Renters and reasonable people, assemble!
We need to drown out the cranks tonight (again)
I come to you yet again on a Tuesday morning with hat in hand to ask that you put some pressure on our strange little city council to not undo progress because a few townies yelled at them at a Honeydew Donuts one morning.
The past couple times, it’s been about Mill Street. Luckily, we’re past all that—for now at least. Thanks to Kate Toomey (amazing), we shouldn’t have to hear about Mill Street for another six months.
Tonight, it’s the other positive change the cranks have been trying to destroy: the rental registry. And for this one, the discussion is in desperate need of the renter perspective. It’s been all landlords, and the changes they’re set to vote up or down are 1. For the benefit of landlords 2. Will make the registry functionally useless.
So renters, renter advocates, reasonable people who are landlords: please show up for this one.
*IMPORTANT* The meeting starts at 5 p.m. not 6:30 p.m. like usual.
You can show up, call in, or sign up to comment on Zoom. All of that info is in the agenda linked above. We’ll also be streaming it per usual on Twitch.
Order of events for today’s post: First a quick agenda primer from me, then a longer piece from Cara Berg Powers contextualizing the rental registry properly. Then some odds and ends.
The four year anniversary 50 percent off deal for subscribers ends in a few days (June 30) so hop on it while you still can!
Agenda preview
City manager evaluation
This should be the biggest thing the council does every year. But, reliably, it’s not very significant.
The rubric they use is insanely reductive. It looks like it’s made for little kids to be quite honest with you. Take a look.
That’s it!
Here’s a Drive link to Batista’s self evaluation. It’s 17 pages long and doesn’t really follow the rubric nor does he grade himself lol. Who cares.
Something to watch for though will be how Councilor Thu Nguyen presents the open public evaluation information they gathered over the past few weeks. Pretty neat way to do it.
Since the council doesn’t set any formal benchmarks or expectations for the manager like a real executive body would, the councilors’ evaluations are usually just five to 10 minutes of talking with no clear points or demands made.
Still, this part will likely take hours.
Rental Registry
This is the big thing—and Cara will cover it more deeply than I will here.
There are three separate items:
Item 10d: Allow landlords to use third party inspectors. Horrible idea.
Item 10e: Request a report after one year. Pretty sure they’d already do this.
Item 10f: This is the main one. It contains a number of separate amendments to the registry and routine inspection ordinances.
The change that’s really bad: Owner-occupied two- and three-family rental units are exempted entirely from having to register or get inspected. Like “what’s the point of even doing this” bad.
The rest are less bad but still serve to muddy a new municipal tool which should be pretty simple.
These changes haven’t been reviewed publicly at all, also. As I wrote about a few weeks ago, they were slid across the desk of economic development subcommittee member desks after the meeting started. It’s really smarmy. This meeting tonight will be the first public review of an ordinance amendment that appears to have gone through the public review process via subcommittee, but didn’t at all.
Homeless report / five year plan
Here’s the five-year plan doc and the status update doc.
Some highlights from the update:
-From 2018 to 2022, homelessness among seniors surged by 29.41 percent
-The chronically unhoused population is 163, as of March.
-The city has built 43 permanent supportive housing units since launching the plan in 2018. There are, allegedly, 143 more units planned through 2028. But as of right now, that’s a lot more chronically unhoused than there are permanent units. The largest project in the works, the Quality Inn Hotel, will hopefully bring 90 much needed units by 2025.
-Worcester has the lowest rental vacancy rate in the country, at 2 percent, which makes the problem especially difficult.
Long story short we need more low-income housing as badly as we need permanent supportive housing.
There’s a lot of interesting stuff in the five-year plan but it’s too much to get into now.
Good versus bad order
Lastly, here’s a short masterclass of what a city council order should like versus what it should not look like.
Read Etel Haxhiaj’s order on the Washington Heights fire for Exhibit A: Good Order:
And then look at Candy Mero-Carlson’s order on where restaurants are for Exhibit B: Bad Order:
In one, you see an explicit request for explicit information from the city manager that wouldn’t otherwise be available. Taken together, the requests allow for a clearer understanding of an obvious problem.
In the other, you see something you can just freakin google. Oi.
Building a Louder Majority
By Cara Berg Powers
Every municipal election year, we see story after story lamenting the low voter turnout and hear elected officials chastising people for staying home. What is hard to wrap our minds around is that this is a completely rational response to engaging with local politics in Worcester, even if it’s not what we need to reshape power toward a better future. How else would it make sense to respond to showing up on issue after issue with logic, data, and great ideas only to be shot down by people who genuinely don’t even seem to understand the basic rules of the governing they’re allegedly doing? Well this week is no exception, and while I get the rationale to tune out, I hope you will tune in, call in, and show up tonight to push back against the city council stripping the little progress they’ve actually made on making the city just a little bit safer for the over 50 percent of residents that rent their homes.
While I am no longer part of that majority, it is abundantly clear that many councilors have never been, and are strangely centering the complaints of a small number of landlords over the residents they have a responsibility to protect. No doubt, they have no problem showing up to photo ops with those residents when they lose their home to fire, flood, or roof collapse in often preventable ways. We are the second largest city across six states, and as of right now we cannot make reasonable, enforceable policies for landlords because we genuinely don’t even know the scope or shape of our housing stock.
The rental registry is a critical tool in this work, and while many landlords are being characterized by councilors as victims of mean regulators who just want to nickel and dime us out of our meager profits, I write to you today as the mythical owner-occupant landlord, saying very clearly that I want the city council to protect the rental registry and implement it faithfully, including all of us that have the responsibility of shelter for others. It is too important to make into a political football, and I have seen firsthand just how dire the consequences of not holding landlords accountable can be.
Worcester Has a Long History of Tenant Safety Issues
When I was a kid, I was terrified of fire. For some time, I kept a trash bag of my most prized possessions next to my bed just in case I had to flee in the middle of the night. My fear wasn’t unfounded. I lived in Main South in the late 1980s and 1990s and had seen multiple neighbors’ homes go up in flames during my elementary years. Decades later, at 40, the reports of firefighters responding to a deadly 1990 fire at 21 Florence Street, where a mother and her three small children died, are still seared in my brain. I was only six, but still vividly remember the traumatized firefighter finding an infant that they couldn’t be sure was a baby or a doll. Almost exactly a year later, another fire took the lives of the father and sister of one of my classmates and neighbors.
A 1991 T&G article describes what we returned back from April vacation to—“When the children reported to Jane Williams' fourth-grade classroom, one desk remained empty.” Our then-principal, Robert Sullivan, shared, “We have a number of families who have been burned out in the past, "perhaps two or three a year, and we collect clothing and furniture and money. But we have never suffered a loss like this."
Two or three a year. This was and remains all too common in our city. And still too often, it is deadly. In both of these fatal fires from the 1990s, there’s a clear throughline—documented but unaddressed code violations. The grandmother of the three children that died, along with their mother, at 21 Florence Street was steadfast in her public crusade about the conditions of the home her family lived and died in, citing, most notably, the lack of fire alarms. The fire began when something from the crib was ignited by the gas space heater the family was using because the heat in the unit was not maintained properly by the landlord. In the case of my neighbors James and Moneka Griffin, who left behind a wife/mother, and three siblings/children, the owner had at least 20 code violations, many of them related to health and safety.
I have lived in 14 different apartments in my life, all but two in Worcester. I’ve lived in my current apartment for 12 years, where my husband and I are owner-occupant landlords to two neighboring units. I am incredibly fortunate that in all of those years, I did not have to deal with the kind of egregious abuses of power and callous disregard for safety that claimed the lives of too many of my childhood neighbors. Still, even with genuinely good landlords, my family was impacted by another common regulatory challenge of the 1990s—lead poisoning from paint that was only discovered after toxicology tests from my younger siblings summoned inspectors. Our landlords were diligent in mitigation once they knew the issue. But the issue could have been identified before it poisoned my brothers if we’d had the kind of systematic regulatory inspections that the City Council unanimously passed and are now, strangely, trying to backtrack on.
Registry Can Support Landlords in Addressing Issues Before They are Harmful
Now that I am a landlord, I’d like to think that I am more like the ones I was lucky enough to have, and want to ensure my tenants (and my family) are safe, healthy, and supported in the home we share. So when we recently had an inspection, I was surprised to learn that even though we had a full deleading certification from 12 years ago, the building needs to be inspected regularly because old paint that might have been sealed can come away. In fact, you need to be recertified every three to five years. Every unit in our house has children, so I am glad we have the information we need to keep them all safe. And even if we had to pay to register our units (as owner-occupants, we are fee exempt), the small fee would be worthwhile to ensure that the city has the appropriate staffing to ensure that landlords who want to do the right thing know how, and that landlords who need to be are held accountable for violations. Anyone who says that landlords need to pass on such a tiny fee to their renters is either lying to you or deeply unethical in their business practices.
Signing up for the registry took about five minutes and cost us nothing. The idea that we should have even more exemptions made because we also live in the house that could lack the needed fire precautions, or have lead or asbestos hazards, or not have the proper rear egress, is mind-bogglingly stupid. Our city is 58 percent renters, and these constituents deserve representation from their elected officials at least as much as the people who own the buildings they call home, especially when many of those people don’t even reside in the city. It’s hard to say exact numbers on that, of course, because as Councilor Haxhiaj noted last Tuesday, we don’t have a registry yet.
This kind of transparency about who is responsible for maintaining the housing stock in our city has long been an issue. During my nearly decade-long tenure on the Human Rights Commission, we worked hard to understand the scope of the challenges of accessibility, code enforcements, and housing discrimination in the face of such a lack of clear information. Part of the charge of the Human Rights Commission is to make policy recommendations, but without a clear picture of the issues—or even just how many properties the city’s largest property owners have—it is impossible to identify which kinds of policies would mitigate the myriad issues that Worcester renters continue to face- like discrimination and health/safety hazards, all while navigating one of the most economically punishing housing markets in the country.
Conflicts of Interest Abound
It’s particularly troubling that at least two of the city councilors leading the crusade to upend the registry that they passed unanimously are themselves landlords, and joined by chair of economic development, Candy Mero-Carlson who gets more money from developers than anyone could reasonably spend on a district city council race in Worcester. Even more troubling is that one of those city council landlords is a lawyer whose objections Mass Live characterizes as such: “Councilor-at-Large Moe Bergman, another landlord, also took issue with the registry and said he questioned the constitutionality of the city sending inspectors to properties for inspections.” First of all, you all voted for this. What were you all doing if it’s so terrible? Second of all, that is quite an interesting reading of the Fourth Amendment. Is it also unconstitutional for inspectors to come to inspect new electrical work or construction? This is bordering on sovereign citizen nonsense. I guess it should be no surprise from a man who characterizes the purpose of the Zoning Board of Appeals as being for neighbors to complain about projects. Bergman represents everyone, he says: “I represent people who own multi-families, and I represent people that own single-family homes.” In any case, the residents of this city deserve better than a council who are more concerned with their own interests and doing the bidding of their buddies than taking the advice of capable professional planners and inspectors and serving all of the city’s residents.
It’s a long tradition of such disservice for renters from council landlords. Former Councilor and Mayor Konnie Lukes faced public scrutiny over multiple code violations at one of her properties in 2017. Former councilor and realtor Tony Economou was found shortcutting the rights of residents who’d been foreclosed on. This is no surprise to me, as he showed my husband and me multi-family homes when we first sought to buy in 2011, and gave us much unsolicited advice about how to shortcut tenant rights and nickel and dime residents with coin operated machines, etc. And then there’s John McNamee, the landlord of 29 Ripley Street, where my childhood classmates’ family died. He himself ran a failed campaign for city council just a few years earlier and was active in city politics.
“I Hoped That We’d Be Able to Move Forward Without Restriction”
What’s most galling about all of this is that we actually do have some really thoughtful, talented, and committed folks working on the day-to-day minutiae of our city government. Folks like Assistant Chief Development Officer Michelle Smith, who recently won the Thomas Green Public Service Award, and other planning staff that have patiently come before the council to explain inclusionary zoning, traffic calming, and accessory dwelling units. As Councilor King said of the last item in a December city council meeting, “We’ve unfortunately not listened to the facts.” If you’re wondering why we can’t seem to manage to hire a diversity officer, this is probably at least one piece of the puzzle. This kind of undermining of the professional capability and expertise of our city’s workers is something I have heard from colleagues that have left the city time and time again. It’s symptomatic of a larger issue with the city’s leadership: an interest in leveraging the alleged concerns of folks like us—young professionals, small business owners, families with young children, or in my case, owner-occupant landlords—as an excuse for the draconian policies they want for themselves and their friends, even if it’s the exact opposite of what many of us actually want in the city where we’re raising our families.
They keep being able to get away with it because in a city with a median age of 32, the median municipal voter is in their mid 60s. We can change that next year, when all of these people will have to defend their nonsense at the polls. In the meantime, we can at least show up and make it clear that whether they claim to or not, they do not speak for us. In a rare confluence, Councilor Bergman and I agree on one thing, which is that many of us who have been living in this city “know how many problems exist in this city by virtue of the fact of absentee landlords. The problems are endless.” Seems like someone ought to do something about that? Show up tonight to demand that they do.
Odds and ends
Thanks for reading! Worcester Sucks is 100 percent sustained by paid subscribers. Every year around the anniversary of launching this thing (June 19) we take a little hit on paid subscribers—so here’s a good deal.
Some interesting reporting from the Harvard Press News (the town, not the school) on the way opioid settlement money has been divvied up among towns. Just like how it works with state school funding, it appears the smaller and more affluent towns are getting a much higher proportion of this money than the large urban cities that actually need it. From the story:
In Worcester County, the City of Worcester, with about 200,000 people and 822 opioid overdose deaths in the past eight years, received the largest allocation. But dividing each Worcester County town’s allocation by its population shows that Worcester, although it received the county’s largest allocation, did not receive anywhere near the most money per person. That distinction belongs to Harvard, whose allocation came to $113 per person using the town’s 2010 census numbers compared to Worcester’s $79 per person.
To make matters worse, it appears the settlement money was portioned at least in part on how much operating budget money a municipality dedicates to its schools... and as we’ve been over Worcester is historically quite low in that category.
Another category we’re apparently quite low in: bike infrastructure.
As Neal McNamara recently reported in the Patch: “People for Bikes last week released its 2024 city rankings, and Worcester came in No. 85 out of 92 cities in Massachusetts.”
But it doesn’t stop at Massachusetts.
Worcester got doored in wider rankings, coming in at No. 179 in all of New England, No. 2,155 in the United States and 2,427 internationally — about 150 spots from dead last, held by Gulfport, Fla.
Woof.
Oh would you look at that: the NYC comptroller did an audit of ShotSpotter and found alerts only led to confirmed shootings 13 percent of the time. Wow, 13 percent sounds familiar. Let’s look at my post from Sunday…
Of the 517 times ShotSpotter “detected” a gunshot, officers found evidence just 70 of those times. That’s 13 percent of the time.
Damn what a coincidence for this technology that the company claims is 97 percent accurate.
Just as the accuracy rates are the same, we can assume this part of the NYC audit is at least similar:
NYPD records show that officers spent an average of 20 minutes investigating alerts deemed unfounded and 32 minutes investigating alerts that went unconfirmed. This translates to thousands of hours of officer time responding to ShotSpotter alerts that do not turn out to be confirmed shootings.
We’ll never know though. No way Worcester City Hall endeavors to do a deep audit into ShotSpotter.
This quote also rings a bit true around here i have to say…
Comptroller Lander continued, “The NYPD’s response to these audit findings is disappointing and reflects a disinterest in using data, effective performance metrics, and transparency to improve public safety.”
Ok that’s all for now. See ya Sunday.
I second that, great piece. Thank you!
Great piece 👏