“We need economic resilience,” Sean Roche said, sitting down in the back corner of a bustling Tatte Bakery in Newton Centre.

It was a sunny Friday afternoon, and there were scores of people walking along Centre Street and gathering in the shade of the trees on the Centre Green.

Roche tells people he wants to see more of that life filling Newton’s villages, and he’s made that his life’s mission for two decades now.

“I look out here, how long has Walgreens been empty?” he asked, motioning in the direction of where the pharmacy chain had a store in that village center. “I think it’s three or four years.”

Roche has lived a varied life so far. He’s been a prosecutor. He’s been a healthcare software professional. He’s been an activist for traffic calming. And now he wants to be a city councilor, running for one of the Ward 6 at-large seats this year.

From law school to traffic studies

After earning his bachelor’s degree at Yale and his law degree at Cornell, Roche got to business practicing law and eventually became the assistant district attorney in Bronx, N.Y. He specialized in prosecuting domestic violence and sex crimes.

Roche got married in New York and then he and his wife, Cindy, moved up to Newton and started working for Hale and Dorr—a law firm in Boston—for a few years before making a life change.

“I realized that I wanted to get into technology, so through a couple of twists and turns, I ended up as a software product manager, and I’ve been doing that for the last 15 years or so, concentrating on complex business processes and healthcare.”

Roche has been an activist in Newton for the past 20 years, focusing largely on traffic and housing.

“My initial kind of entry into things was in traffic calming on my street,” Roche said. “And then we looked at other places trying to reduce speeds—not volumes, because volumes you can’t fix.”

Roche got involved in Board of Aldermen business when the Chestnut Hill Square developers first submitted special permit requests. Then he added input to the permitting process for the Riverside development. And Mayor Setti Warren appointed Roche to serve on the city’s Traffic Advisory Council.

“You make change multiple different ways. You make small, incremental change and you make big change. We ought to make both kinds of change,” he said.

He cited three nearby intersections as examples. He’d spoken with the city and got the intersections narrowed to make them safer for pedestrians, and that added a couple new parking spaces to Newton Centre.

Roche doesn’t just talk about calming traffic, he lives it. And he’s big on bicycling.

“When I worked in Boston and Cambridge, I rode my bicycle year-round, every day,” he said. “And so I got involved with the bike community. I got involved in trying to get kids to not get rides to Bowen when my kids were at Bowen.”

Roche has also advocated for more housing and development, as he sees traffic issues and housing policy as related.

“One of the things you learn in transportation is that land use and transportation go hand-in-hand, and so I got very interested in land use and housing and the multiple lenses to look through with housing,” Roche said. “There’s the climate change aspect, the economic impact, both in creating housing for folks of different economic situations, and then the contribution of housing to economic vitality in our city.”

So, he’s stayed involved. Roche has worked with city councilors on transportation initiatives and development permitting discussions for projects like the Upper Falls Greenway and the bridge that goes into Lower Falls from Washington Street.

Bringing housing variety

Roche also co-founded a local news website—Village14, which has since stopped operations—and in 2019, he volunteered for City Councilor Alicia Bowman’s campaign, which she won.

He calls the Village Center Overlay District battle—which saw several city councilors lose their seats, including Bowman—a “complicated issue.”

“I think that what we’re seeing is that it has not had the impact that many hoped for, and a lot of people feared, in terms of actual development,” Roche said.

Indeed, as of February, only one new housing unit had been built in the first year the VCOD had been in effect. And ironically, after all the trepidation over the VCOD, an obstacle with the VCOD may turn out to be getting developers to opt into it.

For Roche, though, it’s about type of housing more than quantity of units. He wants smaller  homes and multi-family homes. And he wants to allow triple-decker homes in Newton.

“We need more housing options,” Roche said. “We need more housing options for young people who want to move back to Newton who grew up here. I hear time and time again, ‘My kids can’t afford to live in Newton.’ Yeah, we need housing that young families can afford. The housing options my wife and I had 25 years ago when we moved here—they’re not there. And we need housing options for seniors who want to move out of their bigger homes and stay in Newton.”

Roche wants to cut down on worker commutes, too. During the teacher strike last year, several school staff members talked about having to drive an hour away every day. At a recent Charles River Chamber event, several young adults spoke about having to commute to MetroWest from as far away as Cape Cod every morning because of the lack of housing for them.

Roche sees that as a problem for the environment and the community.

“These kinds of commutes are not good for human beings,” he said.

As more and more developments are completed and more housing opens up in Newton, Roche believes that will bring rents down across the city.

“How would you like to be in the Aven right now? With 800 units coming online in the next couple years? Their rents are going to go down, because you have competition,” he said. “I talk to rental managers. How do they set rents? They set rents based on the availability of comparable units in the immediate area. If they want to lower rents, add more units.”

Weathering a budget storm

Cars and apartments aren’t the only things on Roche’s mind when it comes to the City Council. And next year the City Council is likely going to face unprecedented fiscal challenge. President Donald Trump has vowed to cut federal funding to Massachusetts, and his administration has named Newton as a sanctuary city his administration is targeting with federal funding freezes and possible lawsuits.

Even the administration’s tariffs have affected the city, which recently canceled a solar project due to inflated costs.

This has all made talk of a Proposition 2 ½ override louder and more prevalent. And Roche not only supports overrides, he wants to see more of them (albeit small ones).

“If we look at our neighboring towns, they have smaller, less divisive, less dramatic Prop 2 ½ overrides, and more frequently,” he said. “Prop 2 1/2, whether you like it or you don’t like it, it’s a mechanism to let people get more involved in the budget process. Fine, but let’s not save it up and do it once every ten years. Let’s do it on a more regular basis, so we’re not feeling that we have to have these really difficult decisions between the schools and the rest of the budget. So that we don’t have to worry about whether we can pave our roads.”

He’d also like to see a local real estate transfer tax option for homes with sale prices over $1 million, which was proposed but then removed from, the recent massive state housing bill Gov. Maura Healey signed into law last year.

And people of all economic backgrounds benefit from the services those overrides pay for, Roche noted.

“Working class people benefit from good schools,” he said. “Working class people benefit from good roads. Working class people benefit from having parks and open space and fields and courts that are maintained and arts activities.”

Part of delivering those things, Roche insists, is a continuous push for more economic life in the city. And that’s something Roche believes the city can do without sacrificing its neighborhood health or open space.

“If you build over that Walgreens, you’re not taking any trees down,” he shrugged.

A lot has changed in Newton since he and Cindy arrived more than 25 years ago. And he wants to keep things changing for what he sees as the better, to open the city for his kids if they ever decide to move back.

Roche’s son, Sam, lives in New York and plans to stay there, but if his girlfriend goes to medical school in Boston, they’ll move up here. His daughter, Ali, hasn’t decided where she’ll live, but Roche said he’d love for Newton to have options for her, too.

“My kids are fantastic,” Roche beamed.

Roche said he’s running for City Council now because he feels like giving more back to the city he’s raised a family in and called home for a quarter century.

“I like to think that it’s my turn to serve this way,” he said.

Ward 6 is seeing its share of action this election season. At-large Councilor Vicki Danberg is not seeking reelection. And former candidate Lisa Gordon, who ran for the ward seat in 2023 against Martha Bixby, was collecting signatures this weekend for another City Council run.