It is so ordered.
SCOTUS on homelessness, pedestrian death, rental registry doomed from the jump
Hey hi hello! By the time this goes live I’ll be halfway to Virginia for a couple days of fun in the sun shooting guns with Katie’s parents! Very stoked.
There’s a lot to get to today so I’ll keep my requisite opening pitch short: The more paid subscribers we have, the more we can do here. Today is the last day to take advantage of our four year anniversary sale. Just $34 for a year of support!
I haven’t settled on a format I like for the ‘table of contents’ thing I’ve been doing lately. Let’s try a Blood Meridian ripoff:
Grants pass—dead pedestrian—neutered registry—Rewind in Filmmaker—odds and ends
“It is so ordered.”
Thursday and Friday proved a massive one-two punch of an episode in the final season of America. Two psychotic old men got on TV and spent more time debating golf than Gaza. Not to be outdone, the Supreme Court followed with a handful of the most dystopian rulings in recent memory, dropping them all at once. Treatment of Jan 6ers was deemed unfair. Regulatory power was dismantled. And—wait for it—being homeless was made fully 100 percent illegal.
Fines and arrests for sleeping outside when there’s nowhere else to sleep were deemed neither cruel nor unusual punishments. A 6-3 decision, the Grants Pass ruling stands as an encouragement for cities around the country to pass the most brutal, draconian anti-homeless ordinances they can.
Since arrests and fines are the normal ways we punish people, it can’t be “cruel and unusual” as outlined in the 8th Amendment. That was the gist of the argument, written by Justice Neil Gorsuch. If the punishment included things like “disemboweling, quartering, public dissection, and burning alive,” it would be a different story, he writes (not kidding).
“None of the city’s sanctions qualifies as cruel because none is designed to ‘su-perad[d]” “terror, pain, or disgrace,’” he writes.
I’d beg to differ! Terror, pain, and disgrace are the entire point of an ordinance like the Grants Pass sleeping ban. Here’s what the last page of Gorsuch’s ruling looks like:
Something about that sign off—“It is so ordered.”—scares me. I know it’s probably just some legal formality but in the context of the question at hand it has a vibe.
Representing the minority opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor opened the dissent with a moral statement so clear and simple it’s jarring to read in context.
“Sleep is a biological necessity, not a crime.”
She continues:
For some people, sleeping outside is their only option. The City of Grants Pass jails and fines those people for sleeping anywhere in public at any time, including in their cars, if they use as little as a blanket to keep warm or a rolled-up shirt as a pillow. For people with no access to shelter, that punishes them for being homeless. That is unconscionable and unconstitutional.
Sotomayor read the dissent from the bench, which according to the New York Times is a rare move underscoring the severity of her opposition. It should be severe.
As she describes, such an ordinance puts people in an impossible situation:
It is possible to acknowledge and balance the issues facing local governments, the humanity and dignity of homeless people, and our constitutional principles. Instead, the majority focuses almost exclusively on the needs of local governments and leaves the most vulnerable in our society with an impossible choice: Either stay awake or be arrested.
So what does it mean for cities, then? As noted in the opinion, “An exceptionally large number of cities and States have filed briefs in this Court.” Cities across the country really wanted this ruling.
Why? Because it allows them to pursue more punitive and creatively cruel responses to growing homeless populations. The Grants Pass ordinance at question had a stated goal, as noted in Sotomayor’s dissent:
The (Grants Pass) council president summed up the goal succinctly: “ ‘[T]he point is to make it uncomfortable enough for [homeless people] in our city so they will want to move on down the road.’ ”
The way that most cities across the country police homelessness is oriented around this principle: make unhoused people as uncomfortable as possible in the hopes they’ll go somewhere else.
It’s achieved through a variety of means that differ from city to city. Sweeping encampments, trashing belongings, running warrants, fines and arrests or the threat of such. It all amounts to a campaign of routine harassment that keeps the cops busy and unhoused people desperate. It doesn’t solve homelessness—in fact it makes it worse, as study after study show—it just pushes the unhoused out of sight. Policies that would actually help, like sanctioned encampment sites and moratoriums on encampment sweeps, are off the table. They might help, but they also make unhoused people more visible. Solving the issue is less important than having to witness it.
In this regard, Worcester’s unremarkable. We do all the regular evil things here.
We don't have a sleeping ordinance like Grants Pass, but we also don’t really need one to carry out the task at hand.
It’s unlikely City Manager Eric Batista would take the SCOTUS ruling as grounds to immediately propose an outdoor sleeping ban like Grants Pass. The political hit he’d take would make it impractical. But if there were a way to do it quietly, without the public catching wind and without staking his name to it directly, you have to imagine he’d consider it. You have to imagine the cops would welcome it.
The SCOTUS decision won’t change homeless policy in cities like Worcester right away, but it puts new options on the table for cities already drifting rightward amid a homelessness crisis that shows no signs of slowing. It plants an idea in the heads of city administrators across the country that they could be crueler. If the political reality of the place has an appetite for more cruelty, city administrators have something they can deliver.
A sad day—one with repercussions that will be felt slowly then all at once. We’re headlong toward a moment of reckoning with whether we’re content to let a home address be the dividing line between human and subhuman.
For more on this idea, check out the video essay I made recently: What does the Supreme Court ruling on homelessness really mean for cities?
And two longer, more substantial essays on the topic.
Is it illegal to exist without a home?
Endless punishment for the crime of existing
Dead 13-year-old, hospitalized baby
The week was marked by two terrible pedestrian accidents—one that resulted in the death of a 13-year-old girl and one that sent a literal baby to the hospital.
On Thursday, a car struck a 13-year-old girl on the stretch of Belmont Street that runs alongside the UMass campus. On Friday, police announced that she died from her injuries.
There’s a half mile between crosswalks on the stretch of an extremely busy six-lane highway that separates a hospital and medical school from a densely populated neighborhood. It’s an eleven-minute walk from crosswalk to crosswalk.
Pedestrians are almost overtly encouraged to make a break for it. And cars whip up and down that hill. This is a design problem. Pedestrian accidents here are design failures.
Rob Bilotta pulled some MassDOT data and found that District 2—which includes Belmont Street here—has seen 13 pedestrian fatalities since 2015. Make it 14 now. Just typing those four words out has me feeling heavier than I can articulate. I
Three days before and just a few miles away, a literal baby was the victim. On Monday night a a car hit a one-year-old child on Lincoln Street and the child was taken to the hospital with a head injury. (To Bilotta’s point, that’s also within District 2. )
These tragedies just shouldn’t be happening, and the frequency with which they do here underscores deep structural problems. We need to bring Worcester’s roads into something that starts to look like modernity, or this is just going to keep happening over and over.
Something to keep in mind the next time the cranks fight a modern road redesign!
Dooming the registry from the start
Two years after voting 11-0 to create a rental registry, the city council voted 9-2 on Tuesday to make it useless.
The two core objectives that made the registry worth pursuing in the first place were:
1. getting basic information about every rental unit in the city into one central database, and
2. using that information to schedule and manage a system of preemptive safety inspections, as opposed to the complaint-based reactive system we’ve been using.
Now, because of nine city councilors, neither of those objectives stands a chance of getting accomplished.
The 9-2 vote—Etel Haxhiaj (housing expert) and Thu Nguyen (only renter) in opposition—amended the rental registry and inspection ordinances to fully exempt all owner-occupied apartment buildings three units and under. Less bad but still pointless: the amendment delays inspections of new units (post-2022) and makes the fines for non-compliant landlords much cheaper.
You need the registry to do the inspections and you need the inspections to mitigate the unbelievably frequent and tragic fires that keep happening in our unbelievably old and poorly maintained housing stock. Now, thousands (?) of units are now exempt from that process. And we’ll never be able to remove the (?) after “thousands” because the council let an unknown number of landlords off the hook for arbitrary reasons, as we’ll get to later.
All of the councilors who voted for the amendment are homeowners and at least three are landlords (Russell, Bergman, Colorio). Colorio has the rare distinction of being an owner occupying landlord, making her vote transparently gross and sketchy. She exempted herself, folks!
They amended the registry because a handful of cranks were mad at them, and they went against the wishes of anybody else who’s been paying attention to this issue. That includes the administration—the very same they would lavish praise upon later in the meeting, during the annual evaluation of the manager. And also the public: of the nine speakers from the gallery Tuesday night, six urged them not to amend the registry. The three that advocated for the amendment were all landlords.
Zooming out, some 9,000 landlords have already registered at least 22,000 units into this supposedly burdensome and unpopular database. On the one hand, you have a city bus-worth of angry townies accusing you of government overreach and refusing to comply until you “fix this.” On the other hand, you have 9,000 folks who filled out a simple form and sent the city a small amount of money and didn’t bother to say a word about it because big whoop who cares. The city council legislated in favor of a city bus-worth of angry townies, as is tradition. The big whoop who cares crowd has even less reason to care, while the city bus crowd gets to feel the momentary salve of a city council buckling to their petulant entitlement.
Of the 22,000 now-registered units, 4,500 are in owner-occupied buildings, according to city officials. And the city administration is now tasked with the mess of letting all those landlords know they don’t actually have to register if they don’t want to and removing their information from the database if they don’t want it there. The council gave the administration until September 1 to do so, unaware and unbothered by the idea the administration might have better uses of their time.
In short, the moment has us yet again asking the core questions: What exactly is the Worcester city council? What is the point of it existing? What do the councilors themselves think the point is? Do they, even?
Councilors on Tuesday talked about a “need to compromise” without elaborating. Compromise with who? For what reason?
Councilors also hung their arguments on the claim—spurious at best—that owner-occupied buildings are safer and better maintained. What are we basing that assumption on? Vibes? Councilors on Tuesday showed they don’t know and don’t care and can’t be persuaded otherwise. A few choice examples:
“So if we’re going to remove a number of owner-occupied units, which arguably, common sense would say... you’d be hard pressed to find somebody foolish enough to maintain a property they live in in a dangerous way,” Bergman said, based on nothing.
“That’s not to say there aren’t some...” Covering your bases. Nice. “...but they’re far going to be outnumbered by properties that are not owner-occupied, that really need to be looked at quicker and sooner.”
If we don’t have to inspect all the units, he said, it’ll take less long to inspect the other ones.
If there was any validity to the claim that owner-occupied apartment buildings are less prone to fires or other safety hazards, this line of argument might hold some water. But there just isn’t. Bergman wrote the spuriousness of this claim off with a careless “common sense would say...” But it’s not common sense, and it doesn’t say!
That brings us to our second example, where the ridiculousness of the “common sense” line was made transparent. Councilor Khrystian King, who holds the same vibes-based opinion as Bergman on the owner occupancy question, put it to the Department of Inspectional Services directly. King said “my understanding was, based on the research, owner-occupied dwellings fare better in terms of upkeep, maintenance, and impact on the surrounding neighborhoods.”
He brought Chief Sanitary Inspector Lee Hall to the stand to ask her if she agreed with that statement. He didn’t get the answer he wanted.
“I would not necessarily agree with that,” said Hall, who inspects properties for a living. “I got two hoarding cases today, with complaints. Owner-occupied properties.”
King replied: “What is the research showing, is what I’m asking. Not the anecdotal.”
Hall: “I’m not sure what the research would show, in all honesty. In my years of experience, a lot of deferred maintenance throughout the city in owner-occupied properties.
King stumbled for a second, then asked what the causes might be for deferred maintenance in owner-occupied properties.
“I think it could be some costs,” said Hall. “I think it could be some bad experiences with tenants, contractors, family members. We’ve seen it all.”
The tone of her comments were very delightfully what’s your point, dawg.’ The point, of course, was getting someone from the city to say the thing King wanted to hear. ‘Owner-occupied buildings are fine to exempt because they’re necessarily safer and better maintained.’ Hall didn’t deliver that for him. In fact, she gave the opposite assessment.
King had a choice in that moment: Listen to the professional in front of him saying that exempting owner-occupied units doesn’t make sense, or rebuke said professional because what she said didn’t jive with what he wanted to hear. He chose the latter.
“Ok,” King said. “Again, that was my understanding.” He asked the city for a report—”just for validation”—on owner-occupied buildings and upkeep. He looked out at the gallery and said “unless there’s someone else who can speak to that research” (read: say what I want). No one raised their hand.
What is this research King’s referencing? He didn’t cite any specific paper. So I did some digging. There wasn’t much. There’s a study out of New Zealand about the disparity between housing conditions for rental and for “owner occupied” units—but it’s a study of renters versus homeowners. And it goes against King’s point anyway. In fact it suggests he’s part of the problem.
Laws and regulations mandating standards for existing residential housing are outdated and spread over a range of instruments. Policies to improve standards in existing housing have been notoriously difficult to implement.
I asked some people who would know what, if any, research is out there on this subject. None had any idea. It might work for most people at a given city council meeting to just say “there’s research.” But some of us are researchers!
In these two examples we have King and Bergman—councilors often at odds and prone to squabbling—equally willing to commit to a certain bit. Of course owner-occupied units are safer, they both said, so there’s no problem exempting them. Neither adopted that conclusion out of earnest conviction. It just made the decision they were already going to make appear more reasonable. But it isn’t more reasonable.
We’re put in a position now of a rental registry which omits a key piece of data: How many rental buildings in the city are owner-occupied? And are they indeed safer? We actually can’t know now, thanks to this amendment.
A friend of the newsletter who we’ll just call B (he’d prefer not to be named and that’s fine) did some digging on the owner-occupied question. B found that there are roughly 8,548 total two-family and three-family properties in Worcester. Of those, 2,366 three-families are likely owner-occupied (owner address matches property address) as are 2,294 two-families. Between these two-families and three-families, we’re looking at 7,026 apartments that are excluded from the registry. And that’s not counting the apartments that the owners live in! Which should also be inspected!
The way B arrived at this number is solid1 but it’s far from 100 percent accurate. Without a registry, it’s hard to know these things. And now, due to the city council, the registry will not give us the accurate picture we need.
This is the line Councilor Etel Haxhiaj took in her comments Tuesday.
Like King, she brought the chief sanitary inspector to the stand. But, instead of leading questions, Haxhiaj asked real ones:
“Can you tell us how many owner-occupied units—that you’re aware of—that we have right now in the city?”
Hall: “I think it’s an impossible ask. Because we don’t have all that information.”
Haxhiaj: “I thought so too.” She said she went on a chase to find the information and couldn’t. She asked city officials. She referenced B’s analysis:
“We do not have an idea of who owns housing stock in Worcester and whether they actually live in the units.”
It’s why we had this ordinance in the first place, she said. It’s something no other councilor besides Thu Nguyen, who also voted against, seemed to remember.
She asked Hall about the process for inspecting apartments before the registry and the preemptive inspections.
“I would say it’s a very reactive process,” Hall replied. “We don’t know about violations until we’ve actually had a complaint and we can go inside and see what the problem is. So we can’t be proactive … it’s always after a problem arises.”
Exempting just shy of 8,000 units from proactive inspections. That’s essentially what the council voted to do. Haxhiaj stressed the whole reason we have this in the first place is to get units proactively inspected.
“To say that we will exempt an unidentified number of units which could be in the thousands, and we will tell those tenants” we won’t be inspecting them, she said.
Haxhiaj is an expert in housing policy—the only one on the council!—and, coincidentally, the most vocal opponent to the amendment the council passed.
“It is unconscionable to me that we have a policy that could save lives, that could be proactive,” Haxhiaj said. “Instead of asking inspectional services what else they need to do their jobs, we’re making their jobs harder.
“And their jobs and our jobs are to protect tenants from unsanitary conditions. We have zero evidence. And we have zero facts and zero data. That homeowner-occupied units that rent to our tenants are in compliance with the law. And the reason we don’t have the data is because we’re not collecting it.”
It’s maddening.
“It’s truly disappointing, at a time when our tenants are facing the most pressure to find appropriate housing, that we have a policy which could make a difference in their well being … and we are saying we are going to exempt upwards of 7,000 units.”
Even Jenny Pacillo, a new councilor we thought mighta sorta been a progressive—shifting the overall 8-3 dynamic to 7-4—proved lacking on this one.
During her evaluation of the city manager, she said “the rollout of the rental registry was confusing, and while I know it was done with the best intentions, we need to do a better job of keeping residents informed and in the loop. Policy changes should not come as a surprise.”
Between her tack on this and King’s, we’re left with an uncomfortable reality. The 2023 election wasn’t the cementing of the old 8-3 line, as I’d previously described. It’s really 9-2 now.
Pacillo represented the optimism of maybe just maybe bringing that divide to 7-4. She has proven unwilling or unable to take up a progressive mantle. This vote is just one example.
At the same time, King has for whatever reason been sliding rightward. On the rental registry and on Mill Street, he’s proven of late to be little better than the cranks. It’s really disappointing. If I were concerned about whether he’d continue to take my phone calls, I probably wouldn’t write this. But luckily I’m not. King is just not it, man. He is making political calculation after political calculation that demonstrate he’s less interested in doing good than he is doing good by himself. If he thinks tacking to the right is the way to position himself for a more successful mayoral run, god bless him. But he doesn’t have my vote. Anyone who makes the decision that it’s more important to be mayor than it is to do good with the power you have—especially in Worcester, where the mayor is little more than a cheerleader—is not someone I’m interested in vouching for.
On that note, one last scene from the council meeting Tuesday:
The part of King’s comments I referenced earlier—trying to get the city administration to say that owner-occupied units are safer and don’t need to be inspected—was only a sliver. A little later, he brought Hall back up to the stand, this time asking “how we verify or validate” that buildings are owner-occupied.
Hall replied that the easiest way is to go knock on the door. She said they spend a lot of time cross-checking the Registry of Deeds and other records. It’s information that takes some pains to gather.
It’s also information that would be readily available with a rental registry that didn’t exempt owner-occupied landlords from registering!
But that was apparently lost on King. He said that in order to vote the amendment through when it comes back for a final, formality vote in July, he wants assurances from the administration that there’s a process for figuring out which buildings are owner-occupied.
“If we’re going to exempt and provide, you know, a benefit to folks who are in owner-occupied dwellings,” King said, “we need a process in place that ensures what we’re doing is accurate and effective.”
The registry was that process! Now it isn’t! By way of the amendment you voted for!
He asked the manager for a report “in short order” to look at what other cities are doing and put our own process in place to do... what the registry is supposed to do. As King put it, to “verify to the best of our ability owner-occupied statuses and a process by which or a request to have folks report back when they are no longer occupied.”
He concluded: “I don’t know if that’s possible but I’d like for the exploration to occur.”
It was possible! It was on the way to happening! There’s already 4,500 units in verified owner-occupied buildings! But King was one of nine people Tuesday night who voted to make it impossible.
The report he asked for is the very thing he voted against. You can’t make this stuff up.
Just another example of the city council being worse than useless.
“Scavenging the past and importing it”
If you head to your nearest magazine rack and look for the summer issue of Filmmaker and open it up you’re gunna find this...
... which is surreal number one but number two makes me very proud!
For her running “Speculations” column, Joanne McNeil wrote about Rewind Video and Worcester Sucks and everything else we got cooking in the local journalism game around here. Read up: Mutual Assists: Joanne McNeil on How a Massachusetts Video Store is Aiding Local Journalism.
It’s a really good piece!! McNeil captured things about this newsletter better than I ever could have, which makes sense because she’s a better writer than I am. This is my favorite passage:
This element of scavenging the past and importing it to the reality of the present could also describe the kind of journalism that the Worcester Community Media Foundation seeks to expand. In addition to youth journalism programming and community initiatives, the foundation supports Shaner’s “Worcester Sucks,” which is an alt-weekly in every sense of the tradition except the traditional format. It’s on Substack, not a broadsheet, but Shaner writes like he files these missives for David Carr at Washington, D.C.’s City Paper in its prime: muckraking, thorough, sarcastic and smart. I came across the newsletter randomly on the internet a couple years ago, and despite living elsewhere, I got hooked on its Substack emails. Reading it reminds me of a time, many years ago, when I could arrive in a new city, pick up an alt-weekly from one of the bins on countless street corners and flip through the pages, feeling oriented and dialed-in to the local culture.
That right there is exactly it.
Joanne is one of my favorite writers and I’m not just saying that. Her novel Wrong Way and internet history Lurking both struck a chord few books have—the specific feeling of becoming better, more aware, more human. She’s a writer I genuinely look up to, operating at a level of craft I hope to reach. The fact she found my work randomly, enjoyed it, thinks it’s worth writing about... that’s crazy. What an absolute honor. I’ll stop before I get even more embarrassing about it.
If you haven’t read any of Joanne’s stuff, do yourself a favor and fix that.
If you find Filmmaker out in the wild buy me a copy and I’ll Venmo you. I’m gunna buy all of the copies I can find, of course, for putting on the fridge purposes. A few more couldn’t hurt.
And now’s a good a time as ever to remind you that Rewind has a Patreon page and a Givebutter both of which support the nascent little Worcester Community Media Foundation :-)
Odds and ends
This newsletter is supported 100 percent by people who think it should exist. If you made it this far, maybe that’s you? Today’s the last chance to take me up on this deal I’m offering—$34 for a whole year of Worcester Sucks.
Tips are nice too!
A few last things to get to.
On the schools front make sure you read the latest WPS In Brief, in which Aislinn really goes hard on Binienda and Biancheria, who deserve it. Relatedly: Tom Marino puts the two of them in the necessary context with “Worcester School Committee’s “Keep Failing” Caucus. Looks like it’s part 1 of a series! Excited for more of that.
Worcester absolutely loves to tell kids they can’t go swimming. Closing an entire pool for a day or more because you can’t find one police detail is insane. That’s what happened Thursday at the Vernon Hill Park pool. This quote in the Telegram story stuck with me.
Maria Fornoni was sitting by the park playground with her 10-year-old daughter, Gavriella. She said the pool's closure was very sad.
"It's summer. The kids want to be in the pool. That's the only entertainment they have around here," Fornoni said. "People don't have cars to travel."
Interesting news out of Denver: A basic income pilot program giving unhoused people 1,000 a month led to a 45 percent reduction in homelessness among the 800 participants. That’s a whole lot more results than the cops get with the sweeps.
Really liked this post on the Read Max newsletter about the “hawk tuah girl” and what Max dubs “the Zynternet.”
Over the last ten years or so, a broad community of fratty, horndog, boorishly provocative 20- and sometimes (embarrassingly) 30-somethings--mostly but by no means entirely male--has emerged to form a newly prominent online subculture. This network is adjacent to the “sports internet” of 40something dads and the “hustle internet” of Miami crypto bullshit and the “reactionary internet” of trad influencers, but is its own distinct community with its own distinct cultural referents--college sports, gambling, light domestic beers, Zyn nicotine pouches--and influential personalities and media outlets, among them Dave Portnoy, Pat McAfee, Antonio Brown, and Call Her Daddy, in addition to dozens of minor podcasters and hey-fellow-kids content creators who nearly all work for sports-betting concerns.
Speaking of the trad influencers...
The Anonymous Comrades Collective uncovered dozens of members of a prominent Neo Nazi organization called the Nationalist Coalition. One of those members is from Northborough, and his name is Kyle Kilinski. Lots to dig into.
Ok folks ‘til next time!
Per B: the latest Worcester parcel data available online (circa 2023, via MassGIS), cross-tabulation of land use categories and owner addresses, focusing just on two- and three-family properties.
Belmont St and all of Worcester are in DOT District 3, not 2- just fyi