Covered up by certain niceties of complexities

City government held captive by a homeowners association

The DOGE announcement got me feeling like real life is a draft manuscript in J.G. Ballard’s trash can. Anyone else?

Would it surprise you to learn that the Worcester City Council went almost 4.5 hours in their first meeting back from the election without mentioning the incoming mass deportations? And even then only Etel Haxhiaj and Khrystian King had much of anything to say about it? Our officials are so quick to say diversity is a prized asset of our city at any other time, but in this moment, when it matters? When you might be called to do something to defend that asset? Awfully quiet.

The mayor said he “visited a few churches” so... that’s reassuring. Meanwhile, in Gardner, there’s a caravan of hooting fascists doing laps around a Super 8 housing Haitian immigrants.

Haxhiaj motioned to have the mayor and city manager release a statement in defense of our immigrant neighbors. The mayor sighed into his microphone as she made it.  

Today, for precisely the reason outlined above, we’re going to focus on the vote the council took about banning new gas stations Tuesday. It is a crystalline example of the raw contempt our local political class shows when called upon to govern. 

As always, a reminder this reporting and analysis is something you can’t find anywhere else in this city, and it’s only made possible by paid subscriptions, tips (Venmo / Paypal), and merch orders (I just added some cool little fridge magnets to the merch store). 

To business! Just one main post today, then the customary odds and ends.  

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“Covered up by certain niceties of complexities”

The same six councilors that voted against the Gaza ceasefire resolution at the last meeting voted as a controlling bloc again on Tuesday: This time, against the idea of banning new gas station construction. Joe Petty was yet again the swing vote, and yet again sought to cloud his opposition in the muck of governmental procedure. 

He joined Moe Bergman, Donna Colorio, George Russell, Kate Toomey, and Candy Mero-Carlson in killing the idea. While none of them said so directly, the fact that Councilor Etel Haxhiaj proposed it had much to do with their opposition. Regular readers will recognize this story. We’ve been getting some version of it like clockwork for the past three years.  

The story: Haxhiaj tried to use her position to actually govern, and a majority of the council prevented her. They did so because they are reflexively adverse to governing. They resent being put in a position to do so. They get cranky. Mayor Joe Petty is the glue holding this coalition of cranks together.  

Haxhiaj’s order merely called for a rough draft of an ordinance change, along with pieces of information necessary to make an informed decision. (How many gas stations we have, how adding gas stations impact’s the city’s stated climate goals, etc.)

On the council floor, she said the issue of gas stations requires the council to educate itself.  "With this particular topic we need to make sure we understand all the implications—take into account the health impact, the environmental impact, and the economic development impact.”

Moe Bergman, first to speak against it, seemed to dispute the mere idea that the council should be educated. 

He opened his speech by heavily implying that Haxhiaj is making it up that her constituents are opposed to new gas stations. He’s never heard a constituent say no more new gas stations, he said. “It never happened... to me. Maybe it happened to others.” The “maybe” there doing a lot of heavy lifting, as Haxhiaj had just finished speaking about her constituents’ widely held opposition to gas stations. (God, this guy is such an obvious asshole.) He also said so despite waiting for hours to speak in favor of a gas station at a recent Zoning Board of Appeals, while dozens of residents spoke out against it. So right off the bat we’re dealing with a liar. 

He proceeded to argue that the “free market” should be allowed to determine the amount of gas stations in the city, despite being a staunch supporter of the single family zoning laws that prevent the “free market” from adding more housing to his neighborhood. Government incursion in the free market where I specifically live but nowhere else, he says. 

“If electric cars take over, and the free market works as it should, and as it does in this country, then people who develop gas stations will stop developing gas stations.”

Here he shows he didn’t do any homework. The key argument against new gas stations is that they are destined to become future brown sites—prohibitively difficult land to repurpose or redevelop. His bird-brained assessment of the free market doesn’t take into consideration the government intervention that goes into remediating brown sites, despite being on the council that approved massive construction loans for Polar Park, partially on the argument that the land was a brownsite and thus wouldn’t be redeveloped any other way. (Not just an asshole, a stupid asshole.)

He then read some loosely related factoids he googled, conflating that with research. The climax: He said only Providence has implemented a gas station ban. Why would Worcester want to be anything like Providence? (Stupid, stupid, stupid asshole.) 

But Bergman’s not the interesting part of this story. He’s just a garden variety Republican that happens to self-identify as a Democrat. Par for the course. 

The interesting opposition came courtesy of George Russell. Just as bird-brained, but with a different slant: Russell’s reflexive opposition to any idea proposed by a progressive councilor manifested in a very telling screed about the Zoning Board of Appeals. 

Russell argued that to prohibit new gas stations would be to change the “use table” of the city’s zoning laws. What can go where. And he’s not in favor of doing that. Besides, the current use table already bans gas stations in all residential zones so... problem solved. What he doesn’t mention is that people live on the edges of residential zones and in the multi-use zones where gas stations are allowed by permit. And he neglects to do so, of course, because that’s not him or anyone he consorts with—all tucked away in the enclaves of exclusivity consciously created by the authors of this zoning code he now treats as an untouchable constitution. There’s no need for a ban, he said, because the special permitting process exists. The money quote:

“I know Councilor Bergman sometimes gets some criticism from some members of the public for using the words ‘changing the character of the neighborhood.’ Well, guess what, that’s probably because Councilor Bergman served on the (ZBA) and that’s always what we were taught about zoning...”

Ding ding ding!

Russell, Bergman, and countless other stupid and self-interested members of the local political class were expressly taught that the special permitting process is about preserving “character” within the already exclusive and cost-prohibitive parts of town that—just a coincidence—have the most zoning restrictions. 

An applicant for a special permit, Russell said, is “supposed to show, legally, that you weren’t changing the character of the neighborhood by granting a special permit for these uses.” 

A knock-on effect of a citywide ban on new gas station construction is that the most heavily use-restricted parts of town would lose their monopoly on the promise of never having to live next to a gas station. How are you supposed to have “nice” parts of town without the “not nice” parts? Russell doesn’t say that part out loud. What he does say, like Bergman, is that the free market mustn’t be interfered with. Russell, like Bergman, lives in a neighborhood with a “character” that is manifestly the product of market interference. Nevertheless, he said with a straight face, “The last thing I want to do is take competition away.”

What Russell did here, in a ham-fisted way, was articulate a certain pervasive and deeply held belief about the purpose of zoning, shared by the majority of his colleagues on the city council and the “homeowners” that decide municipal elections. 

What the Zoning Board of Appeals has recently been doing, with its staunch opposition to gas stations and relatively receptive attitude to housing development, is articulating a new belief about zoning—one that’s closer to zoning’s original intent, and at odds with the way Worcester has interpreted and employed it since—another coincidence—the Civil Rights struggle.

In Massachusetts, zoning laws are about 100 years old, loosely broken into four distinct eras. (For this I’ll be quoting mostly from “Exclusionary By Design,” a great report published last year by Amy Dain for Boston Indicators.)

Those are: original adoption (1920s-1930s), the postwar era (1940s-1968), the Big Downzone  (1968-1975) and the current era, from 1975 to present. 

The first municipality to adopt a zoning code was Brockton, believe it or not, in 1920. But most would follow in the next decade. I couldn’t figure out when Worcester adopted zoning but I also didn’t try very hard. Back in the early days, zoning was an anti-corruption tool, or at least that’s how it was pitched. Compared to the erudite and obscure codes of today, zoning was simple and straightforward: this is where the houses go, that’s where the factories go. No one should have to live amid the mess, noise, and air pollution of industry. Zoning followed suburban sprawl out from the industrial centers of the urban core until, by 1960, most of the state with any population density was zoned. 

It was around this time that some of the wealthier, whiter towns figured out how to get more bang out of the zoning buck. They imposed rules that required large lot sizes for residential homes and prohibited multi-family housing. Weston, for instance, was a real innovator.  But by 1968, the use of zoning to make for exclusive, value-juiced, and low-density neighborhoods was institutionalized. The building of apartments was all but outlawed in much of the state. 

This is The Big Downzone, as Dain coins. It just so happens that it coincides with both the Great Migration and the Civil Rights Movement. Strange coincidence! Only some people didn’t think so, writes Dain:   

In the years leading up to his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. spoke frequently not only about the evils of Jim Crow segregation in the South, but also of segregation in the North. To the Massachusetts legislature, he called this segregation of the North “a new form of slavery covered up by certain niceties of complexities.”

Using the complexity of zoning laws, suburban communities around the state shut themselves off completely to all newcomers at the same time that the newcomers started getting Blacker. Cities, unable to so completely close the door, fell into hard times as industry and white people fled. Where newcomers could land was in a state of pre-abandonment. Worcester is one of those places, but the power elite figured out how to wall off their own neighborhoods, treating them like ad hoc towns within the city, catering exclusively to the town’s needs. By orienting city government toward this one relatively small section of the electorate, a fragmentation of “insiders” and “outsiders” emerged. This continues to the present day. One need only look at the “high turnout polling locations” amid overall turnouts of 15-20 percent to see it. For more evidence, look at who is shut out of the city government’s channels for public discourse (Gaza demonstrators) and who has all the time in the world (the Germain Street homeowners who want their brick sidewalks back). Who has to grovel and beg for fair treatment (the organizers of POC-led community events) and who becomes indignant if their grievances are not entirely redressed (the Indian Lake homeowners and their jet ski ban, for instance).  

When Russell said they were taught to weigh special permits based on the character of the neighborhood, incidentally, he came dangerously close to publicly talking about this “insider” versus “outsider” dynamic.

The 2003 textbook Land Use Planning and Development Regulation Law explained that the phrases “to preserve property values” and “protect the character” of a community are often used to mask class and race discrimination.

When taken this way, we start to see zoning as the vehicle to achieve a de facto segregation, as opposed to the de jure segregations of Jim Crow or apartheid, Dain writes. It’s a social filtering system based on a mixture of race and class, one that no one has to define in the explicit codes of apartheid regimes. Everyone involved just knows who belongs “in the neighborhood” and who doesn’t. This unspoken code emerged, especially in places like Worcester, from an insecurity deeply felt by the local political class at the time the Big Downzone was set in motion. According to Dain: 

Anxiety about status may have been fueled by recent  experiences of some communities losing status. From 1950  to 1970, a whole set of urban communities lost population, including Boston, Chelsea, Everett, Lynn, Lawrence, New Bedford, Somerville, Cambridge, Malden, and Worcester. Many suburban  voters had recently left those places.

From 1975 to the present, the chickens of this racist and classist downzoning have come ever home to roost. They produced a housing shortage, sending prices and rents up and up and up. Meanwhile municipalities redressed the sweeping zoning measures of 1968-1975 with “surgically careful” reforms that promise to correct inequities but don’t even come close (i.e. inclusionary zoning, which Worcester was about 20 years behind the rest of the state in passing, and still rendered it toothless). Dain writes: 

Exclusion is a means toward money-making and resource hoarding, but exclusivity may be a goal in itself, the end as opposed to the means. The way Massachusetts’ zoning system is structured,  it encourages local civic engagement to the benefit of municipal  residents at the expense of outsiders and regional needs, which reinforces patterns of privilege and disadvantage.

Even today, as the housing crisis becomes magnitudes worse than anyone in 1975 could imagine, the state is wrapped up in legal battles with towns over the tepid MBTA Communities zoning reform. 

We were really good at being quietly racist back in the 1960s. We are presently really bad at being anti-racist, but go about it loudly. We say a lot of things about diversity, but the exclusionary principle of the Big Downzone still prevails. This new modus operandi is to preach the evils of inequity while making sure the practical steps taken are small as possible. You sound like you’re trying and it takes a master’s degree to figure out that you aren’t. 

What Dr. King said of Massachusetts in 1965 still applies: We’ve figured out a new way to cover up our racial and class antagonism with “certain niceties of complexities.” 

The present complexities are more sophisticated than those employed in the 1960s. Used to be a certain cynicism to the whole operation. The people involved knew what they were doing and knew not to say it out loud. Nowadays someone like Bergman doesn’t even have to know he’s being racist. In fact he’s more useful if he’s convinced himself otherwise. This extends to the majority of the council. 

Three quick examples: 

—Donna Colorio stood up for all of two seconds to make a bewildering claim: “I just have one statement that just keeps coming in my mind as I’m sitting here: We as city councilors do not have the right to dictate the land use in the city.” The city council is the only body that can change zoning ordinances. So that’s just a buck wild thing to say. Gotta hand it to her. More even than Bergman, Colorio shows us that obliviousness is a prized attribute on the Worcester city council. 

—Right after the vote, Kate Toomey, sunglasses on, performatively left the meeting with a look of “you’re wasting my time with this bullshit,” allowing the door to slam behind her as Colorio is speaking.

—Joe Petty, who cast the deciding vote against, asked the city manager one short and leading question before doing so: “The zoning rewrite, where are we in that process? Because I would guess this would all be part of that.” He didn’t define what he meant by “all.” Batista explained his office is about to contract a consultant to begin a “two- to three-year process.”

“We’re just starting the process of initiating the zoning rewrite.”

“So all this should be part of that process?” Petty asked.

“Zoning rewrite will include all land use and zoning regulations in the city,” Batista said, omitting the gas station concern. That was enough for Petty. He got back to his chair and voted to file it. 

These examples are here to show what counts for Bergman extends to the majority of the city council, and thereby the council’s electorate.

Interestingly, it’s not so true of the Worcester ZBA—the body you’d be right to assume is principally responsible for managing the complexities of our geographic racism. While there are some members stuck in the mud of 1975-style housing policy, the majority appear to see their role differently. 

The vote on the gas station proposed for the Hope Ave rotary is a good example. By a 3-2 vote, the hearing was closed and the applicant was made to withdraw. Members made it clear it wasn’t just that gas station, they’d be voting against any gas station in the future. Nate Sabo made a particularly impassioned argument, at one point confronting Bergman (who’d spoken in favor of the gas station) directly.

“It was a real head-scratcher for me to hear a city councilor say that a gas station is a higher and better use for the site than housing,” Sabo said. 

Bergman didn’t just call it a higher use, he intoned conspiratorially that something else “which could be far more problematic for a neighborhood that’s looking for more businesses” (read: multi-family housing) would get constructed on the lot if the ZBA didn’t permit a gas station. 

Sabo rejected the entire framing: “We sit here every night and hear proposals to put seven-story buildings on a postage stamp. I’m sure there’s a developer that’s willing to buy this site and put housing there.”

This is a ZBA that wants housing, that sees density as a good thing. That’s entirely opposite of the vision of a ZBA Bergman and Russell maintain—one that exists to manage against growth for the benefit of “character.”

In a hopeful moment, Dain turns to the idea that the current era of zoning could be coming to an end, and that a new one could soon emerge: 

Importantly, the era has seen concerted ongoing advocacy to loosen zoning in support of diversity. Many stakeholders have been involved in that advocacy, including regional, local, and consultant planners,  homebuilders, realtors, staff of nonprofits in affordable housing,  advocates for seniors, environmentalists, business leaders, state  government officials, and many others. In the last decade, the prohousing advocacy movement has involved an even broader base of activists. We might now be at a pivot to a new era of land use  regulation, brought on by the growing movement. It is too early to know for sure...

Could be that’s what we’re seeing here on the ZBA, but as Dain writes, it’s too early to tell. Regardless, we have a proactive ZBA and a reactive council. The ZBA has stepped up to enforce its own de facto gas station ban and the council can’t even bring itself to consider one. Has to spike it before it gets off the ground. 

Why is that, you think? One unfortunate but obvious conclusion is that the council is an elected body and the ZBA is appointed. Municipal elections, at least in Worcester, reward regressive thinking. The candidates that indulge the most selfish impulses of the single family homeowner tend to do the best, because elections are decided by a small handful of heavily zoned neighborhoods. 

How do you change that?

This moment was worth spelling out because it’s an especially clear example of the council as an albatross around the city’s neck. When your zoning board is more forward thinking than your executive body, there’s a problem. But the cold truth is that the council is only an executive body on paper. In reality, it’s more like a homeowner’s association that figured out how to hold a city government hostage. So long as it’s controlled by the six-vote majority (Petty, Toomey, Mero-Carlson, Bergman, Colorio, Russell) that spiked the gas station ban and the Gaza demonstration, it will remain that way. When Batista’s consultants are done with their zoning rewrite recommendations in two to three years, these people shouldn’t be allowed within 500 yards of them.

The current moment urgently demands more of the people in these seats. To remove even one of them would be an act of love toward this city. Luckily, at least three are vulnerable: Bergman, Colorio, and Mero-Carlson. In a future post, we’ll break down the electoral math. 

We’ve still got a year, but the time to start organizing is now. 

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Odds and Ends 

Thanks for reading! Again, we’re doing work that no other local outlet will, at a time when it’s all the more important to report without any deference to power. 

Here are those fridge magnets I teased at the top.

They’re pretty cool! Lots of other nice stuff on the merch store as well. 

This event is in two days!!

worcester.for.palestine

A post shared by @worcester.for.palestine

And don’t forget, next week there’s the Worcester Community Fridges documentary screening. Wednesday November 20th, 6 p.m. at the White Room (138 Green Street). More here. 

A commenter on the stream Tuesday sent a link I found interesting but haven’t given proper time to yet: The Municipalist Movement. 

The devastating effects of police violence, the pillaging of social safety net programs, climate chaos, and the COVID-19 pandemic have wreaked havoc on people across the world, but in the violence a beam of hope begins to emerge. People are once again recognizing their power, organizing themselves against greedy corporations, and an uncaring state to control their lives.

This is the municipalist moment. The movement to gain democratic control of cities and towns is ascendant from Los Angeles to Barcelona to Jackson, Mississippi. People are crafting municipalist platforms, reclaiming the right to the city, and self-organizing as rebel cities.

Will be looking more into this, maybe for Sunday’s post. It reads quite similar to my post election analysis, “We need to start at the definition of ‘politics’”

The Millbury School Committee member found guilty of making a funny post about Trump (“Fuck you Trump supporters, I hope you choke on it.") is being accused by Millbury townies of “hatefulness” and “intolerance.” So much so she made Libs of Tiktok. Sounds like accusations a woke person would make! The MAGA movement is now in the business of tone policing. What a 180. 

I think as we head into municipal election season it’s worth looking at what successful left wing mayors have done in the past. This 2015 article from The Nation about Bernie’s time in Burlington is a road map of sorts. It was housing, housing, housing, housing for Mayor Sanders. And it worked. 

On the other side of the coin, reader Seanie D shared this crazy website about the venture capital world from which JD Vance emerged, and to which he is beholden. Real shadow masters of reality type stuff: 

The Network State is a conspiracy to form a nation-state led by tech billionaires, organized through a large web of venture capital firms and startups. Their goal is to create their own sovereign, independent nation-state – one that consists of distributed colonies or “nodes”, but is funded and run by the same people, money, power, governance and legal structures. Many colonies, but one nation.

Oh—and go see Anora, Sean Baker’s new movie about a stripper and the son of a Russian oligarch. It’s one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. Katie and I caught it at Blackstone on Monday. Just checked and it’s still playing. Well worth the price of admission. 

Ok talk to you Sunday!