Giving up the ghoul
As Tip O'Neill once said, 'All shit politics are shit local politics'
What’s up all!
The other day, Katie and I were stopped for a rush-hour red light at Park and Highland when we witnessed an empty corner-cut cocaine baggie lilt over the hood, taken by a pleasant breeze. Up 10 feet in the air, moving as a jellyfish through calm waters, or a will-o’-the-wisp in some potent grove, back in the days before we coated this earth with the poisons and wastes of a machine world, one that grew so rapidly we found ourselves subsumed, reduced to the role of sex organ.1 In that moment, with the crinkled baggie glimmering in the sunlight, compelled by its own gravity toward the heavens, all was right with the city. Worcester felt like home.
On a more serious note Boyfriend Of The Year over here bought Katie a linocut setup for her birthday last week and she’s been motoring with that thing, and to tremendous results. Like this rendition of the Outdoor Cats logo!!!
More on this story as it develops including maybe just maybe the opportunity to get your hands on one of these in some form or another.
In today’s post, after my usual bullshit, you’ll find a really nice write-up on the rent control ballot question campaign from Gillian Ganesan, my Election Squad co-conspirator and a writer who’s quickly becoming the new star of the show over here. You can read that piece via this standalone link if you’d like to skip the “my bullshit” portion: “The Whole Commonwealth Is Underwater.” But the two are best read together, I think. So let’s get to it...
Next Thursday, Councilor Etel Haxhiaj is back in court for the crazy charges filed against her by the WPD. There’s a demonstration planned for outside the courthouse. It would be good to see all of your smiling faces!
Since no one in Joe Early’s office can touch this case while maintaining the appearance of fairness, it’s in the hands of special prosecutor Steven Gagne, an assistant district attorney under Northwest District Attorney Dave Sullivan, a man who appears to have done some decent things with his office, such as forming a civilian review board. At the hearing on Thursday, the judge will hear arguments on a motion to dismiss the assault charge (for which, despite dozens of videos, there remains no evidence whatsoever). The question becomes whether Sullivan’s direct report will advance a malicious narrative set in motion by the WPD to absolve themselves and, at the same time, run cover for ICE. Will David E. Sullivan want it on his record that he lent an employee to another DA to do brand management for Trump’s forced removal regime—federal policy his constituency overwhelmingly opposes? The correct move, morally and legally, is to drop the assault charge. On Thursday, we’ll see if Sullivan agrees. He can direct his employee to do so and put an end to this madness, or he can put his stamp of approval on it and live with that.
Regardless, see you there on Thursday. I for one could use a good old-fashioned rally for a good cause in real life. And I could use a whole lot less of... whatever this past week has been.
I suppose it should have been obvious that cancel culture would boomerang back around as fascist kitsch but ahh, what can you say. Certainly, if you’re a school teacher, don’t say anything at all.
I’ll do it for you: The guy was a fascist dickhead, a carnival barker, and I have never once thought about him out of the context of that one meme about pee and balls. Apparently, neither did the deeply unwell shooter, who killed him not for any political reason but as a bit for his online friends? We’re stuck divining the tea leaves of his partisanship and not focusing on the fact that all the mass shooters are young white men from one extremely nihilistic strain of internet subculture who gather in the same niche internet spaces.
The kid does not have politics. Any politics. But even that’s not the point. There is a mass murder machine buried within the cultural fabric of the internet. It synthesizes widespread feelings of loneliness, alienation, depression, and obsession with media stardom and spits out random spurts of violence committed by random people for random reasons. There is no hand at the console of the machine, which is the actually scary part. Just millions of disaffected kids poisoning each other’s brains to varying degrees of severity. A balloon that fills and fills until pop.
Ryan Broderick over at Garbage Day put it well, describing a “new nihilistic accelerationist movement that delights in muddying the waters for older people who still adhere to a traditional political spectrum. Many young extremists now believe in a much simpler binary: Order and chaos. And if you are spending any time at all trying to derive meaning from violent acts like this then you are, by definition, their enemy.”
But if you focus on the machine, you don’t get to participate in all the fun of shoveling coal into the culture war furnace. Choo-choo! Focus instead on the delicious question driving it all: Who’s losing their media career next? Jimmy Kimmel, wow. The choo-choo train is really chugging. We all find the entertainment value in institutions big and small rallying to the aid of the white supremacists in their ostensible moment of need.
The conservative media world is having a blast right now. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to them, and they’re acting like it. They are barely containing their naked glee at the state of things, stuffing the exuberance into a cheap costume of nationalist mourning. Give it a week or two and it’ll be naptime. Martyrs are made by the genuine convictions of a movement—the real love people have for their cause. That’s the missing element here, a fact made obvious by the undistilled boredom Trump evinces when made to talk about it.
The only thing I feel strongly about vis-à-vis the ongoing spectacle is that this was a good joke and I, personally, am being silenced—my First Amendment rights violated—by the lack of engagement with it.
Just playing, but in service of a point: One thing I’m sure as shit not going to concede is that I must dutifully pretend the stakes have been raised by this one particular killing among so many killings. Good thing about what I do here is you can’t cancel me, really. Lord knows there have been attempts. I mean, I guess Substack could kick me off, but if they do, honestly, thank god. I’ve been meaning to switch platforms anyway. And I don’t think that sorta smoke is good for the free press brand.
I liked the way Kayla Scanlon put it in a post today headlined “6 Economic Lessons from Books About Power, Propaganda, and Decline.”
I believe that The Machine is designed to monetize human attention, which is then sold to advertisers. And in an attention-based economy, outrage is cheap fuel, something you toss on the fire to make it burn bigger and brighter. Truth, nuance, and analysis are luxury goods that most people can't afford to produce consistently—so they ragebait.
It is freedom and sometimes even bliss to speak the truth without fear of reprisal, but exhausting to lug that freedom around all the time. A bag of damp laundry back from the place with the shit dryers. A spiritually deflating experience—the clothes aren’t even clean. But along the path to and from, you do get to walk in unmitigated sunlight.
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Bandcamp (new extremely dark song coming soon)
Those of you who ordered Bad Brains shirts pre-order, they are finally done! Going down to RI to pick them up tomorrow morning, then in the mail they go. I’ll be listing the extras some time next week.
On the good analysis front, a few highlights.
Nationally, Ta-Nehisi Coates got it right. Locally, friend of the newsletter Andrew Quemere got it right.
Both pieces are responses to dumbass op-eds of the type we’ve been bludgeoned over the head with to a special degree since It Happened, by Ezra Klein in Coates’s case, and in Quemere’s case, not even an op-ed but the official house editorial of the Boston Globe. Embarrassing!
Coates and Quemere both highlight the bizarre fact that the esteemed newspapermen have failed to include a single thing Kirk said in his long career of saying horrible shit, despite said shit being widely available. Rather, they glossed over it all with statements like, “whatever one thinks of his political views”—a luxury the newspapermen seem especially eager to grant to Nazis and no one else.
Whatever one thinks of the Globe’s political views, let’s check in with Mississippi, where a Black student at Delta State University and a homeless man in a town two hours away were both found hanged from trees on Monday. Police quickly ruled the student’s death a suicide—as of my writing this, the autopsy hasn’t been performed, and the police have offered conflicting reports—and lazily tacked an “ongoing investigation” onto the homeless man’s case. Both claims, the suicide and the investigation being “ongoing,” are spurious. Add a third one: “Police don't believe the deaths are related at this time.”
Sure. One of the highest-profile white nationalists in the country dies in spectacular fashion, then within a week, two bugbears in the white supremacist imagination, a black man and a homeless man, die in a certain specific way. The same specific way that white supremacists have made a calling card over the 150 years since they first cut eyeholes in pillowcases. Sure. Sure sure sure. I’ll take the word of this police department, which has almost certainly held within its ranks a few of the guys who made the noose-around-the-tree-branch move famous, and which likely still does. Or the word of the coroner, who’s elected (wtf) in a county that’s basically the Michael Jordan of lynchings. The best to ever do it.
At nearby Mississippi College, two employees were suspended for presumably lib-coded Kirk posts by an institution especially eager to prove they “condemn violence” when the victim is a white supremacist. While the university didn’t post any specifics about the objectionable posts, it’s safe to assume they were expressions of totally normal thought, along the same lines that got at least two teachers were placed on administrative leave2 last week at Wachusett Regional.
Kirk’s primary organization, Turning Point USA, has campus chapters all over the country. In 2022, following a massacre of Black athletes at the University of Virginia, the president of TPUSA at the University of Missouri, Meg Miller, posted on social media: “If They Would Have Killed 4 More N*ggers We Would Have Had the Whole Week Off.” A few months later, the university cited the First Amendment when they declined to punish Miller in any way. No talk whatsoever of condemning violence. Hypocrisy is dead but my god. Can we stop pretending?
What are we to make of a society whose leading institutions and public intellectuals bend to accommodate the most ardent purveyors of inherently violent white supremacist thought, and also, when called to, hand down discipline ruthlessly on their behalf? Who rewrite the definition of violence in real time, make flailing and self-flagellating shows of submission, preemptively admit guilt, and surrender? That’s a white supremacist society you’re looking at. Plain and simple. One that’s just a little uncomfy admitting it, which is worse in my opinion. Pick a side and own it.
Unrelated, here’s another good tweet that went nowhere in the current climate:
Where’s the lie, etc., etc.
Israel launched a full-scale invasion of Gaza City while all this was happening, by the way. A “lifeless wasteland,” they’re calling it, as the Palestinian death figure crosses the 65,000 mark. They launched the invasion after the UN finally summoned stones enough to call the “war” a genocide. Meanwhile, the US unilaterally vetoed a UN Security Council ceasefire resolution for the sixth time since the “war” started. Let the hellfire rain. Watch them flee. All the military-aged males and possible combatants running for their lives in tactical fashion, undoubtedly to the next secret underground bunker we’re already lining up for a BLU-127 courtesy the folks at Boeing.
Many of you probably didn’t even hear about Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, a Chicago resident shot dead by an ICE agent the day after Kirk for the crime of being scared of two masked men with guns who jumped out at him. The ICE agents opened fire within seconds of Silverio throwing the car in reverse. He had just dropped off his children.
Chicago-based independent journalist Raven Geary said what needed saying in Hell World the other day.
I expected everyone across the country would be sharing the videos I saw of protesters back at the facility facing off with ICE—scenes of conflict that would’ve rattled us all five years ago, but we’re now frighteningly numb to. The skinny antifa kids in keffiyeh and the wine moms with glitter glue FUCK ICE signs have formed a united front. I’ve never seen such a defiant mix of people.
But no, the journalist-influencers are all still talking about what they consider a more important kind of violence. The kind they are worried might one day come for them. Not this more routine violence.
And of course there was another of the routine school shootings we’ve absorbed as one more unremarkable threads in the tapestry of modern life. A Thing That Happens.
Why the school shooting is A Thing That Happens but the Kirk shooting is currently presented as some society-altering anomaly... this is maybe the only question worth asking right now. Why it doesn’t count as a crime when federal agents murder someone is a decent follow-up.
What would Kirk do if he were around to see all this? He’d shovel the coal, baby. And have a damn good time doing so.
In any case the must read piece of the week in my humble opinion is Hamilton Nolan’s “Getting Yelled At By Dumbasses” in his fantastic How Things Work newsletter.
This absurdity, in fact, is at the very heart of fascist violence. It is the final twist of the knife, the head-shaking feeling of disbelief right before you are tossed in the prison van. It’s not just that we are being destroyed, it’s that we are being destroyed for incredibly stupid reasons. There lies the ultimate triumph of the dumbasses!
Now to the local news.
The Week in 340ish Words
Drought’s on. West Nile’s among us. New Superintendent Brian Allen put out a “don’t post anything” advisory to WPS staff. The council met for 21 minutes on an agenda seemingly designed to elide any decision-making. It was the last real meeting ahead of the decision-maker election. Multiple teachers at Wachusett Regional going down for run-of-the-mill liberal postings. The teacher’s union is pissed. The city has officially applied for an audience with the State Supreme Judicial Court to appeal a $30 million judgment in the 26-year-old Holden Water Wars lawsuit. Holden’s going for the legal hat trick, having won the last two rounds. Sarkodieh is formally in as the third candidate for mayor. Moe Bergman is out, apparently, after someone (definitely not him) blasted out a goofy text survey last week that asked, among other things, whether they’d be mad at him for running. Apparently, yes. UMass Chan Medical School is looking for a new chancellor, and Tim Murray and Karen Polito were put on the hiring committee. A new bus loop was unveiled at the Roosevelt School to much fanfare, as the neighborhood preps for war over the congestion caused by every parent waiting two hours to pick their kids up on Grafton Street (discussed in detail on the most recent Outdoor Cats). Multiple threads were posted on the Worcester subreddit by people experiencing their first bouts of homelessness, asking for advice on how to sleep without getting hassled by the police. Candy Mero-Carlson went on the radio and said there’s nothing the city can do about homelessness that it isn’t doing already. Significant media pressure, but still no word on the supposed investigation into Enrique Delgado Garcia’s death in a State Police boxing ring. At the School Committee, Superintendent Allen laid out a plan to recruit future teachers from the current student body. Congressman Jim McGovern got fired up about the firing of Jimmy Kimmel, telling the Telegram that people need to “wake up.” A QCC campus cop was arrested at the Big E after punching another cop in the face.
Stuff coming up:
The Etel court date on Thursday as mentioned up top. Really nice to have a good crowd for that! Here’s the flyer again if you want to share it that would be great.
On Sunday night, an online organizing meeting hosted by MCAN that some of you may find interesting!
Earth (yes, that Earth) booked a show at Ralph’s in November. It’s probably sold out but I happen to have an extra ticket hmu.
No set event per se but the rent control organizers need volunteers, consider signing up!
As do all the good council and school committee candidates. Here’s a Worcester Sucks-approved list of their donation and volunteer pages to make it easy.
Giving up the ghoul
The brief nature of the 21-minute city council meeting last Tuesday was obviously orchestrated by the mayor and his cranky coalition. There are plenty of things the manager could have put on the agenda that had a bit more teeth—the civilian review board proposal we were promised? Hello??—but he opted for three reports that were dry as dirt.
(Also, it took me like 15 minutes of navigating/fighting the city’s website to get shareable PDFs of those reports, so I’m leaving them here in orderly fashion to show the city that it’s easy, if you don’t overthink it, to link some hosted PDFs.
Like honestly. Come on. Anyway.)
Last week, they made a big insufferable stink about a mundane fire sprinkler ordinance, openly and nakedly weighing landlord profit/loss potential against the prospect of fatal fires. Simply because Etel was the primary counselor advancing it and they have a handler in the police union who might take a haircut on a few of his rental properties. That meeting went for over four hours, the sprinkler ordinance taking up two hours and 15 minutes of it.
This week, they decided they were content to make that weird anti-fire-safety argument their last significant action ahead of November 4. Of the five or so items on the agenda, councilors only spoke about one at all, and then only briefly: The roadwork report, because of course. This is the “business” they’ve been apparently eager to “get back to.” Doing absolutely nothing. About five of the twenty minutes were taken up by Walk Bike Worcester’s noble advancement of pedestrian safety measures that the cranks will undoubtedly fight in the future. Two minutes were taken up by Gary Hunter telling them it's embarrassing to have an agenda so light after all the complaints they’d made about not being able to get work done due to protests.
There was a criticism of when they had a protest here because we stopped the business of the City. Now we've been on vacation for a while and everyone deserves a vacation but when you come back and I look at what's on the agenda, is this really taking care of the business that we need for the City. There's housing, there's a lot of problems in the City and I don't see it being addressed.
Nevertheless, Candy Mero-Carlson had the temerity to go on the radio on Wednesday and say, about that time earlier this year when the community was demanding she apologize for calling Thu Nguyen “it,”
Our city during that time also, quite frankly, there wasn't much work being done on behalf of the residents of this city during that time period.
As opposed to when, Candy?
The way these people use the word “work” is an insult to anyone who works. They do nothing on purpose. When they say there’s “no work being done,” they mean they’ve been put in the position to do politics, aka, as politicians, to do their jobs. When a crank councilor speaks of a time when there was “work being done” what they mean is a time when no one was paying attention to them.
Also, Mero-Carlson confirmed in that same interview her position on calling Thu “it,” which has been confirmed up and down and around town, remains staunch if vague denial: “So, again, it was alleged of something that I said,” she said Wednesday. She didn’t once say what the allegation was, specifically, in keeping with all her comments on the matter. She just said “That's not somebody who I am. I've never, you know, been there, been that.” At this point, it’s a bigger indictment of Candy’s supporters than of herself that she gets away with that line. But anyway, vote Bilotta.
The orchestrated in-and-out nature of the meeting Tuesday night serves as a flashing glance at the (what’s a nicer way to say “corrupted?”) informal power relations in this city. Joe Petty benefits from an uncontroversial lead-up to the election. No press is good press for an incumbent. Petty hired Batista single-handedly in a practical sense. (He threw his name out there early, and lo and behold, it was the only name anyone threw out. Another good instance of informality.) He maneuvered around a formal search process of any kind, let alone a national search. Batista gave Joe the quiet fall he undoubtedly requested. A good soldier.
If Joe’s good at one thing, it’s quietly rigging the game for himself. You do have to hand it to him on that front.
Another example: Here’s a lightly annotated schedule for the rest of the council’s year. Remember, Joe pretty much unilaterally sets this schedule.
If you’re saying hey, there’s not a real meeting until after the election, you got that right bud. That’s basically all for this year.
Six weeks without a meeting, two weeks (those marked “finance”) dedicated to setting the dual tax rate. Real quick: The tax rate is a vote that should take all of five minutes, but the amorphous blob of insiders around city hall is, for some reason, committed to making a grand show of it every year. Weeks of build-up to a predictably inconsequential vote, keeping the split between businesses and homeowners at relatively the same rates. It is insufferable how they play it up. The type of shit you do to pretend to be busy. Of course you’ll notice the last Finance—abbreviated Fin.—takes place after the election. That’s when they’ll vote.
December 2 is anyone’s guess. What holiday?! I looked it up very quickly and it’s the UAE’s national holiday... and also a UN holiday to celebrate the abolition of slavery, a weird choice given the UAE’s current widespread slavery practices. If I had to guess, Joe and/or someone in the clerk’s office saw an opportunity to score some woke points while getting a choice night off. Two birds stoned at once. Or, we have a UAE lobby I didn’t know about (best-case scenario). Either that or they really like fritters, mutts, or a full English breakfast. Oh, actually, National Bartender Appreciation Day. Bingo. That’s definitely it. Can’t do local government, too much appreciating to get to.
I’m honing in on the schedule because we really need to start talking about what the council currently is not, and what it should be. The role it currently serves is a subject I’ve spent much time analyzing: a reality TV show, an anti-democratic stormwall, a vehicle for laundering fundamentally anti-democratic decisions ... take your pick.
I don't know how much more there is to say on the matter, and it certainly hasn't changed at all. So maybe, to discover what the council is not, we should first look at what the city charter says the council should be, and the only way to do that is to initiate a review of the charter, what colloquially gets tossed around as “charter change.”
Nothing is going to change about this body short of an upset electoral takeover or charter change, and charter change won't happen without an upset electoral takeover. November becomes important solely for the possibility of smashing the six-vote crank majority. There are paths, but there are just as likely paths to further retrenchment—an eight- or nine-vote majority. Nothing good ever to come again.
As the temperature continues to get wantonly turned up across the country, an engaged city is a resilient city. Our power to resist a feral federal government and an unglued reactionary social movement lies in our ability to organize, mobilize, and provide locally what will no longer come federally. We need to reimagine what city hall can be.
For the reasons outlined in the first part of this post, the low-grade and thoroughly unimaginative corruption outlined in this second part is especially frustrating. We cannot go on letting such a potentially vital organ for local resistance continue to operate as a homeowner’s association and real estate speculation piggy bank smushed together like a combination KFC-Taco Bell. Enough is enough.
In the third part of this piece, which will play us out as I’ve already gone long, guest star Gillian Ganesan takes on the new rent control ballot initiative, articulating why it’s so important to get involved in that campaign given who sits on our council.
For further reading on this extremely telling 21 minute meeting, I’d recommend John Keough’s piece on the matter in This Week In Worcester.
Before I leave you, one more pitch for the road to help this newsletter survive:
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To Gillian!
The Whole Commonwealth Is Underwater
By Gillian Ganesan
(Standalone web version here.)
On next year’s ballot, if all goes well, we may be called upon to make a decision about rent control. Massachusetts has a fraught history with the policy, including at the ballot initiative level, and I wanted to pull together a little state political history as we launch into the first phase of what will undoubtedly be a dramatic clash between the people and Big Real Estate.
The first thing to know about rent control in Massachusetts is that it is functionally banned at the moment. In the mid-90s the Massachusetts Rent Control Prohibition Act passed via statewide ballot initiative by a pretty narrow margin. The law does exactly what the name says—it prevents local control over rents. The only exception to that would be affected property owners opting into a proposed rent control law or local ordinance. As you may have guessed this never happens.
Technically the legislature could enact a statewide policy but they almost certainly won’t, at least not anytime soon, though not for lack of trying. In the past few years, because of the steep incline in rent, there have been multiple failed attempts to pass rent control. For instance, just in 2024, the legislature passed a housing-specific bond authorization bill that conspicuously left out any stabilization on existing rents, or landlords’ ability to hike rent prices year to year. If there was any question about who might be to blame for that, look no further: after the 2023-2024 legislative session ended, the Massachusetts Association of Realtors publicly gloated that they had “successfully blocked” rent control’s inclusion in the bond bill. Legislators tried again in the 2024-2025 session, this time with a standalone bill, and it failed again, probably because of the same interest groups. Advocates warned that if it did they would take rent control to the ballot, and folks… have you heard the good news?
On September 3rd (a day-early birthday present to me, I think), Attorney General Andrea Campbell certified an initiative petition brought by the coalition Homes For All Massachusetts. If passed on the 2026 mid-term ballot, the new law would bypass the legislature on rent control and enact it statewide. Rent increases would be tied to the Consumer Price Index’s estimated cost of living, and would never exceed more than 5 percent of the previous year’s rent even for new tenants. So, if you pay $2,000 a month, your landlord could not raise your rent by more than $100 a month in your next lease term; if you move out, they can’t fuck over the next person who signs a lease, or gentrify the neighborhood as easily. You can see the summary and full text here.
This certification does not mean that the question will be on the ballot, however. In Massachusetts, an initiative petition needs almost 75,000 signatures by mid-November—two months from now—in order to be considered by the legislature, which is given the opportunity to pass the petition as-is, propose a substitute, or do nothing. If, after consideration, the legislature does not pass the initiative as written (they won’t), the initiative effort needs approximately another 12,500 signatures before mid-June to get onto the ballot. On most signature collection efforts like this one, it’s to be expected that a good chunk of signatures will be thrown out, so they will need to build in a buffer. This means that the coalition will likely need to gather at least 100,000 signatures to get on the 2026 ballot.
The rental market is increasingly captured by speculative investment. In many places, 20-30 percent of residential sales are made to investors, and in some communities that number jumps to more than 50 percent. Almost one in ten apartment units in Massachusetts is owned by private equity. I got a chance to ask Jonathan Morales at Homes For All a few questions about the ballot initiative. He breaks it down really well:
“Because Massachusetts has no limit on how much rents can be increased each year, profit-seeking corporate real estate investors are increasingly buying homes and hiking rents astronomically, raising the price of housing for everyone else.”
But Gillian, you might say, the reason we don’t have rent control now is because of a ballot initiative that was voted in by a narrow majority. Why would it be any different this time?
The difference is that now, no matter where you live in Massachusetts, cost of living has become unmanageable. Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies has determined the entire state of Massachusetts to be cost-burdened using 2023 data, meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their monthly paycheck on rent. Around a quarter of renters statewide are designated as “severely cost-burdened,” meaning they spend more than 50 percent of their income on rent. It’s not just a Boston metro area problem anymore; the whole commonwealth is underwater.
The other thing is that rent control does work. Study after study has found that it lowers rents and increases rental market stability; basically, people don’t get priced out of their own neighborhoods as easily. When local control over rent was banned in Massachusetts, all of the places that had it at the time voted to keep it. The rest of the state, which did not have rent control, pulled the rug out from under them.
But this time the conditions are different. From Cape Cod to Pittsfield, we’re all getting screwed.
Ballot initiatives are an enormous undertaking, requiring massive amounts of funding and organizing capacity, and so they usually need the support of a broad coalition. Politically, rent control is kind of perfect for it. Outside of labor, housing is the issue that touches the widest swath of the general population; everyone is in the housing ‘base’ so to speak. I’ve personally rented in Somerville, Boston, and Worcester over the past 10 years; no matter where I go I get gouged, and my friends all over the state experience the same. Everyone either experiences the consequences of a landlord-controlled housing market, or we know other people who do.
Unwilling legislatures can disappear something like rent control into endless committee meetings at the behest of their big donors. A ballot question can’t be so easily smothered by special interests—if it gets on the ballot we are all going to be talking about it.
Homes For All is taking the lead on this initiative effort, and I would say it’s well situated to do so. H4A is itself a coalition of housing justice organizations, and the campaign for this ballot question, Keep Massachusetts Home, includes an even broader cross-section of groups, including labor unions, community organizations, and faith-based groups from across the state. We’re still in the very early stages—I’d be willing to bet that this effort is going to grow by orders of magnitude. More than 100 groups joined an early organizing call with Homes for All, hundreds of volunteers have already signed up to collect signatures, and they only put boots on the ground this past weekend. They’re going to need a lot more though; this is about as grassroots as it gets. If you want to get involved, click here.
There’s something about the thought of rent control coming back to the ballot that I find meaningful. In 1994, rent control died on the ballot. It’s a little bit poetic. Maybe next year, like a phoenix, the policy will be reborn from its own ashes.
On the flip side, we need to prepare ourselves for a well-coordinated and highly funded opposition campaign—our friends at the Massachusetts Association of Realtors put out a distinctly pissy press release on 9/3 announcing their intent to “work with our industry partners to build a strong and diverse opposition committee.” I suspect that means we’ll be seeing some vewy scawy ads coming our way next October.
I think we can likely anticipate their narratives, because opponents of rent control have used the same talking points for decades now. Rent control as an issue is uniquely sensitive in Massachusetts, precisely because it has existed here before. Even though it currently does not, big real estate is still extremely traumatized about the whole thing, and regurgitates the same set of talking points about it over and over. Their favorite narrative/veiled threat is condominium conversion. Basically, if you rent control us, we’ll just convert all your apartments to condos and sell them off. However, this ‘market-based’ presumption, which supposes that increased condominium conversion is necessarily a direct result of rent control, relies heavily on a case of historical happenstance, and does not account for condominium conversion policies that exist now.
In the late 70’s and 80’s an economic upturn and the Baby Boomers’ coming-of-age ushered a glut of new homebuyers into the real estate market, leading to a nationwide condominium boom, including in Massachusetts. This gutted the supply of rental properties as they were converted quickly into condominiums faster than they could be replaced with new rental stock. In Mass, the condo boom overlapped with a time when rent control existed in Cambridge, Brookline, and Boston. Most opposition narratives in Massachusetts fixate on Cambridge specifically.
In 1991, the city of Cambridge released a report, titled Rent Control Reform in Cambridge: A New Agenda For Fairness. It made suggestions for improvement to a long-standing rent control system within the city. Today, opponents of rent control love to pick it apart and moan about how many problems there were not only with Cambridge’s system, but with the very idea of rent control. However, no one, not even the opponents, can say rent control didn’t work. The report directly credits rent stabilization with keeping Cambridge affordable. This would be proven correct four years later when rent control disappeared and rental prices immediately skyrocketed citywide. While condo conversion was inarguably an issue during the rent control years, it became a much bigger issue immediately after rent control disappeared. The MIT study linked above found that the condominium stock in Cambridge jumped by 32 percent after the repeal of rent control—this supposed nightmare condo hell world that big real estate is selling us actually got way worse immediately after rent control was gone.
The causal relationship seems debatable, or at least multifactored, since the condo boom was a nationwide phenomenon and not specifically limited to cities with rent control. Really, the big issue was that during the boom there weren’t enough protections for people getting their apartments condo-ified out from under them, rent control or no. Now, the conditions with regard to condo conversion policy are very different in Massachusetts than they were 40 years ago. As a direct result of the chaos during the condo boom, a 1983 law introduced protections for tenants against condominium conversion. These protections were expanded in the 90’s and again very recently in the 2024 bond bill. The original 1983 law also allows localities to introduce more strident protections municipally, which many places in Massachusetts have done. Notably though, Worcester is not one of them.
Additionally, in order for something like the condo boom to happen again, people would need to have the money to buy property. By-and-large, they don’t. According to a 2025 Harvard study, a first-time homebuyer would need an annual income of $126,700 to afford the typical cost of a home today. In Worcester, the median household income as of 2023 is $69,262. Homebuying is currently at its lowest level since the mid 90’s (which is coincidentally around the time when the condominium boom finally kicked the bucket). It’s just not realistic unless prices go down and incomes go up.
Opponents of rent control ignore the different world we live in now with regards to the economy and condo conversion policy, and happily continue to use the scary PR—in Worcester, Moe Bergman, Donna Colorio, and Candy Mero-Carlson have all directly cited condo conversion as a major concern preventing their support of rent control. They do so, conveniently, in the same 2022 Telegram article. Colorio, a landlord, even pointed to Cambridge as an example. Bergman, who is also a landlord, basically said rent control is anti-capitalist (I’m paraphrasing), which made me laugh. Kate Toomey didn’t specifically use the phrase ‘condominium conversion’ when explaining why she opposes rent control, however she vaguely referred to it as “limiting housing” which I think might be partially referencing condo conversion. In any case, that article is pretty interesting, firstly because it’s rare to see a bunch of elected officials to go on-record with their reasoning, even if it is self-serving and insincere, and secondly because in this case the opponents of rent control all sound like they are reading from the same script. If rent control goes to the ballot, I would expect more of the same.
The opposition narrative really boils down to a preventative Austerity Strawman, the same strategy that’s repeated by the Right cross-policy. Any perceived or hypothetical hiccup within a system, even one that does not interfere with functionality, is blown out of proportion and catastrophized as a way to chip away at public support, justify reductions in funding, limit bureaucratic capacity, and corrode the whole system over time until it becomes unusable and eventually abolished. The Trump administration is currently doing it, Shock Doctrine style, to our entire government. Our clown show city council has been doing it about Mill Street bike lanes for god knows how long now, and as recently as last week. Opponents of rent control use austerity propaganda in an attempt to inoculate a populace against even thinking about trying to do it again. “Rent control?! But what about condos?!” they yelp, ignoring the actual policies that exist and the economic reality we live in right now, hoping that I’ll forget that this year my friend’s landlord tried to jack up their rent by $400 a month. Girl bye.
Worcester in particular has experienced a rapid escalation. As Jonathan from Homes For All points out:
“From the Forbes article in 2024 identifying Worcester as one of the most ‘competitive’ rental markets in the country, to the surge in unhoused people and families in Worcester reported in June, corporate landlord greed is destroying our communities and displacing our neighbors.”
We all see it, and it’s gotten to the point that even our city council can’t pretend it isn’t happening—Kate Toomey conspiracy-theorizing about “the towns” sending their homeless residents to Worcester is just a desperate see-no-evil attempt to come up with some other, any other, explanation as to why more and more people are being forced to live outside on the street. It couldn’t possibly be that people can’t afford their cost of living, it must be some other completely insane thing that no one has ever witnessed happening.
Of course the public opponents of rent control in our fair city are the same villains we’re used to. It makes sense. But I want more people to think about that as we inch ever closer to the city council election. Rent control will still fall under statewide jurisdiction even if this initiative makes it past the ballot next year, but the makeup of our city council determines how much further we can go. Local tenant protections, eviction bans, stringent safety regulations, equity incentives, expanded limitations on condominium conversion—all of these fall under local control and are ways that the city council could be acting on the housing crisis in Worcester at this very moment. If rent control passes, it could go a lot further if our city elected officials would be willing to work for the public interest rather than sneer down at us and wail about bullying.
On the other hand, say our city council barely changes after November. If rent control gets enacted statewide, there’s nothing those cranks can do about it.
Gillian Ganesan (@gillianganesan) is a Worcester-based organizer, writer, and concerned citizen. Former campaign strategist at the ACLU, focused on police surveillance and the First Amendment.
A Marshall McLuhan idea I think is a pretty good one. “Physiologically, man in the normal use of technology (or his variously extended body) is perpetually modified by it and in turn finds new ways of modifying his technology. Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and evolve ever new forms”
Originally had it as “fired” here. They are on administrative leave, so not quite.
WachusettRHS teachers are both still on “administrative leave”- not fired- still waiting to find out.
Good piece 👏