A city so motivated could do a lot more
On the new day center and everything else "in the pipeline"
Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
At my mom’s suggestion, I stocked the Portland Street community fridge with everything usable from my Gram’s apartment. The fridge was near empty when I arrived and I left it pretty full. Felt good. Thank Claudia Gardner if you grab anything out of there! (And thanks to whoever put the collard greens in there I stewed up a couple bunches. Very good!). A reminder to watch Alex O’Neil’s documentary on the fridges if you haven’t yet it’s impressive: “More Than A Fridge.”
Story time: I was over there dropping all the stuff off the other day. It was like 8 p.m. All the while there was a guy smoking outside of his car, watching me. I’m about to leave. I have two empty cardboard boxes and a cooler in my hand like some grocery store juggler and I hear the “excuse me, sir.” Ahhhh here we go.
He asked me what the fridges were all about and I explained briefly as I could. He said he thought it was just for “the homeless and the needy people.” I said it’s for everyone go ahead and take something if you want and if you have food to give blah blah blah I did the whole spiel. He then told me about how he was pissed one day when he saw “some Asians in a $100,000 Mercedes” go in the fridge and take everything. Apparently that’s his smoking-outside-his-car spot, and as such keeps regular tabs on the fridge. “$100,000 car” he said again. I said well... you know... and in my head all I can think about is how to make a “Huge, If True” joke this guy wouldn’t understand.
I was about to open my car door when he said he was a doctor at the hospital over there. You know in case I wasn’t sure about the veracity of the allegations. I’m not lying I’m a doctor. I said hey well hopefully they also put something back another time. That’s what it’s all about. He shrugged, then thanked me for all the work I do. I didn’t feel like explaining the whole thing again so I just said thank you and drove away. In the rear-view I watched him go on smoking his cigarette, observing his surroundings.
Pretty funny. The decision to lead with them being Asian is what gets me. Extra Extra: The Filthy Rich Asians Are Abusing The Strange Fridge For Hobos. Now that I’m thinking about it there is nowhere else on Earth I’ve had funnier interactions with strangers than this city. Never fails.
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Before we get to the actual reporting I’ve prepared for today’s edition, I’d highly suggest reading “The Invisible Man,” a recent piece in Esquire by Patrick Fealey (here, in case you get paywalled).
Like go and spend the time you would have reading this newsletter on that instead. Not kidding. It is the most heartbreakingly beautiful and important piece of journalism I’ve read. He’s a former newspaper reporter, and the story is a first-hand account of homelessness—what a day is like, how he fell into it, how the cops treat him, other people too. On top of that the writing is perfect. Here’s a taste, relevant today especially:
I begin parking at Walmart in November. The masses flood the lot to shop for the holidays. People drive fast in the lot, as aggressively as they do on the roads, whipping in and out of empty spaces while pedestrians walk in the low fluorescent glow. They make me nervous. People are economically squeezed, the stress of everyday survival and the fear of uncertain futures turning into hostility. Most Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and many have no emergency savings—they are one crisis from homelessness. A job loss or an unexpected illness and they are where I am. They are on edge, driving bigger and faster and louder cars—a society speeding along as it disintegrates.
Woooof. That last sentence. I’ve read it four times and each opens the world anew. Today’s first topic is, coincidentally, related. The goal today is brevity. I’m running around getting ready for my grandmother’s funeral tomorrow (Me and my sister are doing the music). Also it didn’t work out that Liz could copyedit this one, so if you see any typos no you didn’t.
Here goes.
The day center—a note from Project Priceless—were a small business too!—Batista demands to be paid more than Monárrez—odds and ends
A new day (center)
The city administration this week announced a day center for unhoused people—a rare instance of capitulation to a community demand and at the record-breaking speed of about six years give or take. But don’t get too excited—they say it’ll open in 2026, a time estimate we should take with a grain of salt. After all we’ve been down this road before: In 2021, Augustus promised a day center at the former headquarters of the Providence Worcester Railroad on Hammond Street. In 2022, the building sold to a cleaning product manufacturer. There was no story, as far as I could find, on this plan falling through.
Remember the 103 units of permanent supportive housing the Augustus administration announced in 2018? “About half of the units should be completed by Dec. 31, 2019, and the other half by July 1, 2020, the Task Force said.”
In 2022, City Manager Eric Batista told MassLive those 103 units “were either beginning construction shortly or were in the pipeline.” Stuff is always in the pipeline, where it can either stay indefinitely or disappear without notice. Convenient. In a June report, city officials said two of the permanent supportive housing projects have been completed, a total of 40 units.
So big ‘Wait And See’ on this day center.
If and when, the center will be located at 134 Gold Street, a building directly behind what used to be The Bridge before the property owners evicted those folks in 2021 for the benefit of a high end apartment proposal that still hasn’t come to pass three years later.
The Central Mass Housing Alliance will run the day center, intending it to provide a central access point for “services,” (a word that conceals a dizzying and frequently useless array of vouchers, programs, referrals and other such means-tested supports, the navigation of which is a full time job). More importantly, it’ll have bathrooms, showers, charging stations, laundry, and storage.
Of course a day center at least two years in the making is cold comfort for anyone currently experiencing homelessness. The short-term picture remains increasingly grim.
The way Etel Haxhiaj put it at the end of the council meeting Tuesday sums it up. The new state-level restrictions on shelter stays for families is “extremely disturbing,” she said. “They will hurt a lot of people, mostly women and children in our community who will undoubtedly have no safe places to go and will be forced into places that are not meant for human habitation.” Between the newly unsheltered families the existing unsheltered population, the strain on the local shelter system is set to be tremendous, she said. “How the heck we are going to protect all these families” becomes a pressing question. She called for an emergency meeting of the council’s public health subcommittee with local service providers and public health officials.
A city so motivated could do a lot more. Allow me to bang the drum yet again: Sanctioned encampment sites are proven tools to combat homelessness. There’s a location for such a temporary sanctioned site that the city would find mutually beneficial: the vacant Notre Dame Church lot.
Let me sketch it out.
Allow people to put tents on the property. It’s vacant land, right downtown, and there’s no reason to believe it will be developed any time soon. Instruct your police officers to tell people that’s where they should go, and they won’t catch trespassing charges for setting up there. Wait and see whether the property owner notices. If they do, tell them that if they want the people out, they have to do something with the property.
After the church was demolished in 2018 by Hanover Insurance, the company sat on it for a few years, then sold it to a Rhode Island property developer in 2022. That developer, Foresight Capital, is now trying to sell the land as well. It had loose plans for an apartment complex, but like every other developer they have suspended those plans, blaming unfavorable market environs. Sounds like a personal problem to me. Allowing unhoused to stay on the site unbothered puts less of a strain on the City Common, Union Station, the library, etc etc. Service providers, case workers, volunteers, and mutual aid organizations would know where to find people, increasing the chance of getting people into stable housing and treatment programs.
If the property owner threatens legal action, counter-threaten eminent domain. If and when they need to start building, the WPD knows how to clear a homeless encampment. They do it all the time!
As far as how the camp would run, we already have an organization willing to take that on. HALO Worcester has been petitioning for such a site for years and would run it with great enthusiasm.
I do not see a downside here. 1., The unhoused have somewhere accessible to go to avoid the routine harassment that keeps them homeless in the first place. While not ideal, it’s better than nothing, and allows for pre-organizing the sort of programs that will inform the culture of the day center, once opened. 2., It lights a fire under the property owner to actually do something with the land. They bought it for $5 million from the developer that demolished one of the most prized pieces of architecture in the city. They’re very obviously more interested in flipping it than building anything that benefits the city.
Even to view this action in the cruel terms of punishing a waffling real estate speculator, it has merit. Even incidental and weaponized support of unhoused people is better than no support. The reason it won’t happen, of course, is it requires being slightly less cruel to unhoused people, more lenient of behavior otherwise punished.
In the city we do live in, the leader of HALO was arrested for drug trafficking charges last night, allegedly carrying out a hand-to-hand transaction of a small amount of fentanyl in the view of our “vice squad.” For this, she’s facing three felonies, initiating a long and costly court proceeding that makes the prospect of getting out of homelessness even more impossible. Currently, she’s held without bail. In the police report, she’s reported to have been carrying a single corner-cut baggie, 20 grams of fentanyl within. The report is a short, flimsy paragraph—it doesn’t even describe what form the fentanyl took—and the trafficking charges are obviously overblown. But Olney, already homeless and now behind bars, has to fight the overblown charges. By the time she does, the damage has already been done. What I wrote on Monday applies yet again:
A society serious about fixing a crisis of addiction would put stock in truly understanding the way drugs move through communities, and would come to the collective understanding that there’s rarely a meaningful distinction between “dealers” and “addicts” and that “crackdowns” are counter-productive. They only punish the people already most abused by the war on drugs—the same war these police actions ostensibly serve.
The police posted the press release of this arrest to Facebook, where it has about 40 comments. “Great job WPD.” “Well done, WPD! Stay safe out there.” “Once again thank you so much for your dedication to keeping our streets safe.” No one stops to think about how anyone got any safer. Best not to, when the answer is “no one.”
A note from Project Priceless
I want to share a note I got from Project Priceless after I published my feature on them Monday. It’s very interesting, digging into terrain that’s often neglected but so important to truly understanding homelessness. Here it is in full:
We did think the hunting sport section would’ve been a good time to reiterate the unique subjections of homeless women to these court runarounds and state violence — though we totally realize we weren’t clear about that analysis of the situation with you beforehand so we just took a shot at it by jotting down our thoughts on your piece.
Brittany ultimately has been in and out of jail dozens and dozens of times since she was a teenager — most of these times the charges were for “streetwalking”/“nightwalking”/or soliciting sex, which is part of why the judge had revoked her bail to hold her in the first place — she had an extensive criminal record and could never make it to court. The Project Priceless letters were to be read by the judge as Brittany being a survivor of trauma that got caught up in this mess of a punitive system that treated her like a criminal for being raped and abused on the streets & that PP has often been the only viable option she has for safety and security while left for dead by the rest of the city. Essentially “pls let Brit out because she’s not a criminal, she’s an extremely disadvantaged person surviving insane abuse.”
And that part of this bounty hunting of homeless people is the average men who hunt this class of women as public property to exploit, especially within these drug-using communities where these girls are pimped for hits of crack or a shot of dope or whatever. And they’re arrested for it when the reality of the market for rape is that it exists because of the casual demand of access to sex by everyday men (male addicts, working class men, cops) so they’re constantly being arrested for it while homeless even if they aren’t actively looking for a trick to make money, because the pretense is that they are deviant whores we have to hide as blight from the public.
Brittany has been known as a street prostitute of Worcester for over 10 years now, the cops are well aware of her struggles with addiction and homelessness. She has been arrested far more often than her male peers because of her visibility as both a woman and a black person. By virtue of female, she *must* be a prostitute and therefore there’s plenty more fake charges to throw on her to hide her as blight/deviant from the public than if she were a man.
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Batista demands he makes more than Monárrez
After a “hold” from Mayor Joe Petty on Tuesday, the council is slated now to discuss the manager’s contract extension in private (executive session) at the December 10 meeting. The contract (read it here) is very generous. But what makes it interesting isn’t the salary per se. It’s the other provisions.
And then you look at the list of 2023 salaries and the inclusion of “employees of the Worcester Public Schools” starts to look a bit pointed.
I looked it up and in Batista’s old contract, the provision is not in there. Coincidentally, I’m sure, the chairmanship of the subcommittee that negotiated this deal (municipal operations) changed hands in the time between the two negotiations. With the first contract, it was Khrystian King. With this new extension, it was Moe Bergman. Therefore we can deduce that Bergman, a lawyer, shares a good amount of the blame for this provision that exposes the city to a slam dunk lawsuit. Nicole Apostola put it very well in her public comment Tuesday:
This council absolutely needs to consult with an attorney to confirm whether this would potentially be in conflict with the Massachusetts Equal Pay Act. If this contract goes through, that means a man, the city manager would make more money than a woman, the superintendent who has a larger budget and more employees. Please again, talk to an employment attorney about this clause.
School committee member Sue Mailman also chimed in to say that if the council allows this provision in, they’re effectively ceding their ability to negotiate city manager salary to the school committee.
Both also pointed out that the city council sets no formal goals for the city manager—a hilarious fact of political life in Worcester. Our chief executive, set to get $300,000 plus annually with a car payment stipend on top, has really no accountability from his alleged oversight body. There was no search, now no goals set.
Meanwhile he has weekly meetings with an unelected body of local power players called the Economic Development Coordinating Council. While we have no way of knowing, I’m sure they make their expectations clear, and also played an outsized role in Petty’s uncontested nomination of Batista for the job with no search. (If you haven’t, check out my Brief History of the EDCC.) Petty is, after all, on the EDCC.
ZBA member Nate Sabo put it well in the most recent edition of Liz Goodfellow’s new column for this newsletter, “Worcester Speaks!”
There was some optimism that we'd actually get a qualified city manager who had experienced managing a city, and instead they put someone in who'd been a project manager two years before, who didn't have the skills, and didn't have the abilities. And when you couple that with the city council and some of the people on city council, it just makes it so dysfunctional that you can't really get things done.
He goes on to say that there’s a certain conspiracy brewing to remove him and other progressives from the Zoning Board of Appeals, which I don’t doubt for a second. The whole thing is worth a read for sure.
Odds and ends
I gotta run. Lots to do. So this part will be quick. Please consider taking us up on this holiday deal and the merch discount!
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Parking minimums are a strange little feature of the city’s antiquated zoning codes that really should be done away with. An order from Etel Haxhiaj on reducing parking minimums advanced with almost no push back from the cranks on Tuesday. I was sort of surprised. I think it benefited from everyone very obviously wanting to get home. (The agenda was mostly wiped at the beginning of the meeting with a series of “holds” and it went just an hour and a half.) But there are reforms to parking minimums in the city’s Now / Next master plan. And Haxhiaj wants the manager to bring those to the council ASAP for adoption.
Ray Mariano shows us a great example of Democrat Brain—tripping over himself to personally endorse mass deportations when no one asked him to—in his most recent Telegram column.
Ok, no post on Sunday this week what with this funeral and all. But one early next week for sure. Talk then!
A good song to play over and over again in the meantime:
Does anyone know how we could help Samantha Olney with bail funds?