Is city council just a weird reality TV show?
Just kidding haha... unless?
Today’s main feature is a long essay I’ve been working on all week and I’m so stoked on it. Haven’t written one like this in a while. Feels good to be back, baby! I hope you like it and I encourage you to take your time with it. There’s no “breaking news” you’ll miss out on if you take a couple days. But there are some new/big ideas within I’d love to hear your thoughts on.
The local discourse lately has been remarkably stupid. This post is my best attempt at pulling something “not stupid” out of this dumb moment.
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Since the main piece is so long, I’m gunna get a few quick things out of the way first.
Big ups to Andrew Quemere!
Friend of the newsletter Andrew Quemere recently published an extremely impressive story in The Mass Dump on how the person convicted of the “worst mass murder in Massachusetts history” is very likely innocent. The reporting that went into it is truly impressive.
Fifteen people would be killed by the inferno, the deadliest in Massachusetts since the 1942 Cocoanut Grove blaze. And eventually, a Danvers man would be convicted of setting the rooming-house fire and sentenced to life in prison for what The Beverly Times described as the “worst mass murder in Massachusetts history.”
But that man, James “Jimmy” Carver, has insisted on his innocence for the last 34 years. And now his attorneys think they can prove it.
Andrew’s a real deal independent voice and this one deserves a big ol read & share.
A nice talk!
I was invited this week to give a talk at Clark! It was really fun. Professor Jack Delehanty had me come into his Cities & Suburbs class to talk about reporting on the unhoused The class read a few of my pieces alongside an article by Chris Herring in an academic journal. Highly flattering to have my work on the syllabus next to that one! The article is titled “Complaint-Oriented Policing: Regulating Homelessness in Public Space.” I put it on Drive. While it’s set in San Francisco, just about every observation within applies to Worcester. Worth a read for sure.
Book club this week!!
The first meeting of the Worcester Commenters Union Local 69 book club will take place this Thursday April 18 at 7 p.m.! In person at Rewind Video/Cordella's Coffee (116 June Street). On Twitch at the WCT3k channel! We will hopefully/likely have someone behind the counter slinging coffee for the meeting.
We’ll be discussing the intro and chapter 1 of Eight Hours For What We WIll. In total, it's about 30 pages. But it's a dense 30 pages.
If you don't have a copy, here are some scans I made:
And here's a Drive folder of all the scans as we make them. Chapter 2 is already in there if you want to read ahead. Thank you so much to our scanning volunteers!
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Is city council just a weird reality TV show?
Since this post is too long for most email providers, it might be better to open it in a browser.
Over the past few months I’ve been finding it extremely tiring to go about the business of explaining why the Worcester city council is... the way it is. Though the specific issues change, the underlying themes remain the same.
It is anti-democratic as a government body and bizarre as a social organism. It is a homeowners association and a social club and a forum for the maintenance of obscure and petty personal beefs—a defining feature of this weird little city’s weird little character. I’ve made those points more than a few times by now. They’re all true, but not encompassing.
In writing this essay, I stumbled on a new lens for understanding the council: reality TV. A bizarre theater, not so much opposed to governing as unbothered by it. A fiction that strikes a rich and specific vein of resentment in the hearts of certain city residents. Like reality TV, it operates on a premise of being “real life,” but in the service of entertaining an audience. We’ll get there!
But it requires some extensive set up. The current fracas over the rental registry is perfect, it turns out, to illustrate this reality TV theory.
The rental registry should not be an issue. Any controversy says way more about us than about the concept. It is a benign and boring tool for municipal governance. When it was approved by a unanimous vote back in 2022, that was the case. It wasn’t until landlords got letters about having to register last month that it became a “thing.” Councilors suddenly became opposed to it. They had a hard time saying why. But they were mad. There was drama.
A lot of cities have these registries, and some for a long time. It’s nowhere near the cutting edge. It’s not radical. It’s not even lefty or progressive. In more normal places, it is not a front page story. Not a flashpoint.
The mere fact it’s “a thing” here is crazy. It’s also emblematic of a longstanding failure to govern. Landlords here are accustomed to a city hall with a negligently hands-off approach to the rental market. The registry ever so gently rubs against that deep sense of entitlement landlords have. The reaction was, accordingly, petulant and dramatic. It was a runaway train of reactionary outrage that couldn’t be reasoned with.
If Worcester city hall didn’t have a history of letting landlords do whatever they want free of consequence, you have to imagine the landlords wouldn’t have thrown such a tantrum.
City hall has let them run amok because we don’t, as a rule, think about what other cities are doing. Batista was punished for trying to keep up with basic best practices.
Once the registry became “an issue” we stopped talking about what it is and does, and focused instead on why people are mad at it. It’s a familiar pattern! The whole Mill Street thing, for instance. It is a symptom of the peculiar role the city council plays in this city–an anti-progress machine. A limiter. A dome between us and the outside world. A spectacle for those within said dome. A way for resentment to mitigate progress. A theater.
What’s crucially missing from the discourse on this registry is why we need it and how it fits into a larger project. That should be the beginning and the end of the discussion of course but what should happen doesn’t happen here.
What is a rental registry?
A rental registry is just a database. A repository for basic bits of useful information. Landlord contact information, inspection logs, addresses, unit numbers within buildings, and sizes of said units. It becomes a central hub for otherwise disparate and obscure data points. Figuring out who owns a building and whether they hire someone to manage it is surprisingly difficult. The registry is a simple tool for a city hall to increase efficiency, keep track of work, and generate more useful, accurate data. For landlords, it’s a form to fill out and a small fee. Dozens of dollars annually.
Cities across the country have maintained these databases for years. St. Louis was an early pioneer, launching a proto version in 1968. By the 2010s, dozens of cities had them. Boston launched one in 2013, for instance.
Since the pandemic, the number of cities with registries is growing exponentially. Providence will launch one this year.
Every city’s registry is different. There’s no uniform standard dictated by state or federal governments. Some cities collect more information than others, charge more than others, and require more frequent reporting. There are stiff and lax penalty structures. It’s all over the place.
Worcester’s registry is a tame one, compared to others. Even before the recent proposed changes, which make it even more tame.
In Worcester, it’s a simple online form requesting simple information: address, type of property (residential vs commercial etc.), number of rental units, size of those units, the owner’s contact information, and the property managers, if there is one. The up-front cost is $15 per unit, and then $5 to renew. It mandates that an owner or property manager live within 60 miles of a given rental property, which is reasonable.
Then, once the landlords have registered, the proactive inspections begin, once every five years, at a cost of $50 to the property owner. The state’s sanitary code, which is very baseline stuff, is the sole focus. Properties in violation will be reinspected, then fined, etc. The city uses the database to send out information on the sanitary code, and encourages self evaluation before the inspectors show up. Examples of what they look for include exposed wiring, faulty plumbing, functional heat system, mold, rodents etc. In an FAQ, the city says “a good test is always to ask yourself, would I want to live in this building or unit?”
The fees allow the city to pay for the inspectors they need to do this. The money has to come from somewhere, and the landlords themselves are the second best place behind the police department’s operating budget, I think. If the rents are going up either way (and they are), renters are at least getting something out of it. A landlord who wouldn’t bother to deal with the mold problem otherwise will have to now.
Any landlord claiming they wouldn’t raise the rent if this registry didn’t exist is lying and should go to the top of the inspection list. Landlords do not set rent based on operating costs. They set rent based on what the market lets them get away with. They reinvest rent money back into the property only so much as the market requires.
In the current conditions, the market requires no investment at all. There’s no incentive to maintain a building, let alone improve it. Its value as an asset isn’t tied at all to its habitability, and neither are the rent payments. If a tenant moves out due to poor living conditions, there are five others ready to take their place. No need to put on a show with a 0.5 percent vacancy rate.
That’s the reality that makes a registry necessary. The housing market, left to its own logic, will drive the city’s housing stock into the ground, starting with the cheapest units. That housing stock is already crumbling from age and isn’t being directly replaced by new construction. It gets more dangerous to live in as it gets more expensive. Luxury complexes designed for “young professionals” outpace any other new housing construction. The Democratic Party, from Biden to Batista, use “trickle down effect” messaging—freely and shamelessly—when they talk about the housing crisis. The solution is “incentivizing” more housing production. More housing, less pressure. And shhhh don’t talk about public housing, that’s a thing of the past. We can’t build anything real with the tax money we take from you. What we can do however is cut tax deals to private equity firms for large housing projects. So the firms build the kind of housing that will make them the most money and eventually that new housing will “trickle down” and “alleviate pressure” for everyone else. That’s how we get out of this crisis, they say.
It’s pure, 100 percent Reagan, coming from the party advertised as the opposite of Reagan. They don’t even try to use another term! Trickle down! Meanwhile zoning reform and public housing are mostly off the table. The “trickle down” approach leaves little to no room for new construction of working class housing. The three deckers will continue to get more dangerous as they get more expensive. Public housing will similarly deteriorate as the wait list grows. New luxury units inflate the “market rate” that landlords can charge for even the worst apartments.
The “pressure” those new luxury units “alleviate” on cheaper apartments will take years to manifest, if it ever does. It would take a drastic over-production of units to produce a reality in which potential tenants have leverage over landlords. Private equity will only produce such a surplus by accident. There’s no incentive! It would be a bad investment. The government on the other hand has an incentive, but only if they value functional communities and local economies more than equity firms. It is insane that new public housing production remains a radical idea. It is insane that in this “blue state” we’re being sold trickle down economics as the answer to the question of whether we can afford a basic human right.
Worcester is very much at risk of losing itself here. And not just in terms of “vibes.” The whole fabric of the city was built on the premise of new immigrant communities finding a place they can form an enclave. Dense neighborhoods with cheap rental and storefront commercial property, a viable path to ownership and wealth building, and freedom to be ignored mostly. This has been the case for literal centuries. These enclaves provide the workforce the city needs to function. When that workforce is displaced, business suffers. Restaurants are the first to go, as we’re already seeing. But they won’t be the last. It’s dishwashers and housekeepers and janitors and then it’s teachers and DPW workers and bus drivers and nurses.
And we don’t have another place for these people to go and continue working here. There’s no Pawtucket or Olneyville. There’s no Dorchester. We are surrounded entirely by suburbs guarded against density and hostile to poverty. Even within our own city limits, there’s a moat dug around the urban core.
If we lose the ability to provide immigrant communities an attainable space for enclave creation and maintenance, it could prove fatal. Moreso than the highway or any other urban renewal project since. When rents reach a certain point, we test a reality that’s never been tested here. Worcester’s never been in the position to attempt surviving without a built-in working class. It may not be able to. The market has no incentive to correct that. It will drive us to a breaking point, then it will simply move on to the next place once it’s broken. The roller coaster of uneven development we’ve been riding upward the past couple years has been remarkably fast, but the fall will be faster. And it may come sooner than we think. The number of developers pulling out of large projects recently is not a good sign.
The government needs to intervene to stop this from happening. It can’t be a facilitator of capital at this moment, it needs to be the mitigator. It needs to govern. And it needs to understand what this city really is, and stop trying to make it something else. Worcester is nothing without its working class neighborhoods. It cannot be a Brooklyn because it doesn’t have a Queens.
The failure to recognize that within city hall is nothing new. But they’ve also never been in the position to lose it. No matter how badly our city leaders have resented the working poor, they’ve never been able to get rid of them. If they’re allowed to see the class warfare in this housing crisis as a good thing and do nothing to mitigate it, their loathing of this place will reach its logical conclusion.
The government needs to stop the market from sabotaging the deeply essential fabric of abundant low-level housing which has been taken for granted here. It needs to build what the market will not, or else mandate it as a cost of doing business. It needs to open the city up for more of it in more neighborhoods.
To look at the rental registry in this wider context is important. It is a tepid, half-hearted step toward intervention in the housing market. And that’s a good thing! But we need many more and much larger steps. If this baby step is too controversial to take the next one, we’re doomed.
We need to understand it as a baby step, and not accept the premise that it's something which merits the dire terms used to discuss it locally.
All registries, including Worcester's, stem from the same general idea: proactive inspections. It’s a better system than one based on reactive, complaint-based inspections. The proactive inspections make a city’s housing stock safer, better kept, and better able to house more people. Registries allow for a coherent system of routine safety inspections and more compliance with basic sanitary conditions. It protects renters, and forces landlords to invest in maintenance of housing units. Letting apartments go idle or uninhabitable has consequences where it previously had none.
In a reactive, complaint-based model, like Worcester’s current one, it’s up to a tenant to report a problem (and know which problems are reportable, and how to report them). This means most problems go unreported. Tenants risk angering their landlord by doing so. Antagonizing the person who can raise your rent as much as they want is not a good idea. It’s even worse if you can’t speak English or afford an attorney. Worse still if you’re unsure you’d be able to find another apartment to move into if your landlord forced you out (editor’s note: or piss off some pervert with a key to your apartment). It’s a system where the most vulnerable people, living in the most substandard units, are the least likely to see an inspector.
The registry was proposed after a deadly fire and a roof collapse that displaced hundreds of people. It’s not a coincidence that both of those buildings were firmly on the “low end” of Worcester housing stock in terms of affordability. It’s not a coincidence that the landlords in both situations demonstrated a pattern of neglect.
Proactive inspections won’t shift the unfair power dynamic between tenant and landlord which produces these tragedies. But it would make that imbalance less deadly. The city can get eyes on units that it wouldn’t otherwise. For instance, an old space heater plugged into a daisy-chain of cheap power strips next to a horsehair wall in a cramped room would get flagged. Avoidable fires that displace tenants and decrease housing supply and kill people have a better chance of being avoided.
An inspector who prevents a fire should be as worthy a “public safety” expense as a firefighter made to run into one after it starts. That’s the basic idea from a public safety perspective and it makes intuitive sense. If you don’t care about renters’ safety, you don’t care about firefighters’ safety.
Proactive inspections also help with property value, by way of mitigating disrepair and blight that make a neighborhood look less attractive. It’s sort of weird the city administration didn’t lead with that angle. The whole controversy could have been avoided if pitched to property owners as an attempt to juice value.
Without the registry, scheduling and tracking these proactive inspections would be impossible. It would be akin to annual car inspections without the sticker system. The most dangerous cars are the least likely to get inspected. More breakdowns, more accidents. The roads are less safe for everyone. Getting an inspection sticker is a small, inexpensive bureaucratic hurdle for car owners. At best, it’s mildly annoying. But it’s not a hill you see people die on. No one is comparing it to Nazi Germany. This registry is less burdensome for landlords than a car inspection. It costs less money and takes less time. Nevertheless, it became a massive issue in this city. The Nazi comparisons have flown freely.
Of course, other cities have faced legal challenges for implementing registries—always from local landlord organizations. But they’re not winning cases. Los Angeles, for instance, was sued by a much more powerful landlord organization than Worcester could muster. The city won.
On the floor Tuesday night, Moe Bergman claimed that cities often lose these lawsuits when they get filed. He said he “did his research.” I can’t find what he’s talking about, really. The closest I could find was a ruling in Pennsylvania that inspectors couldn’t enter apartments without notice, but Worcester’s plan provides for advanced notice. There was another similar ruling in Pittsburgh. But the concerns revolve around involuntary or unannounced inspections, not the registry component. Landlords in these cases invoke the “right to privacy” for tenants and landlords, which is obviously bad faith. The right to not get fined for violating basic safety standards, basically. If they were underwear drawer inspectors it would be a different story.
The moral choice is between ensuring safe housing and ensuring landlords aren’t responsible for providing safe housing. To side with the landlords is malicious—especially here, where house fires are far too common and far too deadly.
It’s worth noting that registries have other uses that more progressive cities continue to explore. Evictions, for instance, can be mitigated. Exorbitant rent increases can be flagged. All manner of tenant right violations that happen routinely and anonymously could be made harder to pull off. For a city that cares about its residents who rent, it’s a very useful tool. Worcester isn’t that city, but it could be one day. A tepid registry now could become a robust one in the future.
Why do we need it?
Worcester’s housing stock is among the oldest in the country. There is a line to get into any unit, no matter how dangerous or disgusting it is. With no market pressure to invest in upkeep in order to attract tenants, rental properties are pure speculative assets. The “up and coming city” narrative makes it easier. There’s windfall profits to be had in flipping low-end rental properties. You don’t even have to spruce ‘em up! It’s a slumlord’s dream.
I’ve seen this firsthand. My building had three landlords in four years, and my rent increased each time while the property saw zero investment. My last landlord lived in Florida. I only saw him one time. I had no leverage. None of the rent I paid went back into the building.
The unit would be filled in a month if we left. Anywhere we went would be the same deal or worse.
This is not a problem the market will fix. You cannot incentivize your way out of it. The city has to step up and govern on behalf of its residents. The ones who live in these assets, not the ones trading them. This is the baseline framework we should be using to talk about whether a registry is good policy. The framework has instead been uhhhhh landlord feelings.
It’s dumb or evil or a combination of the two to center landlords in this effort to regulate landlords. It’s pure regulatory capture, being demanded by people who don’t know what regulatory capture means.
We can barely take this tiny innocuous step to interfere in a market that rewards the abusive treatment of powerless people. But that’s not how councilors talk about it. That’s not how the newspaper writes about it. That’s not the chatter on social media.
It looks like the registry will pass, if begrudgingly. That’s a good thing. But the reduced fines for non-compliance will make it less effective. And it’s not a solution in and of itself to the crisis at hand.
Without a slate of other policies that foster increased density in neighborhoods and new construction of low-end housing, it may prove counter productive. It will take low-end units off the market–for good reason!–without adding new ones. It needs to be implemented in tandem with policies that create units.
The backbone of our working class housing stock continues to be the three decker, despite the fact it’s impossible to build a new one. The three decker continues to be that backbone because it just works. It’s not broken, it’s just old. Three decker neighborhoods still perfectly suit the immigrant enclaves that sustain this city. So why aren’t we building more? Why is it impossible to build the most appropriate style of housing for our city’s population, in this moment of desperate need for more of it?
The answer lies mostly in our zoning laws—a legacy of white flight within city limits. Most of the city’s buildable land is guarded against these buildings. City hall could change that. And changing that would incentivize the production of the low-end housing we need so desperately. We would create the conditions needed for the market to fix the problem. It would usher in growth like no luxury apartment project could. The city would expand as a metropolitan center organically. Property values for single family homes would rise alongside the city’s growth. Public transit would expand. If mixed use zoning is expanded, new commercial corridors would blossom alongside the increased density. Everyone would win.
This good idea is entirely outside the overton window of Worcester politics, for reasons that are reactionary, racist, and classist. Our zoning laws handcuff our city, and exist to maintain an artificial class divide. The “nice neighborhoods,” walled off from the city they exist in. The really depressing part of it is that it would make the nice neighborhoods nicer and more desirable if they were allowed to become less suburban. Homeowners would make out big if Worcester was allowed to truly grow as an urban center. But most of them can’t see that, because they don’t want to. They are content to understand single family zoning as that which preserves their class status. They associate density with poverty, and maintain an image of the “undesirables” that will flood into their proximity.
Just as Worcester is sustained by its immigrant enclaves in the “urban” neighborhoods, it is held captive by class-centered enclaves in the “nice” neighborhoods. In the pursuit of maintaining a geographic divide between classes, the power elite have unwittingly hurt their own position. The short term gain of removing themselves from the presence of poverty came with a long term loss that we’ll never be able to truly understand. What would Worcester look like as a city if density wasn’t contained by arbitrary zoning laws? How much bigger would it be? How many more fully actualized city neighborhoods with their own little centers? How much more real of a downtown?
Worcester has denied itself the ability to blossom as a city because it has been governed by people who resent cities and do not want to live in one. In doing so, these power elite denied themselves the increased power and wealth that comes with presiding over a larger city. And they did so out of reactionary fear they would end up living among the poors. They created their enclaves, to be sure, and continue to preserve them. But at the expense of potential. When the single family zoning lines were drawn, Worcester became an urban bonsai tree. If it continues to be trimmed, it’ll die.
The people who refuse to see that are the people fighting this rental registry and inclusionary zoning and accessory dwelling units and bike lanes. If they’re allowed to continue shaping policy, Worcester will implode. If they’re ignored, they will be dragged kicking and screaming into a more fully realized city with more valuable property. They’ll find it easier to cash out and move to Holden if they really can’t take it. But, like a petulant child discovering they actually like the taste of broccoli, they might come to enjoy living in a real city. They might like it when they can walk to a restaurant down the street from their house. They might enjoy the bus trip down to the Hanover on a Friday night. They might feel a tinge of hometown pride seeing Main Street bustling with people at 9 p.m.
We only get there if we cut them out of the decisions we make entirely. They need to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to see they were strangling the city with an unwarranted fear.
If Worcester were to follow the general best practices of municipal government—not even progressive ones, just the standard set—we’d be in a much better position than we are now. This rental registry, for instance, is a mundane best practice that the city manager pursued in a mundane way. He was rewarded with a hissy fit from the council, and had to make it less effective to calm them down.
While Batista is not a brilliant, progressive administrator, he has been consistently better than the council majority. It’s a low bar, but an interesting one. It raises the question of whether we’d be better off without a city council at all. Imagine a Batista motivated to prove himself as a competent city manager. Would be better for the city than the current Batista, motivated to please the council? I think he would be. And it’s not like he was hired by the council, either. He was hired by Petty before a word was said about it on the council floor.
Before the last election, I considered it practical if not likely that a progressive takeover of the city council could happen in the near future. I’m not so sure of that anymore. But I'm more sure than ever that the city council is a net negative on the city’s direction. It’s the vehicle by which a small minority of reactionary homeowners hold the city hostage. Without the ability to motivate a wider electorate, 10 percent of voters in several “nice” neighborhoods decide elections. The prospect of changing the electoral math is hard to entertain seriously after Maureen Binienda’s astounding victory last November. Why should anyone start caring about a local government that’s never done a thing for them? It’s not an easy pitch. Without new voters, Binienda walks into the mayor’s office.
If you can’t change the council via elections, and can’t change the form of government, what’s left? The manager. The city manager already acts unilaterally with broad authority, and the council doesn’t act like the manager’s boss. If the manager started outright ignoring them, only a small handful of people would notice. The council is unaccustomed to acting as a coherent body. They don’t set expectations or evaluate in a formal way, and don’t understand that to be their role. So when they start getting ignored, they’d just kick and scream about it on the council floor. And the manager could ignore that too. Batista could stop pretending he has to make the councilors happy, and start publicly weighing their opinions against national best practices.
He could have done that with the rental registry, for instance! He could have just said “this is what you voted for and it’s a good idea.” Councilors wouldn’t be able to do anything but motion to terminate his contract, and I’m not sure the crank councilors know they can do that. Batista could start calling a certain bluff: Do you know what your job is? Do you know how this works?
Most of them clearly don’t.
If the council is going to continue to be a roadblock, I think I’d be fine with Batista testing their perceived authority over him. I think Batista’s career as a city manager would benefit far more from what he gets done than what any of the councilors think about it. I think I’m fine with this current council-manager dynamic being as anti-democratic as possible. The progressive bloc is already powerless, bludgeoned by the majority out of even trying anymore. I think it’s time Batista did the same bludgeoning to the cranks!
The cranks expect that they’ll be catered to if they whine loud enough. There’s a lot of entitlement baked into that relationship. If they’re upset, the manager has to fix it. If the whining no longer works, do they have a Plan B? Does Candy Mero-Carlson—a landlord who said on the council floor she didn’t know there was a state sanitary code—have a Plan B? Does George Russell—a councilor who admitted he didn’t read the registry ordinance before voting for it—have a Plan B?
I don’t think they do. These are not serious people. They voted for something without understanding it, they forgot about it. Then the small group of old people they consider their constituency got mad before trying to understand. The councilors didn’t explain it to their constituents because they didn’t know what it was either. So they brought their constituents’ objectively stupid complaints to the city manager. In public, and with righteous indignation. It was embarrassing to watch in real time. They were just conduits of the reactionary anger their crank friends expressed to them, and they carried themselves without shame. That is what they consider the job of city councilor to be. That is all they know how to do. And they’ve been humored by the city administration, historically. When they get cranky, the city administration has to offer a compromise. But they don’t have to! That’s just a norm–“the way we’ve always done things”–and nothing else. Batista could have said he’s not going to change the ordinance, and forced the council to vote it up or down. The vote would have been 6-5 in favor, probably. Maybe even 7-4. Instead, he watered an already tepid ordinance down for the benefit of people who never bothered to understand it in the first place.
This is a small example of the way this tiny crank constituency holds the city captive. Their power to do so is the product of a long tradition of normative assumptions, not any real leverage. Batista would do well to challenge that cultural assumption. If something is a good idea, in line with the best practices of contemporary city government, Batista shouldn’t have to weigh it against what the dumbest, most entitled people in our city think about it.
While I see it as my job to criticize and demand more of a city administration—and it’s often very easy to do!—I couldn’t help but feel bad for Batista watching this drama play out. He did what his boss wanted him to do and did a competent job of it. He was rewarded for meeting expectations with weeks of punishment. His boss didn’t stick up for him. Instead, they stoked the anger directed at him. Repeated inaccurate information generated by a mob. Then they demanded he explain himself, ignoring their own responsibility to understand something before voting on it. They made him look like the bad guy.
When the camera turned to him, I sympathized with what I saw. Genuinely. Anyone who’s had a bad boss would understand the look on his face. Tired and frustrated and indignant, tucked under a solemn deference. Trying not to erupt. Knowing you can’t say what you want to say, no matter how badly it needs saying.
Between this drama and the Mill Street fracas that came before it, Batista’s been in a strange position. A rental registry and a street redesign are things a city manager in 2024 should be able to do. They are uncontroversial, commonplace features of municipal government. They’re not fringe ideas. They’re not even interesting, frankly. Both times, he was made to eat shit in public then handed a pile of pointless extra work to do. Where in the past, Batista has been the one standing in the way of good ideas (the crisis pregnancy center ordinance being the best example), here we see the opposite. He’s trying to do bare minimum things and catching heat. He looks like the good guy, almost!
It’s interesting to consider that, during this same time, the progressive bloc has pretty much stopped trying to put new ideas on the table. They’ve checked out, it seems. And it’s understandable. This council is not going to pass anything they propose.
It sorta looks like they turned to Batista to do the bludgeoning they used to do to the progressive bloc. With no progressive ideas to reflexively oppose, they’ve turned to moderate ones. Could it be that they just need to bludgeon someone? That they’re there to generate a strange, ongoing drama, and require a heel? Does it matter what they get mad about, as long as they get to be mad? Is it fundamentally a theater?
Reality TV?
I think it’s worth considering that the Worcester city council is fundamentally a reality show and the target audience is grievance-soaked senior citizens. Like any good art, the viewer finds something that helps them process and articulate their interior world.
I don’t think this is a ridiculous theory. In fact I think that it’s less ridiculous than there being a set of coherent politics and objectives at work here.
Definition of reality TV: television programs in which real people are continuously filmed, designed to be entertaining rather than informative.
Well, first of all, city council meetings are television programs in an objective sense. You can watch them on your television if you live in Worcester and have cable and are bored. City councilors are real people who are continuously filed. This rental registry fracas felt a lot more like “entertaining” than “informative.” I mean—no one making it an issue knew what it was, really. The point was to get mad, and mad is entertaining.
So, in pursuit of ego, old guard councilors unknowingly put on a show for the cranks. The cranks like the show because it provides a channel for an otherwise undefinable and directionless anger. The council needs someone to bludgeon to keep the show going. Otherwise it gets boring.
The rental registry drama is, in that framework, an episode of a TV show. The shared vocabulary it provided for directionless anger made it compelling. Better than Mill Street even. A bigger audience too. Councilors who get elected by this audience were incentivized to make the show entertaining. They had no reason to understand the policy (boring) and every incentive to repeat the talking points that were getting the fans riled up (audience participation).
If the majority of a small electorate just wants their show, they get it! And it turns everyone else off because it’s insane. With normal people checked out, the councilors who make for a good show keep getting the most votes! Kate Toomey, for instance, is an objectively bad city councilor but she connects with the audience. They see themselves in her character, probably. Why can’t everyone just be nice like her, they say. When she shakes her head and says “must be an election year” when the progressives make a stand, they shake their heads too. When Moe Bergman puts on the affect of being smarter than everyone else while saying something dumb and racist, that hits big with the folks at home. Candy Mero-Carlson’s stream of consciousness grievance airings are soothing to the ear. When she demands the respect she’s entitled to, they feel that deeply. When George Russell says he’s just a regular Joe trying to understand this crazy world, so are they.
Someone like Thu Nguyen is a manifestation of everything they’ve been taught to despise about the modern world. Etel Haxhiaj needs to learn her place. Khrystian King is, well… you know. It wouldn’t be polite to say. So they came up with “divisive” as a shorthand.
This show has nothing at all to do with the city as a city. In that it runs on reactionary anger to any sort of change, it’s a regressive force. But not intentionally. It’s not politics. It’s entertainment. To keep the show engaging, they chew up and spit out people who want a better city. It’s fun to see them fail. And like any good TV villain they always fail in the end. What progressives process as punishment for caring, the reality show audience processes as narrative resolution. They enjoy the very thing that causes people who care to get burned out and stop caring.
When you look at rental registries in the abstract, it’s a simple concept. The intent and the philosophy and the practical use are clear. The problem is uncontroversially a problem. The regulation is widely accepted as useful in pursuing a solution.
Once the concept hit the local political discourse, all that clarity vanished. The actual plot was lost, in favor of one which made for better TV. It became unintelligible except for the drama of it. The “issue” had nothing to do with safe housing. The anger defined the narrative.
It’s like no one even tried to understand it. Straight to opposition without considering why. The inciting incident of a new episode.
Politics reduced to a reality show is not unique to Worcester, nor is it new. Zooming out, it’s the enduring legacy of the Reagan era, I think. An entitlement to reflexively reject a government’s attempt at governing. If you’re wondering why Worcester is seemingly stuck in the 1980s, that’s the answer. Our city government has been bullied out of believing it can govern. Even a feckless attempt like this registry can’t get off the ground without being compromised into oblivion.
When considering why Worcester is so behind other cities on so many things–so tragically unable to get out of its own way–this moment is useful. It’s the last in a long line of times we allowed a relatively small group of perpetually aggrieved people to sabotage something for the sake of it. There’s a directionless anger in this city that’s deeply felt and little understood. Every so often, it stumbles upon a thing like the rental registry or a bike lane that allows it to congeal. People sense a fleeting moment to express this ambient anger with shared language. They lob it like a grenade at city hall, content to witness the explosion. Then they move on. That anger reverts to directionlessness until the next thing comes along.
City hall has made the mistake over and over of taking these moments seriously. They capitulate to the congealed anger, even if it’s bad for the city. They pacify at the expense of good governance. They avoid situations that may provoke that anger in the future. Good ideas go unproposed and unadopted out of fear they’ll trigger another round. They let it hold the city hostage. They could just ignore it, recognize that it’s not politics but rather a collective venting, but they don’t. And so we never try to do anything that makes too much sense. Every good idea must be tempered against the reactionary anger it may provoke. Every idea is an episode of TV where it assumes the position of antagonist.
That’s what we’re really seeing in this rental registry moment: a city council that’s so far removed from its design that it’s worse than useless. A city unable to realize its potential because it’s held captive by a weird little TV show.
Thanks for reading! Let me know what you think.
Cheers!
Wow! So far behind in reading but thanks for your decisive insights. Unfortunately I live in Clinton and can not vote in Worcester. What can be done? (Besides reading your blog!)
Just curious: Asked local Poli-Sci college types if they considered, studied Worcester City Hall?
Malheureusement, profs and students could vote in local elections, yet don't.
Deeming the two lowest-paid municipal groups, WCC and WSC, as worth no more that 17% attention.