A hidden avalanche of a humanitarian crisis

The CoCC NOFO cometh

Sup!

Spent the morning yesterday at Worcester District Court for a motion to join the cases of Ashley Spring and Etel Haxhiaj ahead of the Feb. 10 trial. Steven Gagne, the outside ADA brought in from way up in the northwest corner of the state to prosecute these cases filed the motion at the last hearing. As I entered the courtroom, he was halfway through making a vociferous case. Doing one trial as opposed to two was in the interest of “judicial economy,” he said. Never heard that term before! An extremely dressed up way of saying “gas money” if you ask me. I should think Joe Early is comping Gagne’s gas and driving time but we aren’t allowed to know these things. And Elizabeth Halloran, Etel’s lawyer, argued against it, saying it makes it harder for both Spring and Etel to have fair trials. The judge, to the surprise of everyone, most of all Steven Gagne, agreed with Halloran. He denied Gagne’s motion to join the two cases. “Motion denied” was all he said.

Still, both trials are set to begin the same day: Feb 10. One to have bolded on the calendar.

As we get closer to the date, I’ll share more thoughts, but for now it’s worth saying that Spring and Haxhiaj taking their thin assault on police charges all the way to trial is a rare and possibly precedent setting move. This is a charge with no solid legal grounding— “common law” they call it—applied wantonly by police then used as a cudgel by district attorneys, forcing people to “plea out” to lesser charges in exchange for dropping the “more serious” one. Listen, do yourself a favor and take the deal, they say, like they’re on your side. Then when you take their advice they notch an easy “guilty” in their conviction column and move on, having administered precisely zero justice and inflicted a lot of harm. It’s a key piece of glue sneakily applied to the house-of-cards illusion that is the justice system. But like I said more in the coming weeks.

Leaving the courthouse, I was reminded of how much I hate that building and how much the gleaming opulence of it says about power in Worcester. It’s much nicer than City Hall. It’s nicer even than the Federal Courthouse. They spent so much money on it. It’s easily the best-kept, most pristine, most active building on Main Street. The vestiges of other industries crumble—the Commerce Building being the best example—or become big chips in the ongoing members-only game of On The Map Off The Map. But the punishment bureaucracy maintains its grand facade. Not that it’s measured this way but if someone did I think they’d find it’s in the “top industry” conversation. The thing that really replaced manufacturing if you catch my drift.

It had me thinking, walking past the metal detectors and feeling the warm light turn back to the dull grey of the outdoors, that it’s that building the police are really beholden to. And yet their money comes from our building. The drab one down the street where democracy ostensibly happens.

Dwell on that stuff walking down the broad center staircase of the four open floors of the tastefully lit and marble-coated feeding tube for the local house of corrections and you can find yourself arriving at a question of whether the courts exist for the public’s interest or the public exists for the interest of the court. I found myself lingering on the image of a vampire presiding over a colony of thralls.

In this way you can see homelessness as a matter of convenience for a punishment bureaucracy. A perpetual and reliable criminal class, manufactured automatically by the free market which is of course American and thus Good. Early has a lot of ADAs, after all, and they all need something to do. Spend just a day in district court and you’ll see it: people bringing their backpacks with them up to the stand as they get slapped with trespassing charges, default warrants, stay-away orders, then sent off on their way with yet another albatross around their neck.

Anywho.

I’ve been feeling pretty bummed on Worcester of late as has been evident I think. Happy to report all that has turned around big time after an Outdoor Cats interview that will be coming out in a couple days. No spoilers but hooooo boy did it rekindle the Worcester Lover in my cold heart. Completely reaffirmed in my belief this city’s greatest export has always been Extremely Cool Weirdos (TM). The sort of people who break out of the “you think you’re better than me?” trap... who are able to internalize and make use of The Dome, rather than submit to its warped logic and harden like coal to the world outside it.

There was a good amount of news over the past week or so, mostly having to do with homelessness. That’ll be the focus today.

First a few palate cleansers.

This post belongs in a museum:

God damn what a caption. “Kohl’s.”

Secondly here’s a pic of Snowy Turtleboy Katie grabbed on the way to the punk rock flea market Sunday. That was a great time by the way we both sold lots of stuff and got to meet a bunch of lovely people. Hello to everyone reading this I met on Sunday!!

And as always gotta take a break to ask for money!

Still a few shirts left after the punk rock flea market as well!

The CoCC NoFo Cometh

I think it’s been easy over the past year to forget about the Trump administration’s sick designs for the homeless. Flashier, more visibly garish displays of class warfare and cruelty have clogged the feed of late—the masked agents of the disappearance machine, the grainy forced perspective shots of fishing boats blown to smithereens by people who don’t know why and don’t care.

But plans quietly laid at the Housing and Urban Development to dismantle what little safety net we have are coming to a head. Cities across the country, many of which like Worcester already do the least they can get away with, are likely going to find themselves with less federal money to do the One Weird Trick to get people off the street: build homes for them.

We’ll get to the specifics later on. For now, suffice it to say that if these plans go through, a bad situation gets worse, it turns dire actually, and that will in turn ramp up the scapegoating, which will increase the public appetite for cruelty, increase the administrative bloat of the punishment bureaucracy and we’ve seen this story before folks: the war on terror, already fully transitioned to the border at this point, is primed for its next mutation: the urban core. We’re already doing Guantanamo II: For Migrants, the torture program and all, it turns out. The restructuring of CoC money away from permanent supportive housing is a step toward GITMO III: Homeless.

“Late capitalism is scratching its piles and trying to figure out where next to shit.” That’s a nice line from J.G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come, the book I wrote about at length in the last post. How many piles away is your specific pile, you think? Me, I’d say two to three piles down the pike.

So what the hell am I even talking about.

What little national support there is for homelessness is about to go the way of so many other elements of a functioning federal government. Right now, there’s a lot up in the air and it’s very confusing. So I’m going to bust out a classic timeline device to help us sort through it, combining relevant local and national updates into one pretty bleak string of events.

Nov. 13 - The Trump administration announced a package of proposed changes to an important federal program with an impossibly wonkish name: the Continuum of Care (CoC) Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO). The CoC NOFO (lol) is the largest stream of revenue from fed to municipality on the matter of homelessness. It’s annual budget is north of $3 billion. Most of that money, some 87 percent, goes into permanent supportive housing and rapid rehousing programs—stuff that works!--as opposed to emergency shelter systems and other less effective services. Trump wants to change that 87 to 30 percent. That was the marquee change in a package of other ghoul’s gambits. There are about 170,000 people across the country who would be forced into unsheltered homelessness should that change go through.

HUD Secretary Scott Turner’s video announcement of teh change, fittingly posted direct to Facebook, reveals the shift to be pure Culture War Bullshit. He calls the CoC evidence of a Democrat “homelessness industrial complex.” He calls it a Biden administration policy despite it taking two seconds to figure out it was launched in 1994. He proudly announces the name of the new, totally different and non-woke and also effective program: the Continuum of Care (CoC) Competition Notice of Funding Opportunity. Step aside, CoC NOFO. Time to give the CoCC** NOFO a spin.

The B Roll then abruptly upon this announcement of this new program changes from Black people on the street to a white guy playing an acoustic guitar and rhapsodizing to the placid guests of something that maybe sort of looks like a homeless shelter but who’s to say it could be a jail or a barracks. Totally up in the air.

Real shot from this real video.

Then a Libs of TikTok tweet complaining about a shelter for transgender residents then a still of Trump shaking a cop’s hand over about 20 boxes of pizza at some event.

Can’t make this shit up man.

Homeless advocacy organizations quickly sounded the alarm and in a matter of days the lawsuits came in.

Nov. 29 - SOS Worcester, a harm reduction group that provides direct material support to unhoused neighbors, posted about a 4 a.m. encampment raid somewhere in Worcester that displaced 15 to 20 people on an especially cold morning. SOS wrote:

This move was clearly about separating people from their belongings long enough to destroy their tents, clothing, documents, and survival gear. Multiple men and women report having IDs, EBT cards, SSCs, and other critical documents lost in the process.

The logic behind this abuse is that people will submit to “the system” if they are kicked down far enough. Doesn’t work. Meeting people where they are at is how progress happens, not setting them back months or years in their recovery, not increasing overdose risk, frostbite, and other harms.

The area was in the midst of a polar vortex, with temperatures into the 20s at night. The city had not yet opened its emergency winter shelter. It wouldn’t for two more weeks.

The sweep is in keeping with the city’s practice of routine encampment sweeps—For years, sweeps like this have occurred on a routine basis. I’ve written about it extensively.

May, 2023: Under Batista, the sweeps will never end

December, 2023: “The bureaucratic machinery mirrors popular belief”

February 2024: We use our garbage police to police homeless people

August, 2024: The miserable will be made even more miserable

This is exactly the sort of policy the Trump Administration is encouraging with its change to the CoC NOFO.

The council voted down a proposal to put a moratorium on the practice a few years ago, despite reams of data showing it to be a harmful and counter-productive one. More recently, Moe Bergman has proposed using police drones to get decibel meter readings of RVs idling through the night for heat.

Dec. 1 -National Alliance to End Homelessness v. HUD hits a federal district court in Rhode Island. They’re asking the courts to simply block the CoCC NOFO. (Sorry.) Cities across the state and country joined in the following days, including Boston and Cambridge but of course not Worcester.

Dec. 7 - Matt Noe, the sort of young professional the city ostensibility wants living downtown, posted a video to Instagram of his quality of life being yet again collateral damage in the city’s pursuit of lowering the quality of life for unhoused people. A cop car idling under the Green Street bridge, which is directly outside Noe’s window, was doing what we might call a “preventative sweep” — posting up so no one even tries to sleep there. The cruiser’s lights were left flashing for hours. Noe wrote:

It is 10:30 at night

If I go into a non-downtown neighborhood and start flashing lights like this into people’s windows, do you think I’ll get arrested

They are literally just in their car as a “deterrent,” not actually doing something that requires flashing lights

Yesterday morning, during the snow, Katie and I noticed a cop idling next to the bridge with the cruiser’s solid blues on—presumably the daytime version of the same assignment.

Dec. 8 - Trump’s HUD abruptly withdrew the new CoCC NOFO ahead of a Dec. 12 deadline, pushing it back to January and promising revisions in a bulletin posted to the HUD website. A Rhode Island judge called the move “intentional chaos,” which... I’m not sure how much “intent” is happening in Scott Turner’s noggin’... “dick-tripping chaos” perhaps. But I digress.

Dec. 9 - For good measure, Turner coated the whole debacle in vague anti-immigrant rhetoric, gleefully of course picked up by Fox News with the headline “HUD chief blames ‘unchecked illegal immigration’ pricing-out families amid new housing report.”

“The unchecked illegal immigration and open borders policies allowed by the Biden administration continue to put significant strain on housing, pricing out American families,” Turner said.

So are they rapists and murderers or are they mortgage-holders contributing to the health of our entirely mortgage-backed economy? Here I thought Republicans were all about the financialization of land assets, guess not. Quick question though, wouldn’t un-pricing out white—sorry, “American”—families via a subtraction on the demand side tank the entire economy? And if we’re suddenly interventionists in a subtractive sense why would it not be even more MAGA to be additive interventionists. Why don’t we build a surplus of big beautiful homes? Think of all the white babies you could stuff in those things! Round beautiful uncorrupted Christian white babies! Something to consider. If any of the 1776ers reading this can pass it up the chain that’d be great.

Dec. 9 - At Tuesday’s council meeting, outgoing District 5 councilor Etel Haxhiaj made a heartfelt and well-informed plea that the city proactively plan for the possibility of its limited stock of permanent supportive housing units getting more limited.

...we have a hidden avalanche of a humanitarian crisis that extends to unsheltered people that we see tucked under the bridges, under the overpasses, who get moved from location to location, and included in this population are also families with disabilities, literal family units that have kids who meet these requirements. And we don’t often talk about those populations at that community because we think that families are typically taken care of by the shelter system. It’s no longer the case.

City Manager Eric Batista offered a less-than-reassuring response. He conceded the emergency winter shelter will be over capacity from the moment it opens. He said he had no idea how many unhoused people there were in need of beds.

We’re again, we’re trying to turn every stone as much as possible to address the issue. We’ve seen an increase in homelessness in the city and we’re trying to address that in the longterm. That’s why we’re putting our efforts into the resource center and trying to look to see if we can look at additional permanent shelter beds in the city on top of the current overflow work that we’re trying to do. But at the end of the day, the monies that come to support all of that work is starting to go away. And that’s the area that we’re trying to put our efforts to think creatively, think more collaboratively, think more about partnerships and ways that we can stretch those dollars so that we can continue to have the impact.

Khrystian King asked whether our shelters are at capacity. Batista responded:

Yes, our current shelter network is at capacity. We’re working right now with the current shelter providers, to try to expand some of the current locations that they have and we’re working with the state to try to relieve a little bit of that and provide more spacing in that. That’s why every year we try to seek a site so that we can create an overflow shelter because we know that there’s a need in the city for more shelter beds. The shelter system is at capacity.

The last time homelessness has been discussed at any length on the city council is in August. An order from the health and human services subcommittee has gone unfilled by the city administration.

Dec. 11 - The Telegram reported a supportive housing development proposed for the former Quality Life Inn on Oriol Drive has hit financing trouble that has further limited and delayed a project that once accounted for the majority of units outlined in the city’s plan for 103. Now, it will open, maybe, in 2027, and has been reduced by at least half. The development has for years been fought by “concerned neighbors,” among them outgoing District 2 Councilor Candy Mero-Carlson.

The organization has struggled to secure vouchers needed for the project, Paul TonThat, the executive director of Worcester Community Housing Resources, said.

He added that those vouchers include a combination of Continuum of Care Programs, Section 8 and the Massachusetts Rental Voucher Program.

Dec. 11 - The city announced it would open a 36-room emergency winter shelter in the Quality Life Inn—a substitute, and a poor one, for the roughly 60 bed RMV temporary shelter, which will not be reopening for reasons I’m not super clear on.

Dec. 12 - Shark jump: Trump administration opened a Fair Housing Act investigation against Boston for— I shit you not—reverse-racist redlining. From Mother Jones: “Trump’s HUD Accuses Boston of Engaging in “Redlining” Against White People.” Surreal. A classic misdirect. Works every time. They launched another bad faith “investigation” in Minnesota for good measure. Gotta make sure you’re not too focused on one media market.

So that’s where we’re at. Worcester is already basically self-implementing the cruel directives of the Trump administration—doing a lot of sweeps, opening temporary shelters, and building almost no permanent supportive housing—and the new HUD directives will incentivize worse policy decisions from the Batista administration. Better options that may have been in the realm of possibility will stay firmly outside of it.

The avalanche Haxhiaj spoke about last Tuesday will become apparent if we really do run out of permanent supportive housing money and the “sheltered” homeless population—currently the majority—becomes “unsheltered.”

Our numbers for homelessness are based mostly on a yearly “point in time” count, which typically comes out in January or February. Based on the most recent PIT, released in late January, the area (our COC is loosely the boundaries of Worcester County) was home to about 1900 homeless individuals. Of those, only 142 were unsheltered. The rest were in either transitional housing or emergency shelter. At a September Board of Health meeting, our now-retired Director of Health and Human Services Mattie Castiel said the numbers have only increased since that PIT count. A worryingly high number of them were senior citizens and Castiel at that meeting confirmed that remains the case.

This is the “invisible” population Haxhiaj was referring to. And to become “visible” is also to become a target for routine harassment from the police and district attorney’s office that necessarily and by design sucks in homeless people and spits out “criminals.” Etel also addressed that part.

We do a decent job in Massachusetts against all odds and often the will of our elected leaders to make sure that at the very least kids and families with kids are put up in some sort of shelter. Our ability to do that is highly contingent on the supportive housing money from HUD. Should HUD self-DOGE and really reduce that 87 percent line item to 30 percent, there are ~1,600 people who’d join the ranks of the ~150 that comprise our colloquial definition of homelessness. Visible homelessness would quadruple overnight.

And at that point it’s likely our Toomeys and Riveras and such will only double down on the line that all the new people on the street are not “from here” but rather “from the towns.” They will provide their anecdotes. Their “I was talking to a police officer and...” legitimizers. They will wash their hands of it. They will say that the people they see on the street “don’t even want help.” The fact that the new people are overwhelmingly young mothers will go unaddressed. The cranks will go on ignoring the insufficiency of the “help” on offer, content to rationalize that unhoused people do drugs and thus deserve it. The city will not meaningfully increase funding to respond to an increasingly desperate situation.These people are not hard to figure out.

Bookmark this graf with a note to revisit next December, lol. The 9-2 split on the council all but guarantees the outcome I’m describing if Trump’s HUD appointee is allowed to really throw this culture war molotov cocktail.

Even in cities where there’s political will to do better, the new HUD directives will likely make it prohibitively difficult. New York, soon to be under Mamdani’s control, is the best example. From a local outlet in New York:

“We are going to take an approach that understands its mission is connecting those New Yorkers to housing, whether it’s supportive housing, whether it’s rental housing, whatever kind of housing it is,” Mamdani said last week, explaining his decision to end the sweeps at a press conference.

But under the new rules, the Department of Housing and Urban Development would greatly reduce the portion of “Continuum of Care” funding for permanent housing, while increasing the portion of funding that goes toward temporary shelter and adding work or service requirements. In New York City, this would mean that the current $170 million in funding for permanent housing for homeless people could be reduced to $52 million, according to estimates from Tierra Labrada, director of policy and advocacy at the Supportive Housing Network of New York, which represents over 200 nonprofit providers. The new rules also encourage crackdowns on homeless camps and they appear to target organizations that support trans or nonbinary people and ones that have used DEI language, The New York Times reported.

So, no chipper note to end on here. But something to be paying attention to. An issue on which our city administration could really prove itself by going above and beyond, and in terrain wonky enough they could get a lot of work done without even telling the city council a word about it.

A good and highly related read from Tom Marino over at This Week In Worcester: “The Extreme Views of Worcester’s Self-Proclaimed Moderates”

...of the combined 11 councilors across the current city council and the city council that takes office in January that oppose civilian review, exactly zero have brought forth an alternative oversight concept to a civilian review board.

The posture of fighting against a CRB, but bringing forth no legitimate alternative, is not opposition to only a CRB. It is opposition to any oversight at all.

Given the history of oversight embedded in American governance, and with its origins in medieval Europe, there is no argument to categorize anti-oversight as anything but extreme and authoritarian. It certainly isn’t moderate.

With the council’s long dismissal of the separation of powers, another core American governance value, and its attack on resident participation in proceedings of the council, almost entirely ending resident petitions to the council, this opposition to oversight is entirely on brand.

---

Speaking of, let’s take a quick look at the council agenda for the meeting tonight.

Moe Bergman is trying yet again to advance the cranks’ war on bike lanes...

Candy Mero Carlson is asking for a game plan on her dumbass ballot question proposal the city manager already told her was illegal to actually do...

And I expect there will be a full meltdown about this resolution in support of International Migrants Day from Haxhiaj. Looking forward to the squirming on that one.

And that’s really it. Light agenda.

A few more things to touch on.

—New data released by the city administration shows the “school safety” drama advanced by Binienda and Mariano to be obviously concocted in bad faith. Turns out all of the increases in “assaults” are in the Kindergarten to third grade level, the result of a change in reporting requirements mostly. On every other level the numbers stayed flat or went down. But the toddlers! Super scary for teachers! I mean really how embarrassing is this whole putsch? They should all be ashamed of themselves. Let’s revisit a few choice lines from Ray Mariano’s recent column on the matter in our paper of record, the vaunted Telegram and Gazette.

The picture painted by this report is a screaming alarm that warrants a plan of action. School Committee member Dianna Biancheria, who had been hounding the previous superintendent for this type of report, wants quarterly numbers so the committee can stay on top of the administration’s effort to deal with the problems.

...

I called Superintendent Brian Allen to ask him what he plans to do differently to tackle the problem. Unfortunately, he hid behind his public relations guy and declined to be interviewed. Well, he can hide from me but he can’t hide from the magnitude of this problem.

...

The report on school safety should be a wake-up call and lead to decisive action by the School Committee and superintendent. If it doesn’t, the students who come to school prepared to learn will continue to be the real victims.

This next line is for Michael McDermott, executive editor of the Telegram and someone who is not “from here” and so has nothing to lose by taking my advice: you can part ways with Ray Mariano. You can just [poof] stop responding to his emails. In doing so, you’ll put an end to an ongoing insult to our profession, a humiliation ritual, a reminder of how far we’ve fallen: the Telegram having allowed this low-grade crony from the local political machine to use the title and space afforded a columnist—that used to mean something!!—to take cheap, self-serving pot shots at his political rivals. You are the only person who can make that call. You are a well-respected journalist. You obviously care about the craft. He’s done the opposite of what a newspaper columnist should do, he’s intentionally muddied real issues with the pulpit your outlet has afforded him. He has used your reputation and your mandate to provide the public clarity as a cheap cudgel. His column is an insult to journalism. It is a humiliation. You know it. I know you know it. You don’t have to make a big thing of it, though you’d be widely celebrated for doing so. Just for the love of god stop putting this bullshit out.

—While I’m on the local journalism soapbox it occurs to me I haven’t yet shared a video from Free Press I’m featured in! It’s about Eureka Street and the local media. It’s really good!

@freepressaction

Free Press on Instagram: "Local news by the community, for the …

And Chris and I will be giving a talk at the Framingham public library! Mutual Aid 101, Jan 22!

Odds and ends

One more request for a small amount of money monthly yearly or in the form of merchandise!!

I’ll be submitting a story or two to the Izzy Awards but feel free to do so as well! It is I think free. Here’s the submission form. Would be nice to get some recognition in the form of a major award (“must be Italian!”). Back in my time in the traditional press I was racking up NENPA prizes, including the most coveted plaque of them all, a Publick Occurence. Little fun fact. But you’ll never catch me calling myself an “award winning journalist.” That’s ‘pick me’ behavior.

Speaking of! The Guardian ran a story in defense of “mom and pop” landlords (because of course they did) as the rent control ballot campaign progresses.

“On one hand, we appreciate the pressures that renters have when they say that rent is increasing,” Shahsavari said. “But what people miss in this story is that operating costs are also going up exorbitantly for the property owner too.”

“If [small property owners] can’t increase rent rates, what’s going to happen is they have to exit the market,” said Tony Lopes, a SPOA board member. “We can’t afford to supply this housing at a loss every month.”

Hmmm sounds to me like they should get a job.

Michael Hirsh is stepping down as the city’s medical director. Between losing him and Mattie Castiel and Etel Haxhiaj there goes like 99 percent of the city’s brain trust on its most pressing issues.

The cringiest thing you’ll hear all year holy shit: Dr. Charles Steinberg Previews New Worcester Anthem, “We Are Worcester”

Holy shit is all I have to say.

Been on J. Geils Band kick lately and there’s a lot of fun little tidbits in this video of them playing at Holy Cross in 1972. Geils introduces his keyboard player: “Young fella born right here in Worcester city. Woooostahhhh. Where’s ya cah dud?”

Ok you might hear from me before Christmas but if not: Merry Christmas my lovely Christmas Adventurers. Be well!