Sean Rose pulls one last Sean Rose
Plus, the Rewind Video Club is live!
Hello again! By the time you’re reading this I’m probably on my way to New York City for a few days of holiday fun. Hope everyone’s holidays are going well!
A couple topics today: the Rewind Video Club, some observations from the accessory dwelling unit showdown at Council this week, the city manager’s new riveting Substack (welcome), and a couple cool developments on the John Monfredo front.
Please consider a paid subscription! I owe all of my work here and on the Twitch stream and at the video store to the paid subscribers who allowed me to make this gonzo local journalism thing a full time job.
Introducing The Rewind Video Club!
Things are starting to pick up at the video store! We have regular hours and a fully stocked store and became a member of The Alliance of Nonprofit News Outlets (ANNO) and last but not least created a Patreon page!
Here’s an excerpt from a post I wrote to introduce the Patreon and the Rewind Video Club, which you can join as a real deal card-carrying member:
Welcome to Rewind Video! We’re an IRL non-profit video store with a mission!
A fully functional DVD rental shop (116C June Street, Worcester MA), Rewind Video is also the headquarters of the Worcester Community Media Foundation. We’re trying to build real homegrown local journalism in a world that doesn’t want it to exist, and we're doing it one movie at a time.
A Rewind Video Club membership allows you to check out DVDs, get exclusive online content here on our Patreon, and one of these super cool physical membership cards (designed by local graphic artist extraordinaire Travis Duda), custom made with your name on it! Like so...
The Rewind Video Club is a real deal, actual card-carrying membership. But it's also more than that.
A membership helps us build up the Worcester Community Media Foundation—to pay for more local reporting, put on workshops, and create a new infrastructure for the sort of scrappy, fearless alternative city journalism that alt weeklies once supplied. Where legacy outlets like the Telegram & Gazette are rapidly withering and newer for-profit digital outlets barely hanging on, we're trying something new.
The WCMF isn't a start-up, it's a sit-in. We're trying to build a solid, durable foundation for local reporting's continued existence in an ever-changing media landscape. And we're doing so slowly and intentionally. We are not coming out of the gate promising big things. We want to build incrementally, with real buy-in from the community. Ultimately, we want to be a hub for actually good local journalism work, cultivate new talent, and provide a space for organizing and producing real local news!
A good way to think about it: A membership to Rewind Video Club is a membership to the alt weekly of the future!!!
Emma Goldman had an ice cream shop and we have a video store!
Read the rest here! And get yourself one of those fancy membership cards! See you at the shop! More updates on store events and projects soon! For now, let’s get to the journalism.
Sean Rose pulls one last Sean Rose
In keeping with tradition, the Worcester City Council equally weighed unwarranted panic from the “nice neighborhoods” against expert opinion and best practices. They did so in adopting an ordinance for “accessory dwelling units” on Tuesday night.
Accessory dwelling units (ADUs) are additions to homes like in-law apartments and converted garages. It’s silly such a thing was ever illegal in the first place. But this is a silly city in a silly state. However “blue” we might be here in Massachusetts, we get real “red” when it comes to the “character of the neighborhood.”
The council meeting Tuesday was a great little snapshot of the political reality which produces silly things like in-law apartments being illegal.
Primed by a glowing planning board endorsement and a unanimous subcommittee vote, the council was set to vote on an ADU ordinance that had a shot of generating more desperately needed housing. The proposal didn’t have any of the restrictions that make ADUs impossible to build, like owner occupancy requirements, blood relative requirements, or a special permit process. In essence, the council had the chance to take substantive action on the housing crisis, with the support of the city administration and planning board. Should have been a slam dunk. A rare positive development from our city council.
But then Sean Rose stood up Tuesday night and pulled a classic Sean Rose.
At the very beginning of the discussion, he motioned to amend the proposal to include an owner-occupancy restriction. Then, after an hour of discussion, that’s the version that ended up passing.
This was a course reversal for Rose. He’s the chairman of the standing committee on economic development, and at the November 29 meeting of that subcommittee, he voted to support the planning board’s restriction-free version. Something between then and now changed his mind, I guess!
As he explained it on the council floor, he spoke to “dozens of people” between then and now and could “certainly appreciate the concerns” he heard. He said adding the restriction “alleviates any anxiety around this plan.”
“I got the sense that residents want to feel comforted that there’s an owner in a home having accountability over an ADU,” he said.
Khrystian King, who also voted to support the restriction-free version at the November 29 subcommittee meeting, took the mic after Rose. He said he wants to vote for the version he voted for the last time, which is reasonable. That’s how it usually works. He asked Chief Development Officer Peter Dunn whether other cities and towns have owner occupancy restrictions for ADUs.
“The trend is that municipalities are removing the restrictions because it didn't result in much production at all,” Dunn said.
Dunn is a guy who knows what he’s talking about, and he cited all manner of data and studies in answering King’s questions. And he made it very clear that owner-occupancy restrictions make ADU ordinances useless to the point other cities and towns are removing them just to get a few ADUs actually built.
Dunn’s expert testimony was not enough to tip the scales against the perceived “anxiety” in the neighborhoods. The council took these two equally weighted perspectives and found a compromise position. And in doing so, they made sure that no real action would be taken on the matter of the worsening housing crisis. Classic Worcester.
Rose’s version of the ordinance passed 9-2. Thu Nguyen and Etel Haxhiaj voted against, both on the grounds that there should be no owner-occupancy restriction.
Then the council voted against a more restrictive version proposed by George Russell. His version would have required owner occupancy and a special permit process to approve ADU construction in single-family zoned areas (read: the “nice neighborhoods”). The council rejected that version by a 5-6 vote. Rose, Nguyen, Haxhiaj, and King were joined by Mayor Joe Petty and Councilor Sarai Rivera in opposition.
This is the part that really bugs me. That 5-6 vote against Russell’s extra-restrictive ordinance could have easily been a 6-5 vote to pass the restriction-free version! The one endorsed by the city administration and the planning board and the standing committee on economic development! The one in line with best practices around the state and entirely innocuous.
With five reliable votes in hand, Rose could have pressured the mayor into casting the deciding vote in favor of the restriction-free ordinance that Rose himself voted to support a few weeks ago. Instead, he went out of his way to offer a compromise position that the mayor eagerly endorsed.
That’s what I mean when I say Sean Rose pulled a Sean Rose: one last snub to progressives on his way out the door. Just like he did with inclusionary zoning, for instance. The meeting Tuesday was his second-to-last. He could have done something good on his way out. He chose not to, and in doing so he left the city with an ADU ordinance that city officials basically flat out said wouldn’t do much of anything. It’s obvious Rose and Petty had some sort of conversation ahead of the meeting, and that’s a shame.
While the Rose angle is the most interesting part of this ADU thing, it’s also worth highlighting the way our crank councilors are thinking about it.
Moe Bergman, Kate Toomey, Candy Mero-Carlson, and Donna Colorio all let us know they have the same strange boogeyman in their heads. Allowing for ADUs is going to bring “the developers” into “our neighborhoods” and make it “impossible for our children and grandchildren” to become homeowners.
Taken as a good-faith concern, which is generous, it’s stupid. Your children and grandchildren already cannot afford a home because we don’t have enough homes. It is ridiculous to assign the housing cost issue to in-law apartments. But they all gave some version of that assessment: The developers are going to come in and scoop up all the houses and make them rental properties. We can’t allow that to happen to “our neighborhoods.” It’s a good thing when that happens in multi-family neighborhoods–we don’t want to do anything to stop that–but not in “our neighborhoods.” Developers are our main constituency and we bend over backwards for them in every instance but this one for some reason. In this instance they’re evil.
Taken as a bad-faith argument, this boogeyman is just raw and naked classism. What they really don’t want is “tenants” in their secluded tenant-free enclaves. And I think we all know what “tenant” means wink wink.
The way Moe Bergman spoke about it was so crazy I just had to clip it and put it on YouTube.
“I look around this room and I see a lot of people who live in single-family homes. Some people don’t. Some people choose not to.”
The premise that single-family homeownership is a matter of consumer choice is just… it really stretches credulity to think he’s dim enough to believe that. Single-family zoning is on the short list of most powerful tools used to maintain economic segregation. People do not “choose” to live in multi-family neighborhoods over single-family neighborhoods. Single-family zoning exists to draw a geographic line between classes. The bank decides where you get to live and where you don’t.
I could go on and on about that little clip of Bergman. It is jam packed. The sad reality is he’s not a fringe thinker here. His thoughts are widely shared! It’s the perspective that got us into this housing crisis and it’s what’s going to keep us there—and that’s not a problem someone like Bergman really cares to solve.
Thank you, Jack!
At the last school committee meeting there was some motion on committee business stemming from Heather’s story. The administration got back to the committee on an order Sue Mailman filed to make sure that what happened to Heather wouldn’t happen again. As reported by Jeff Chamer at the Telegram:
At the School Committee meeting Thursday, Mailman briefly commented on the response she got from district administrators related to her agenda item she submitted at a meeting in November related to the district’s response to students alleging abuse.
“The response was exactly a very legal response,” Mailman said. “If that doesn't answer the bell, then what are we going to do? Because holistically, it can't be what it was before.”
...
All school officials and employees are required to report any suspected case of child abuse or neglect. If a report is filed against a staff member, the accused person is immediately placed on paid administrative leave.
“Then, the WPS Human Resources Office will begin an initial investigation which may include contacting law enforcement or appropriate authorities, such as the Department of Children and Families, if there is evidence of potential abuse,” the district previously said. “If the filing is unsubstantiated, HR will review and determine next steps.”
However, while the response was “very legal,” Mailman said she feels confident that Monárrez and her team of administrators understand that “we still have responsibility to do something if we know that there is hurt going on or harm that has been caused to our students.”
She said she thinks that Monárrez’s strategic plan, which she and district administrators provided an overview of on Thursday, will, “mandate that we cannot have the same response as happened many years ago.”
Also! While accepting an award, former school committee member Jack Foley said the following (about 13 minutes in)...
I especially want to note the recent item filed by Sue Mailman and endorsed by the committee to ensure our students are protected from sexual abuse and supported properly by the district. The first priority for any school committee is to protect all of our children. Heather, your story inspires all of us.
Right on!
The city manager is on Substack, folks
We’ll get to Batista’s Substack in a second. First, a related bit of news: Finally someone else reported on the shelter bed shortfall! In the Telegram’s write up on the new shelter at the RMV, the elephant in the room comes up for the first time outside the digital pages of this newsletter. And the city manager was made to offer comment:
Shelter bed capacity was 166 beds without the new Main Street shelter, leaving a 197-bed shortage. With the Main Street shelter, the shortage stands at 136.
City Manager Eric D. Batista acknowledged a gap between shelter bed supply and demand.
"Opening [the Main Street shelter] shortens that gap, but there's still a gap; there's still a need in the city," Batista said. "That's why the important thing is, how do we figure out how do we get them housed, to temporary or permanent supportive housing."
Ok, so what are you doing? And if you’re not doing anything, why not? This goes unasked and unanswered. You might say hey it’s just a quote, maybe he didn’t have space. But the city manager has given himself unlimited space with a newly created Substack newsletter—The Buzz with City Manager Batista—and the first and only post addresses the homelessness situation in great detail. It is long! Buuuut he still doesn’t address the shelter bed shortfall. Not once. Not a matter of space I guess. Even with unlimited space he’s not touching that one.
At least the comments are great!
Odds and Ends
Thank you for reading another edition of Worcester Sucks. I am grateful for everyone who gives me the time to do this by paying for it! Please consider joining them. And to all my paying subscribers watch out for a Christmas card soon from the Worcester Sucks team :-)
Tips are nice too! (Venmo / Paypal)
I’m going to New York City tomorrow to look at the big tree and do other Christmas-y things. What should I check out?
Ok that’s enough for today. Talk soon!
We should learn from the communities who are ahead of the us in their thinking and experiences. If those communities are getting rid of restrictions because they don't work, why wouldn't we learn from their previous mistakes? We'll get there eventually. It may take a few more elections.
I’ll be sure to email Sean and thank him for being a stooge.