The miserable will be made even more miserable

Maura Healey and the meat grinder

Aug 04, 2024

As promised, here’s the Sunday chaser to the Thursday shot!

If you came out to the Honeybees show at Ralph’s last night, that was a fun time, huh? I have a headache and a happy heart. Ralph’s is one of the things we’re going over today, unfortunately. Anyway, to business:

The miserable will be made even more miserable—Maura Healey—the meat grinder—a firsthand account of the crash—hands off Ralph’s—odds and ends

The miserable will be made even more miserable

I’m 60 or so pages into Octavia E. Butler’s 1993 Parable of the Sower, a novel depicting a near-future dystopian California. Some live modestly but comfortably in walled communities. The rest live in cannibalistic squalor outside. It rains once every seven years or so. In a chapter I just finished, a young girl in the walled community is killed by a bullet that penetrates the supposedly bulletproof wall between them and the rest. The family pays for a police investigation out of pocket, because that’s what you have to do if you want one. The protagonist, a 15-year-old girl, suspects the investigation won’t accomplish much but widespread harassment of the homeless people who live outside the wall. The year, in this dark imagining of an America in ruin, is 2025. The book’s young protagonist describes what she suspects will happen when the cops interact with the unhoused:

It’s illegal to camp out on the street the way they do—the way they must—so the cops knock them around, rob them if they have anything worth stealing, then order them away or jail them. The miserable will be made even more miserable.

Governor Maura Healey has recently taken executive action that will ensure more people in this state live on the street—the way they must—and there is little space between the cops of Octavia Butler’s 2025 and our current 2024 when it comes to policing our unsheltered homeless population. The only thing in that passage that you can’t prove happens right here right now—but you also can’t disprove—is that the cops knock them around and rob them. But... we’d never hear about something like that if it did happen, right? The bargain we’ve collectively made with the police here is that if we don’t have to see it, we don’t want to know about it.

So, today’s main post is split into two sections: First, a rundown of Maura Healey’s recent emergency shelter order. Then, after that, a look at some records I just got back from the city that intimately detail the day-to-day reality of our homelessness response. What puts people on the street, and then what happens to them when they’re there.

Maura Healey

A few weeks ago, Healey announced that stays in overflow shelters will be limited to five days, and a six-month waitlist for longer-term facilities. Also: the state won’t build any new overflow sites to keep up with the increasing demand.

These are the most recent updates to an increasingly austere immigration policy from our Democratic state administration. Others include capping family shelter capacity at 7,500, a one-month limit on overflow shelter stays, a plan to evict 150 families from shelters every month, barring migrants from sleeping at Logan Airport, and—how could we forget—sending a delegation to the southern border to “educate” people on why we don’t want them here.

The “Do Not Come” energy is real.

As we went over in last Sunday’s post, Healey says the cuts are due to money troubles—what the newspapermen like to call a “strain” on a “beleaguered system”—but what she doesn’t say is that she passed a $1 billion tax cut that benefits the wealthy to an extraordinary degree. She doesn’t say that the state could simply build more shelter capacity, and no one in The News bothers to ask why. The whole media narrative is wrapped up in “migrant crisis” consent manufacturing but the reality is this is not a migrant issue at all. Absent any boogeyman foreigners, the state’s shelter capacity is increasingly insufficient for the state’s homeless population. Even if The Wall in our collective imagination went up tomorrow, the “strain” wouldn’t subside.

These policies are necessarily going to put more people on the street with nowhere else to go—and, when it comes to families, constitute a direct and flagrant violation of our Right to Shelter law. That they’re enacted under a Fox News ‘migrant horde’ pretense gives it all a double fuck you: more austere cruelty to real unhoused people, plus more scapegoating of a vague ‘immigrant’ in the imagination.

In a joint statement earlier this week, Councilors Etel Haxhiaj and Thu Nguyen blasted the governor for adding to the “heartbreaking and cruel ways in which our government and officials treat our unhoused community members.”

Living in our current system is not sustainable. None of this is humane. We need our government officials to understand this reality. Rather than devising ineffective and inhumane policies, taking away lifesaving resources, we need to change the systems to better support our most vulnerable community members who are absolutely deserving of life and shelter. Creating more barriers for people to survive is not a solution. Neither is giving in to policies that harm and dehumanize our community members.

On Monday, Nguyen and Haxhiaj were among hundreds to attend a rally outside the statehouse.

votethu

A post shared by @votethu

At the rally, Boston State Sen. Liz Miranda described the situation in her district already. Before the changes that will make it worse:

“There are people in South Bay walking around all day, and there are people sleeping at bus stops because they have nowhere to go in Mattapan Square and all over our communities. Five days is not enough to find housing and alternative temporary options,” she said.

And what options even are there? Another question we don’t like asking. Perhaps that’s why Maura Healey abruptly canceled a Zoom call on Wednesday with health care workers and service providers about her policy changes. “Breathtaking cowardice,” as Avik Chatterjee, a physician providing shelter-based health care, put it when he tweeted it out. Glad he did.

Using Worcester as an example, we see the answer to the “where are they supposed to go?” question is, increasingly, nowhere. Haxhiaj and Nguyen in their statement paint the picture well:

The most recent Out of Reach Report shows in order to afford a modest two-bedroom apartment in Worcester, a renter would need to work 70 hours per week, 52 weeks per year. Homelessness is on the rise for our seniors and those squeezed tight between high rents and stagnant wages. From 2023-2024 alone, the population of unhoused folks in Worcester County grew nearly 20%.

There is simply no housing for homeless families to “exit the shelter system” into. Not in 30 days, and certainly not in five days. This is a policy that puts vulnerable people on the street.

Once a person becomes unsheltered (the bureaucratic term for ‘on the street’), they are thrown into a meat grinder of punitive enforcement measures that amount to a deliberate banishment. People falling through the cracks fall further. This has been a reality up until now reserved mostly for single adults, but now we’re talking about subjecting families—children!—to the same game of whack a mole that I’ve been painfully detailing for years on here and is designed to keep unsheltered people miserable and invisible.

Which brings us to part two:

The meat grinder

We’re only midway through 2024, and already Worcester police have logged at least 616 enforcement actions on homeless encampments. Sure to beat the 695 logged during 2023!

In response to a record request I put in a few weeks ago, the city sent me a big spreadsheet of work orders logged in the city system under “DIS Task Force Homeless Encampment.” It’s not quite what I asked for—I wanted the DPW Task Force, as it’s a better indicator of when encampments are actually swept. So I’ll be filing another one.

But for now, the DIS Task Force data, which you can peruse at your leisure here, offer a unique glimpse at the depth and breadth of the city’s routine encampment sweeps.

I have 2024 data sorted by location and then time (thanks, Mom!!) Reading it this way, you see how many times the Quality of Life Team goes out to specific encampments and for what reason, and how the end result is always “all clear at this time.” The example of 450 Lake Ave North is a good one.

You go back and back and back and remind people they can’t be there and once they’re not there anymore—by whatever means—you have effectively swept the encampment. You deem it abandoned if you don’t see anyone there when you arrive. Then the DPW or the MassDOT comes in and throws stuff out. The information logged includes GPS coordinates, making sites easy to find.

It’s a good way to make homelessness de facto illegal without any law on the books—a reality that’s been crucially missing in the Grants Pass discourse. Why arrest or fine someone when the threat of such just fine?

This is a snapshot of what’s generally called the “complaint-based model” of policing an unhoused population. Worcester is not unique in adopting it. You get a complaint about homeless people existing, you resolve it. The text of the complaints is sometimes included in this spreadsheet. There’s a recent one (March 28) from the mayor’s office.

QoL received complaint from Mayors office regarding tents trash and individuals staying behind the school. Everything was abandoned at this time. Sent pictures to school dept for cleanup.

Some of them are completely ridiculous but nonetheless triggered a response.

QoL went to this location after the Parks Dept. received a complaint about brush piles. They believed someone might be staying in them. They were just large piles of brush.

We paid the cops to investigate brush for the presence of human beings and go ‘nope just brush.’

The most depressing are the ones that come from residents. This one is especially bad:

House 80 pilgrim Ave has been vancant for 2 yrs I've been here over winter someone started coming in and out of house leaving door open Still has realtor box on it but door appears doesn't lock There is now 6 ish ppl who appear to be struggling with addiction issue living in the house The house has electricity I sometimes see lights on But windows are semi blocked w blankets trash etc random people coming and going plus those staying inside the house which appears like the

It ends like that, on “the.” Like they wanted to keep going with this complaint and ran out of room in the submission box. What, exactly, were these people doing to this person who snitched on them? Doesn’t matter. The complaint was logged Feb. 9. The Quality of Life Team responded twice, on Feb. 20—“QoL rechecked this location. Residence is boarded and secure”—and Feb. 28. “QoL walked property with contractors to make sure building was vacant.” In the first entry logged, the QoL “rechecked,” implying they’d “checked” before. What does “check” entail? Why isn’t it in the system? Where did the people go? What made them leave? We don’t know. We never know.

This happens all the time. Not a week goes by.

What it amounts to is a lot of city resources—how much police officer salary money do 616 homelessness work orders translate to? Not a small amount, I’m sure—to essentially shuffle people around the city.

With overfull shelters and no political will to pursue a sanctioned encampment site or reevaluate the current strategy at all, we will continue to pile up money like brush and light it on fire. Meanwhile teachers get laid off, we can’t fund traffic-calming designs, and we’re barely hanging onto our youth summer programming. The cops make out though. They get a lot of busy work logged this way.

And, on top of that, they have a city administration running cover for them—actively obscuring the endless encampment sweep responsibility in pointless propaganda videos we pay former newspaper reporters to produce.

The Quality of Life Team is the main character of this cache of records I got. You wouldn’t know it watching the above video. Not mentioned once.

To bring it back to Octavia Butler, we’re watching in real time the ‘walled vs unwalled’ society of Parable get kneaded into reality. We already know where the walls will go: Just cross reference any city’s redlining map with its current zoning map. For instance...

But how do we stop it? That’s the question. It calls for big—and dramatically different—thinking about cities. This is not a problem that’s solved in the context of the two-party system. By ‘politics’ as we understand it. The spectacle has no incentive to turn itself off. The growth machine overrunning humanity is a bipartisan consensus. But it’s the growth machine that needs to be excommunicated if we’re ever going to build cities (and cities are, more than the state, the governing structure of society) that don’t inevitably become gated communities surrounded by chaos. We cannot build cities for people until we’ve torn up the compact between cities and the growth machine. I’ve been chewing on that a lot lately, ever since I finished City Authentic by David A. Banks. In the final chapter, titled “What’s to be done?” he puts it this way:

The City Authentic...is the latest form of capitalist urban development and so it will take nothing less than a new society to defeat it.

In relitigating not just the government but also the basic governing principles of a municipality, homelessness provides us a massive hinge point—a skeleton key to understanding the value a city puts on human life in relation to the value it places on capital.

Interfering with capital for the benefit of human beings without homes is as good a starting place as is available to truly wrest the city away from the growth machine. A step toward what Banks describes as a “postauthentic order.”

A postauthentic order—and by extension the postauthentic city— would have to reimagine nearly everything about identity formation, consumption, and culture. Such a society should seem alien, but exciting a world of new possibilities that foretell a civilization based in compassion, care, and cooperation, where ambition is moderate, tempered by the needs of the moment, not the ego.

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A firsthand account

After Thursday’s post came out, Sam Olney of HALO Worcester hit me up and said she personally saw the Shrewsbury Street crash that put 13-year-old Ayuen Leet in a coma. What you’re about to read is, as far as I can find, the only firsthand account of what happened that’s been published.

I literally saw the crash happen on Shrewsbury Street and the girl who creamed that poor girl walked away.
I am so angry they did not arrest her. It is so frustrating because if it were someone like me, they would have taken me away in cuffs. There were no skid marks, she didn't even slow down, she was about 50 feet from where she hit the girl when she stopped. It was so loud David thought it was a car hitting another car, and THEN thankfully there was an off duty cop in traffic but in the videos from the helicopters you can’t see the Bronco in frame. She hit that poor girl where the Bronco stopped to let her cross, she was on her phone the ENTIRE time, there was about eight of us who saw it and then watched as they did not arrest this girl.

I asked if they just let her drive away.

She got in the front seat of the cruiser with the cop, they coddled her. It was a child she hit. I am so ANGRY they let her leave. It was right after that light. Directly across from Piccolo’s.

Greg Opperman, Worcester Sucks traffic violence beat reporter, echoed this sentiment when he was interviewed by CBS Boston Friday:

“They would rather children die than have their drive to Whole Foods take another minute or two.”

Well said, Greg.

Here’s a note from Greg on how that interview went:

If you watched the video, you’ll see some b-roll of me crossing the street near where Ayuen was struck—the intersection at Cross St, where East Central feeds into Shrewsbury Street. Even as someone who knows the pedestrian life in Worcester, the experience was revealing. Waiting in the sweltering summer heat, I missed the first crossing opportunity because so many cars blew through the light. On the second, I could only safely begin my journey once the flashing red hand appeared, giving me half the usual time to make it across the intersection.
A lot has been made of the fact that both Gianna Rose Simoncini and Ayuen Leet were struck outside of crosswalks. I saw another angle—with only a short time to cross a wide intersection, with drivers gunning it through the red light, and a long line of cars staring you down, you might actually feel safer crossing as far away as possible. On Belmont Street, there’s a half mile between intersections where Gianna made her fateful crossing. The median seemingly provides a safe checkpoint. If I were her, or Ayuen, I could see the logic in getting as far away as possible, waiting for a quiet moment, and hoping for the best.
Afterwards, I climbed back into my car and headed home, protected by 3,000 pounds of steel and fiberglass, relieved that I only had to brave the crosswalk once.

You can support Ayuen’s family by giving to their fundraiser on PayPal.

Hands off Ralph’s

You might have missed it but a week or so ago, news broke that Robert Kraft’s warehouse company bought a warehouse building at 112 Grove Street. A big Who Care until you realize that this warehouse is the Rainbow Furniture building riiiight next to Ralph’s Rock Diner—the bar I’d be saddest to see this city lose besides maybe Vincent’s. Per the WBJ, the 112 Grove St. property is next to a packaging warehouse Kraft owns called UN1F1ED² Global Packaging (insane name). Here’s the situation:

It would be so so so brutal if Robert Kraft of massage parlor fame puts an end to one of the country’s last remaining punk bars. Here’s hoping everything is copacetic, especially on the parking lot front and that Mr. Kraft has no further aims with the area.

At Ralph’s last night, a few people told me they were under the impression that 112R, the building closer to Ralph’s, was also sold as part of the deal. I checked the property records this morning to make sure and luckily and that’s not the case. At least not yet.

While there’s a Registry of Deeds filing for the 112 Grove sale, there’s been no update on the 112R lot. Still owned by the same LLC that bought it in 2015.

Here’s the deed for 112 if you’d like to read it yourself.

Odds and ends

Thank you for reading! How does everyone like two shorter posts rather than one giant one?

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