A long way of saying nothing
Tax breaks for landlords, vindictive ICE agents, July Fourth tomfoolery
Happy fourth of July everyone! May you all catch the shaved and lubricated pig trolloping around your American hearts.
May your proposal to discharge an 884 pound English mortar from a ship sunk during the Revolutionary War pass the review of the civil authorities.
May the person who lost this...
...uhhhh, find it. I guess. Or not? Rephrase: whatever the outcome, may it not in any way resemble The Conjuring.
Let us raise our Bud Lights in honor of the guy on Bell Hill throwing dynamite out his window Wednesday morning who, when police arrived, claimed to have no idea what they were talking about… while dynamite sticks poked out of a bag beside him.
They once chased a shaved and lubricated pig through the streets of this fair city. Now lighting off sticks of dynamite is some sort of crime? More on that in the next episode of Outdoor Cats, which with any luck gets scheduled for tomorrow right after I hit send on this one.
No council this week and, remarkably, no Insane News Event. A welcome reprieve from the past few months of non-stop happenings. The first half we’re looking at some sketchy ICE activity in the city this week. Second half, I’m breaking down why Joe Petty and Candy Mero-Carlson packaged a strange new tax break for landlords as an affordable housing solution. I planned on Taking It Easy this week but ended up getting a little nutty with it.
If you haven’t read Liz Goodfellow’s latest edition of Worcester Speaks kindly close this tab and open that one. It’s with Dani Killay, the woman who looked the cop in the face at Eureka Street and asked him why the women on scene defending the family have more balls than them.
It’s my favorite edition of this column yet, and the column is one of the real standouts of this whole operation, I think. Killay’s on fire here:
To be facing all of that and to have been thrown around by these unidentified guys, to have them physically wrestling me in my pajamas. Because I had no idea, I literally dropped my son off at school and I went to the address for the alert literally in my pj's. I'm doing everything I possibly can and getting pushed around, told to shut up, being grabbed. I had my arm locked in with Roseanne's arm and one of the guys that showed up with a mask was grabbing my arm trying to wrench it off of her. And they were threatening to pepper spray us. And I took it as a complete deliberate threat when he said, “you know, it could break,” referring to my arm.
After having been through that, seeing my local police show up and immediately side with the men in masks kidnapping a mom off the street, after watching us be assaulted and then doing nothing about it—and then worse—lying about it. Immediately watching the city come out with a statement that was a lie.
Aislinn Doyle over on the relatively new WPS In Brief Instagram (well worth a follow) has a good breakdown of the newly announced withholding of federal funds for public schools.
Just a proud editor over here! (It’s weird to think about but really I am the editor and chief of this here publication.) If you’re a paid subscriber, you should also be proud. Without you, Worcester Sucks would have been a failed experiment on my way out of the local journalism game forever. Instead, five years running and doing better than ever. Thank you. And for the rest of you, it is never too late to become a patron of the local gonzo journalist dark arts.
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We have made a difference. We have punched way above our weight. What we could do with even a meager $200,000 annual operating budget would put the rest of the field to shame. Nice to think about. One day.
First let’s catch up on the news with the Weekly Index. I’ve been adding this section to most posts the past couple months and find them useful and clarifying. They are also my little prayer to the journalism gods for our coming into the money and/or capacity to put together a nice boutique quarterly print product. And then parlay the success of it into a monthly endeavor. I envision the index right on P 4, laid out subtle and tasteful, same way every issue. Meant to be read fast. Dry and minimal prose with the lightest splash of snark. Written by someone else who I can pay well and who does a good job. Gah! One day.
Weekly Index
New security measures added at the main branch of the library, following the city hall upgrades, including “de-escalation buttons” for librarians asked to be our default social service workers while cops make north of $150,000 a year by watching road work happen. WPI is apparently keeping the hotels they bought fully operational, shelving plans for additional student housing, per a Monday announcement that cited new financial issues. Brian Allen officially took over as the new WPS superintendent. Just in time for new federal funding cuts that could cost the district millions. As the one-year mark approaches, still no answers in the Enrique Delgado Garcia investigation that is supposedly underway. Rumors of empanelled grand juries swirl. District 1 Council Candidate Keith Linhares (who rocks) proposed a ban on all new billboard construction in the city, then argued in the WBJ for the city to adopt a land-value tax system (love this man). At a fundraiser for Etel Haxhiaj’s opponent in District 5, the Chamber of Commerce and police unions were heavily represented. A teenage girl from Rhode Island was hit and killed by a train. In the same week: Governor Maura Healey announced a mass closure of temporary homeless shelters around the state due to lack of funds; news broke that the state’s rental subsidy program is out of money; Healey announced a $360 million “renovation” of Framingham MCI, the state’s primary women’s prison. In the same week. There is a “no kings” demonstration today from 12 to 2 p.m. at city hall.
A long way of saying nothing
The Big Beautiful Bill passed the house, and with it, an absurd $170 billion in new funding for the deportation machine and the masked men it sends into neighborhoods around the country to disappear people and the Silicon Valley firms working on the new algorithms and databases that decide who gets disappeared when. Temporary Protected Status protections for Honduran immigrants hang in a quiet limbo. Should the Trump administration fail to renew them, as many as 2,500 families across the state will become freshly deportable—bad news for our community but good news for the quotas. From the Immigration Policy Tracking Project:
Each field office has been instructed to make 75 arrests per day, with managers "held accountable" for failing to meet the targets. Nationally, this would increase daily ICE arrests from a few hundred per day to at least 1,200 to 1,500.
You take thugs and give them a ridiculous unfillable mandate for thuggery and guess what you get Raging Bull Thugs.
Mark Henderson had a good thread on Twitter the other day laying out the many unanswered questions about ICE activity in the city and the local assistance of it.
He highlighted a moment from the HRC meeting a few weeks ago that I’d like to illustrate as well. It came about two hours in, during a long conversation on Eureka Street.
Creamer: In my case, I am a Latino individual that's very clearly Latino. If I get pulled over, I'm an American citizen. If I get pulled over for probable cause, which is what they are doing, I would like, in my opinion, I'd like my Worcester Police Department to be present because you're wearing a body camera. They're not.
Saucier: They do. They wear body cameras.
A quibble on the point ensues. Then Saucier actually answers the question of what the WPD would do in that circumstance.
Saucier: “If they're saying they have probable cause, they don't need a warrant. They're not going to have to show me a judicial warrant or an ICE warrant. That's their rules of engagement, and I can't speak to that.”
A long way of saying “nothing.” In a recent post, Hamilton Nolan wrote:
Getting through the period of American history that is now descending upon us will require all of us to practice radical empathy. A strange quality of even the worst totalitarian fascist states is that very bad things might happen to the person next to you, and your life can still continue as normal. More and more Americans are going to find that their neighbor or their friend or their employee or their colleague was just snatched up by armed men and taken somewhere.
Some people are already doing that! They were at Eureka Street and they weren’t the cops.
Earlier week, some of the anti-forced removal activists had a strange, worrisome encounter with an ICE agent. No need for names here. The “ICE watchers” will suffice. They were following a tip of a deportation underway. Upon arrival they gathered information about the ICE agent and his vehicle—standard practice, totally legal. Upset by this, the ICE agent followed the community organizers as they drove away, ominously trailing behind them. A few minutes of that. Then he pulls up next to them, stops the car. The windows are tinted black. You can’t see inside.
After a beat he pulls away. Then he comes back down the street, driving in the other direction now, toward the organizers, and he’s going twice the speed limit on a quiet residential road. He drives off into the distance. It’s all on a video I personally watched but won’t share publicly, on the off chance this clearly vindictive man, whom the government has given an accountability blank check, might be able to identify the people filming. The SUV he was driving has what look like MA license plates, but the number isn’t in the RMV’s system.
The agent’s target fled on foot, leaving behind the vehicle. Rumor has it ICE called for WPD assistance, specifically requesting a K9 unit to track the man down. Unclear if WPD complied. None of it made the scanner feed that’s publicly available, far as I could tell.
Earlier this week the Boston Globe released a massive feature on ICE and the impact on local immigrant communities (which you can read in liberated form here). It’s a series of vignettes, well put together. In one, an audience of immigrants in New Bedford hears from a man who’d just recently returned from three weeks in ICE detention, in at least two different locations. The first was the Burlington, MA field office, where, he told the crowd, “they treat you like a dog.” Forty men crammed into a small room. No contact with the outside world. Not enough food or water.
The other day I watched a clip of the Milford teen that ICE arrested speaking out about his experience. He said everyone in the cell with him was in work clothes. They were all just on their way to or from work when their lives were suddenly upended. It’s a mental image I’ve been unable to shake. I imagine myself there, in the crowded cell, my big non-slip kitchen Crocs and stinky, baggy kitchen pants on. The light undershirt I planned to wear under the heavy-fabric kitchen coat. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me or anyone around me. I haven’t been allowed to make a call. At work it’s as if I’d simply vanished, leaving nothing but extra work for the other guys to cover. At home, perhaps, I have a young child. A wife. To them I have also simply vanished.
What is the fucking point of this? Rhetorical question. The point is the TV show. Every day the show airs—they haven’t missed a taping since the pilot back on September 11, 2001. The show’s audience comprises an unstated death cult. Membership is in the millions, still growing. Almost everyone in America knows a member. To be around them even for a meal is vaguely uncomfortable, and so it happens only when it has to, on holidays, and only if they’re family.
In the show, the action always rises. Each season, a new and compelling enemy, more dangerous than the last. With its introduction, a new promise the viewer will be saved from their present circumstances. Freedom at last. The cultists find their lives oriented around the show, a dependency that deepens every viewing hour. It consumes their thoughts to the point it diminishes awareness of material reality. By the time the villain inevitably dies, resolving the season’s tension, they’ve already moved on to the next villain, the next arc, forgetting they hadn’t been saved at all. The promise of next time intoxicates their imaginations. Their heroes will kill for them once more. They don’t believe they’ll be saved, not like they once did, but they do believe in the future bloodshed. In the new enemy always on the horizon. The next one to be slain. They take comfort in the thought. They sit on their Lay-Z Boys in the dull ambience of the TV’s glow as they drift to sleep. Their homes are otherwise dark and empty. You, the person across the Thanksgiving table, are the enemy they’re saving for last.
Keep this death cult in mind when you read the following, a poem Etel Haxhiaj put on her Facebook page after having been screamed at by one of these people at the grocery store.
Sometimes I want to
Walk in your mind
Wonder what is it about you
That is so deeply hurt
That you hate a mother
Walking with her children
I want to understand the
Anger
So much anger in your eyes
I feel it rise and surround me like
A wasp. Ready to sting.
Venom ready to reach and poison
Each word
“You piece of scum”
Stop. I freeze.
I want to run
And then
Wrap my boys with my arms
Shield them from your
Anger
Poison
The words that envelop me
Like a pair of fists
Ready to punch
Harm
Hurt
Violate
I want to scream
In a second you’ve robbed me
Of my calm
A moment of love
My sanctuary
My ability to
Protect my extension
My children
They
Are
My extension
Mine to protect
How does a mother protect?
Defend? Teach? Deal with the silence that follows her tears
Stuck in her throat
What did I do to be met with such
Anger, poison, violation?
Robbed of a moment that
Was meant to be mine to be
A moment that was mine
Mine now to shed
Bury
Let go
Re-claim
I re-claim my safety
My space
My spirit
I reclaim my light
I hope you
A stranger in the parking lot of a
Supermarket
Sleep tonight knowing that
You have not robbed me
Of anything with your words
Or your anger
Because
I. Reclaim. My safety.
You have to wonder... how consumed by your fiction you have to be, how abstracted from the physical plane, that you can do something so antisocial as scream at a woman you don’t know, in a public place, in front of her children, simply because the people who make the TV show around which you orient your life decided to briefly put her on it...
Well anyway happy Fourth of July. Cue the Creedence.
Calling the bluff
It’s only as complicated as you make it. Mamdani ruined an avatar of the Democratic Party machine by simply centering a problem in the majority of people’s lives and offering tangible solutions. Here he’s quoted in New York Magazine:
“We have tried to listen more and lecture less, and it’s in those very conversations that I had with Democrats who voted for Donald Trump many months ago that I heard what it would take to bring them back to the Democratic Party — that it would be a relentless focus on an economic agenda,” Mamdani said. “And when I asked those same Democrats who voted for Trump why they did it, what they told me again and again came back to rent and child care and groceries and even the $2.90 that it costs for a MetroCard, which is now out of reach for one in five New Yorkers. And the manner in which we have to respond to this is both to acknowledge it and actually put forward policies that would resolve it.”
The way Mamdani arrived at this approach, by simply talking to Democrat voters who went to Trump, and the way he presented his proposed resolution, both radically simple politicking. Exercises in the “no translation” I went long on in the last post. Both proof that in this political age of data aggregation, targeted ads, campaigns run by and for a consulting class, the only way out of the trap of wonkish fecklessness that will kill the Democratic Party is to go completely around it.
It takes a brave politician with good instincts and a real, fully developed analysis of power to do such a thing. Again, the raw power of this new critique of “translation” on full display. Lucky for me and the argument I just presented, Candy Mero-Carlson and Joe Petty teamed up this week to offer a local example of exactly the wonkish fecklessness that Mamdani so rebukes.
Seeing that housing is a make-or-break issue in this election (perhaps because they secretly read this newsletter with an intensity only known to a true hater), the pair released a statement detailing what they presented as an ambitious, forward-thinking, and “fiscally responsible” affordable housing measure: tax breaks for landlords, with the cherry on top of a humiliation ritual for their tenants.
That is an oversimplification of course. But this stuff needs oversimplification. Because what makes it insidious is buried in the layers and layers of translation that, in the long tradition of Democratic city politics, turns a wealth transfer from the public trust to private landlords into a “solution” for the housing crisis. Without pulling out the simple material realities buried in benevolent-sounding language, Candy and Joe get to claim they’re doing something—just last week my colleague and I called for a new program to increase affordable units—when in reality they’re doing less than nothing.
So bear with me as I disentangle it. Translate. It’s important—an exercise in what Mamdani laid out, and something we should all be doing when we’re made to swallow these big ideas from state and local leaders. We need to develop a shared vocabulary for calling the bluff buried in this stuff. Many, if not most, of the people who suffer at the hands of the real estate speculators rightfully find the conversation around “housing” dense, boring, abstracted, and confusing. To keep ourselves within the prevailing vocabulary of “housing policy” wins us nothing. That expression about the master’s tools applies here. Even with the best intentions, using words like “incentivizing” makes you sound like a master.
Before that, though, I should quickly point out the obvious: This is naked pandering from two people who directly benefit from the housing crisis in material ways, who have wantonly facilitated it hitting this city harder than most, who, before it went out of fashion, called the crisis a renaissance and basked in the glow of finally being “on the map.” They’re still beholden to the speculation machine that made rents so ungodly expensive here so quickly—a fact that screams out from between the lines of this proposal.
(Candy Mero-Carlson’s subtle skullduggery of her opponent’s proposal to seek more tax relief for seniors is useful context for understanding why these statements are coming out and why now. Don’t have time or space for that, but a few weeks ago I went over it in detail: “Snubbing seniors out of spite.”.)
So, as I laid out, this is a tax break for landlords and a humiliation ritual for struggling tenants. Keep that in mind as we go through how Mero-Carlson and Petty describe it. In a statement that went out as a joint instagram post, the headline read, “Mayor Petty and Councilor Mero-Carlson Propose Local Property Tax Incentive to Preserve Affordable Housing in Worcester.”
How will it work? Well, simple. The city offers “property tax exemptions to landlords who maintain rent levels aligned with federally defined income thresholds. If adopted, the proposed program would incentivize property owners to preserve affordability in Worcester's rental housing market.” Self explanatory!
Translation: Landlords providing cheap apartments pay reduced property taxes if they fill out a few extra forms every year. This, by some convoluted mental gymnastics, helps renters. Don’t ask us to explain how. Oh and what we’re not going to tell you is the landlord is going to need every tenants’ tax returns for the application.
There’s a lot of known unknowns at play here, so much so I had to go spelunking through state law to get answers. What are the rent levels? The thresholds? The incentive? The state, in typical fashion, allows the municipality to decide. Based on past practice, Worcester’s likely to go with the 80 percent area median income standard, as defined by the Federal Office of Housing and Urban Development. Millbury’s website has a good breakdown of how that shakes out for our “metro area,” which stretches from Worcester to northern Connecticut, where the mansions are.
Let’s do some back-of-the-napkin math. A two-bedroom unit at 80 percent area median income is, per HUD, supposed to cost $2,316 a month. That’s the affordable definition they’re likely working with, though of course it goes unstated. A quick scan of Zillow shows rents for 2 beds ranging from $2,100 to $4,000 in Worcester. Let’s use this example, because the number is round, in the middle, and it’s a sideways triple decker, which is funny.
The unit is valued at about $380,000. In 2024, the landlord paid $4,159 in property taxes. The difference between $3,000 a month and $2,300 a month is $700. Times 12 is $8,400. That’s the hit they’d be taking by sticking with the HUD-defined rent. The landlord can save $4,000 in taxes by taking advantage of Mero-Carlson and Petty’s new proposed program, but in order to do so, they would leave $8,400 on the table. So they don’t save any money, they actually lose $4,400. There isn't a landlord in the world who’s going to sign up for more paperwork in order to lose money.
A more extensive analysis is required to see how this breaks down for units closer to but above the “affordable” definition. But for the units already under that fair market rate for 80 percent AMI, it becomes a no-brainer for the landlord. They don’t have to change their rents, and they get a free tax break courtesy of the city. This proposal has a better chance of winning Petty and Mero-Carlson the support of our local slumlords than it does lowering anybody’s rent.
For these slumlords, there’s another perk buried in the fine print: they get to ask their tenants to produce proof of income every year. Per the new state law allowing municipalities to offer this, which I read and doubt Petty or Mero-Carlson did, a landlord must demonstrate that their tenants don’t make too much money in order to qualify. Per the law:
The property owner seeking the exemption shall submit to the city or town any documentation the city or town deems necessary, including, but not limited to, a signed lease and proof of the occupying person or persons’ household income, to confirm the eligibility of the property for the exemption under this section.
Municipalities are allowed to set the income level at which a unit is disqualified from the tax break, so long as it’s less than 200 percent AMI. If the city were to set it at 100 percent AMI, it would mean that the landlord would have to prove that the unit as a whole—that means every tenant added up—makes less than $92,000 a year. So, say, you have two people living in a two bedroom who each make $45,000 a year—like two working class parents might—boom, you’re disqualified. For a slumlord this grounds for access to tenants’ reported annual income has all sorts of accessory value, as I’m sure you can imagine if you’ve ever been a renter. It’s this small caveat in the fine print that the slumlords could really be after. Say they want to evict someone already: income statements then become firepower in Housing Court.
It’s difficult to imagine a situation in which the local government suddenly required landlords to provide their tenants with a year-end balance sheet, showing how much they made off the labor of their tenants combined with the necessity of shelter. Remember the rental registry? There would be open revolt among our pettiest bourgeois. In every Dunkin and Honey Dew across the city, there would be chatter among the morning crew of insurrection. George Russell would be disinvited from the card game.
What’s happening here is Candy and Joe are putting forth something that sort of looks like it might be affordable housing policy if you squint and suspend disbelief. And they’re merely introducing an idea implemented by Maura Healey last year to the municipality. Maura, Joe, and Candy are all working within the same Reaganite rhetorical framework when it comes to housing. The state, they say, needs to “incentivize” more production, through deregulation and subsidies for the equity firms that dominate the housing construction market. The argument is trickle down 101. Eventually, demand will decrease, and so rent stabilization trickles down eventually for everyone.
I left this comment on their post...
...it will almost certainly get deleted.
In the meantime, policies that would materially benefit renters, such as the ones Mamdani is proposing, are outside the Overton window. They will not do anything for the sake of a renter that might ask the landlords to share in some of the pain of this ridiculous, local-economy-collapsing, homelessness-producing rent issue.
Real social housing construction, real rent freezes, real intervention in the market is what will help people who are suffering right now. It is amazing that your average Democrat is unwilling to concede that such policies are good for the party’s survival. It becomes less amazing when you see the amount of money the real estate lobby pumped into opposition to Mamdani. That is a hose from which the power elite in cities across the country have affixed their greedy mouths, and they remain unwilling to change that. They are trapped, to their existential peril, in a peculiar mode of neoliberal city governance in the arena of housing that goes back to at least the 1980s and every day proves more and more disastrous.
This analysis is neatly laid out early in Abolish Rent, a new book on tenant unions by LA organizers Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis:
By the Eighties, shaped in turns by inflation, tax revolt, racism, and the red scare, Republicans had invented the housing programs that make up the overwhelming bulk of the government response to the housing question today, in which support for tenants ends up benefiting landlords and real estate developers.
Section 8 and Low Income Housing Credit tax subsidies are some of the marquee programs of this new approach. Some 50 years later, that’s still the case. In the shift to an “incentive-based” approach, as opposed to the grand public housing project of the New Deal era, we lost the capacity to believe the government can actually intervene on behalf of its citizens against a predatory market. Still the case, as evidenced by Maura Healey down to Joe Petty, it’s more than obvious. Rosenthal and Vilchis write:
Thus, federal assistance for tenants came to subsidize the private market rather than regulate it, or offer a public alternative (...) The programs help inflate the price of rent, eroding their usefulness: as rents rise, more tenants need support, while the state has to spend more money to house them. Rather than challenge the power of landlords and developers to extract rents, these programs hand over our tax dollars to shore up private profits.
It’s hard to account for how much of Mamdani’s success is due to his willingness and ability to color outside these lines. To actually challenge real estate. Perhaps this is why the real estate lobby invested so much money in defeating him? The fundamental act we’ve all forgotten about, that the government can actually do things for people at the expense of the market’s predations. But you can bank on the idea that Joe Petty and Candy Mero-Carlson would never.
Odds and ends
Just a few more thoughts but please if you enjoy what we do here help us stick around!
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Keith Linhares wrote a treatise on big ideas for tax policy changes for the Worcester Business Journal, including moving to land value tax system:
Our current property tax system inadvertently holds us back. Taxing buildings and land equally penalizes investment in improvements. If you add a new apartment or fix up a storefront, your tax bill goes up. Meanwhile, a derelict building or vacant parking lot in a desirable area incurs a modest tax bill—despite gaining value thanks to public investment using our tax dollars.
This system rewards blight and speculation while fueling sprawl. That’s not how we build a vibrant, thriving city.
The rest is well worth a read. This is what city councilors should be doing by the way.
Here’s a good thread on WPD taking absurdly long to respond to car crashes.
And Worcester Community Fridges bringing the heat on Instagram.
The other night I had an insomniac back-to-back movie night, starting with Shock & Awe then moving to Shattered Glass. Shock & Awe was good journalism agitprop, something I’ll never turn down. But Shattered Glass.... Man. What a movie. Hayden Christensen hitting evil notes he never came close to in Episode III, I’ll tell you that.
If I was a billionaire I’d finance We Were Soldiers from the Vietnamese side.
Aright it’s grilling and chilling time baby. Happy America.
Thank you for breaking down the Joe/Candy proposal — I knew the second I saw them both crowing about it that it was going to be a giveaway to landlords, but it’s nice to have a detailed breakdown of what a complete boondoggle it really is.