There’s a white boat coming up the river
Real estate speculators, bankrupt developers, rent control, Moloch
First things first, a note from the Mea Culpability Department: In my last post, Guide to the Sept. 2 Preliminary Election, I made a tremendous oopsie. Regarding the District E School Committee race, I said voters can vote for two of the three candidates. That’s dead wrong. You can only vote for one. It says so right on the ballot.
I haven’t made a mistake that stupid in a long time. Still kicking myself. While I updated it within minutes online, the email version stays wrong forever and that’s how most people read this newsletter.
What’s worse, I provided an analysis of how to use those two votes effectively against Kathi Roy, the January 6-adjacent incumbent. Anyone who takes the advice I offered will have their ballots disqualified.
Only vote for one candidate in the District E preliminary.
I deeply, deeply regret the error. It’s an especially bad mistake because it muddies an already confusing situation. I’m sorry!
Read Aislinn’s rundown on District E over at WPS in Brief. She knows better than I. Just whatever you do, don’t vote for Kathi Roy.
Oi. Cheeks are flush.
Look out, Mama, there’s a white boat coming up the river...
Now I’m no doctor but making a mistake that’s so stupid and obvious is, to me, a pretty clear indication of burnout. Another indication: It’s taking forever to write these things lately. Like 14-hour totally nonproductive workdays. My whole body resists the document. Fighting it. Getting stressed. Stress exhaustion. Hm, if only there were a specific phrase for this conundrum as it afflicts writers specifically.
As July turned into August, I let myself slow down for the first time in like... a year? And the inertia of that has been hard to combat. So bear with me if we’re looking at an eight or nine-day window between these OG Worcester Sucks posts and not the seven-day one that’s been tradition. Currently we’re at eight, I think. The seven-day rule is self-imposed of course but it is generally considered good practice in the gig-work journalism cottage industry.
Were I at another job like my old one for Worcester Magazine I’d be “phoning it in” during listless periods like this. I have almost no incentive to do that now, the whole business model premised on your finding value in what I write here. So, idk. I’m reminded of what internet historian Joanne McNeil said in our Outdoor Cats interview with her…
And then the other element of that is it's so individualistic... if you're going it alone, you're counting on it that you're never gonna get sick. Someone close to you isn't gonna pass away, that you will never have to be away from this job for say four weeks that could like decimate your followers if you just disappear. And I don't think anyone, any one of us should just, like, take that gamble. ... I also strongly feel like we're setting ourselves up for just the next realm of failures.
Of course, if you’ll allow me to continue this amateur self-diagnosis, overwork isn’t the only source of the burnout or block or whatever it is I’m feeling. It’s hard to care right now in the specific way that motivates action. Whereas it’s very easy, it seems, to care in the way that sends one into a tailspin. I’m talking universally, at the zeitgeist level, but also personally. A culture-wide case of the Mondays.
It’s a unique sort of dread, watching someone take a bullet from the lens of their own camera, one only rolling to document an abuse of state power. On the thinning hope that evidence matters in some way. I’ve been behind that camera, rolling that tape, many a time. Just this May, I was at Eureka Street, one of the worst incidents of state power abuse in Worcester history, with my camera out, dutifully observing, making sure I captured the necessary footage for future accountability purposes, knowing the prospect is at best an open question, but ahhh nevertheless... I imagine seeing what Awdah Hathaleen saw: Out of nowhere, a muzzle flash a few dozen yards away. And then… nothing.
In “Powderfinger,” Neil Young describes a young man scrambling to do something about the menacing boat full of settler-colonial soldiers of some unstated variety coming up a river toward his riverside home. The story, told in first person, ends this way: “...I saw black / and my face splashed in the sky.”
Awdah Hathaleen spent his final moments documenting a bulldozer manned by settlers, Israel’s somehow even more Third Reich-coded response to the call of America’s neo-Nazi militia movement, as it chugged and sputtered through a Palestinian village, its driver intent on flattening the thing.
Around it, a scene the city manager might call “chaotic”: Settlers haranguing a group of angry villagers in “I’m not poking you” fashion, keeping them away from the bulldozer like it’s an SUV with New York plates on Eureka Street. And then one of them pulls out a gun. Whips around like he’s in a Western. Bang. Hathaleen drops to the ground.
This was a month ago. But in new footage released a few days ago by Israeli human rights watchdogs B’Tselem, you can (though probably shouldn’t) watch Israeli settler Yinon Levi point his gun. Muzzle flash. Camera falls to the ground. Then, black.
I refuse to turn the sound on but I’m told you can hear his last few breaths, the camera next to him facing the dusty ground recently chewed up by a literal engine of the ongoing genocide. Likely a Caterpillar product, by the way. Made in the USA, baby. The whole ordeal has been great for our domestic heavy demolition machinery industry. A good time to buy, as they say.
An Israeli court released Levi just a few days after the shooting. Lack of evidence to counter his self-defense claim, they said. Now there’s video and they’ll have to come up with a new excuse—a task I fully trust them to perform.
On Sunday, the IDF deliberately targeted and killed five Al Jazeera journalists stationed in a media tent outside a hospital in Gaza City. The IDF accused them of heading a Hamas cell “advancing rocket attacks.” They did so without evidence, as part of a long pattern of after-the-fact revisionism when they’re made to answer for deliberately killing off another precious link from Gaza to the eyes of the outside world. You’ll remember (or, depending on your media diet, perhaps you’ve never been made aware) that no foreign journalist can get into Gaza besides on heavily sanitized IDF tours. Meanwhile, the IDF has killed at least 186 Palestinian journalists in the past year and a half. It’s a figure unseen since WWII.
It just so happens the most famous of the five, Anas Al-Sharif, was a point man for the starvation storyline ever so slightly bending the mainstream American consensus toward the truth of the matter. Inconvenient for the IDF and their obvious plans and also their American cash machine going brrrrrrrr. He was there to witness and document the forced starvation that is for some reason finally tugging on the cold American heartstrings, and so he had to be obliterated. Cast off the mortal coil because he couldn’t be cast off the reservation, wouldn’t shut up about what he was seeing happen to his community, duty bound like any good journalist to keep telling that uncomfortable truth. Right up until the end. It came out this morning that the IDF had offered him a trade a few days before they murdered him: They’d let him leave Gaza if he stopped reporting on what was happening there. He turned it down. They still called him a terrorist after they killed him for continuing to report on the world-historic crimes inflicted every day on his community.
He had a statement ready to go in the event they finally did it to him. The action of a man who expects assassination imminently.
I have lived through pain in all its details, tasted suffering and loss many times, yet I never once hesitated to convey the truth as it is, without distortion or falsification—so that Allah may bear witness against those who stayed silent, those who accepted our killing, those who choked our breath, and whose hearts were unmoved by the scattered remains of our children and women, doing nothing to stop the massacre that our people have faced for more than a year and a half.
The “those,” by the way, includes the majority of the Worcester City Council, now campaigning on the need to “get back to business,” not focus on such things. “Distractions,” they’ve come to euphemize.
They continue also to smear the progressives who dared give a shit. Instigators, rioters, crazy, they allege. Very much like the IDF in that way, these cranks. They’ll just say whatever.
Anyway, it is insane to me in the abstract but unsurprising in a realpolitik sense that this latest instance of Israel’s routine-seeming practice of murdering journalists isn’t breaking through to primetime.
The Committee to Protect Journalists statement goes hard, though:
“Israel is murdering the messengers,” said CPJ Regional Director Sara Qudah. “Israel wiped out an entire news crew. It has made no claims that any of the other journalists were terrorists. That’s murder. Plain and simple.
“It is no coincidence that the smears against al-Sharif—who has reported night and day for Al Jazeera since the start of the war—surfaced every time he reported on a major development in the war, most recently the starvation brought about by Israel’s refusal to allow sufficient aid into the territory,”
It should be playing over and over on the TV, like pictures of rockets and holes in fences. In a sane world, maybe.
What Israel is currently administering to the Palestinian people is a US-directed imperial strategy of performatively cruel mass violence—shock and awe, if you will—destined to eventually return home, from the front to the core, having undergone only slight augmentations. The way Vietnam returned as the collapse of the New Deal: the hollowing out of our cities and the drugs and the colonial policing strategies and the new second-class citizenry sleeping on cardboard boxes amid the excess of gleaming financial centers.
The signs are all around us if you’re looking.
Last Friday, journalists in LA were clubbed by the police, their cameras smashed, some eventually detained, their hands zip-tied behind their backs, as they followed some 60 demonstrators to the fences around an ICE detention facility. It was just one of many such incidents in LA in recent months. Local watchdogs there have collected more than 100 independent incidents of deliberate targeting of reporters, inflicting all manner of “less-lethal” punishment. A torturer’s bag of implements, from the gas to the rubber bullets to the good old-fashioned stick.
In lines like this...
Rose did not mince words after the violence Friday night outside the federal Metropolitan Detention Center, calling it “utter lawlessness by the LAPD” and adding: “They seemed thirsty to crack skulls.”
And on the other side of the country, in statements like the one our president put out (Truthed™) about the 800 or so unhoused people in DC after having to see a few of them briefly on his way to the golf course. The federal takeover “will not only involve ending the Crime, Murder, and Death in our Nation’s Capital, but will also be about Cleanliness.”
And at home in Facebook comments like this...
It’s the local police, not ICE, who are thirsty to crack the skulls of journalists and whack the moles of the unhoused. It is the municipal government that uncomfortably holds the leash of that rabid dog, unsure if they could actually control the thing should they need to. Some, like Toomey, have decided just to be the dog themselves.
So yeah, it’s been difficult to write lately. I feel so tired and adrift and listless. The above passage is an attempt, I suppose, at an explanation. As much to myself as to the readers. How to rationalize an irrational time and the numb sense of dread it engenders?
Despite the protestations of the cranks, what happens “over there” and “in our backyard” are permanently, indelibly linked. The trick is untangling the “how.” If the municipality is the only political arena we have a chance in hell of changing, it becomes the struggle of our times to figure out how to act on it. And so when Anas al-Sharif, in his last will, tells us, “Do not forget Gaza,” we can do so by fighting for a newly introduced rent control measure, fighting against the little-understood real estate speculation practices worsening the housing crisis in our city, shining light on the corrosive practices of the conglomerate equity firm punishing our nurses for telling the truth about the unsafe hospital they’re running. All three are on the docket today.
There’s a new Moloch lurking in our thrashing, terrified empire, and it is equally responsible for the subtle, quiet hollowing-out of anonymous American cities like Worcester as it is the overt, performative, and bloody hollowing-out of Gaza.
In Palestine, we see the rapid introduction of a new social contract that we’ll all be forced to acquiesce to eventually, though the roll out will be a bit more ambient: A gas leak here as opposed to the explosion over there. The only chance we have at resistance is a mass awakening to the true shape and nature of that contract. In a recent TrueAnon episode, “GI Go Home,” the guest was Jake Romm of the Hind Rajab Foundation, a group that tracks down and builds cases against individual IDF soldiers who’ve committed war crimes. Romm concludes the conversation with a zoomed-out theory that jives with this idea about a new social contract. He says, basically, the reason why the Global South has formed the Hague Group and come out so hard against Israel’s crimes and in favor of international law is “they see where this is all going. And it’s going towards a world that looks like Gaza everywhere and not just in Gaza.”
You want to build up a new definition of international law, with new powers, to protect yourself against a truly unleashed hegemon—free from the traditions of the postwar “international order.” “Those are the things that protect you from abuse by the United States, basically, or any other world power that might come into existence and replace the United States.”
In terms of the postwar order, the id is coming to dominate the ego. Palestine is the id’s chosen example in this play for power. There’s nothing to eat anymore but the flesh of the weak. The id is unbothered while the ego dies of shame with every bite. The destruction of Palestine, then, is the destruction of the Earth. The total victory of id over ego. The dawn of this new Moloch’s reign.
We all need to understand that the best way not to forget about Gaza is to fight like fuckin hell for Worcester. I am saying this to motivate myself. To say get the fuck off your sorry ass and keep moving.
Woof, got a little heavy there. So as a palate cleanser, here’s a delightful bit of ad copy from some ice maker Katie and I were looking at buying the other day.
It’s everywhere!!!
And here’s maybe the prettiest picture of Worcester ever taken? A drone shot by local photographer Josh Wingell. I saw it on the Worcester Subreddit. Wingell: “Taken yesterday evening (8/5/25) with my drone. The sun was an incredible bright red, thanks to the Canadian wildfires.”
What an incredible shot. I was out around the Wachusett Mountain area trying to see some meteors the other night and can confirm: The smoke made the moonlit landscape into a “dentist office painting,” as Katie put it. Also I think we encountered this bear at the edge of a field in Princeton... story for another time.
Now to the local news. But first...
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Some stuff coming up:
Thursday night August 21 7 p.m. Election Squad Round 2. Steel & Wire.
Thursday August 28 Worcester Whirlwind Nite at the Museum of Worcester. A fundraiser in support of a neat documentary project on the life and times of Major Taylor. The event will include the unveiling of a painting, and period dress—lace gloves, pocket watches, top hats, brooches, corsages, parasols, bow ties, cycling chic—is highly encouraged.
Where’s My Chippy?
Boy oh boy did Eric Casey over at Worcester Business Journal give the town something to talk about with this one: “Chip Norton, owner of Mercantile Center, files for bankruptcy amid lawsuits, $70M in debt”
Charles “Chip” Norton, one of the most prominent players in the Central Massachusetts property development world, has filed for Chapter 7 Bankruptcy as five lawsuits have accused him and his businesses of unpaid debts, amid an unprecedented crisis for his billion-dollar real estate empire.
Norton, the owner of Worcester’s Mercantile Center and the largest commercial property owner in Central Massachusetts, disclosed a total of $1.69 million in debt in filings with U.S. Bankruptcy Court for the District of Massachusetts, but creditors have claimed he has nearly $70 million in debt as the result of personal guarantees related to real estate financing, where his personal assets were offered as collateral.
Is that bad?
The article lists exhaustive accounts of unpaid debts to local banks and other institutions. It’s dizzying. The kicker line suggests he’s doing Uber now?
Norton’s bankruptcy filing seems to confirm he has stepped away from management of FRA. He lists his current occupation as a driver for various unnamed employers, with an estimated monthly income from this employment of $1,000.
I don’t know. And while the bankruptcy is a personal one, there’s a lot of grey area between Norton’s checking account and the account paying the electric bill at the Mercantile Center. It’s probably the most densely populated commercial property downtown. Fate as of yet unknown.
But, luckily for Norton, he can expect a city hall that’ll go easy on him as he and his many high-powered tenants, including the State of Massachusetts and the federal government, sort all this out. Before he went bankrupt, he was liberal with campaign cash. A review of OCPF shows he’s donated some $5,450 to Joe Petty’s campaign over the years, as recently as earlier this year. Same goes for Candy Mero-Carlson, head of the economic development subcommittee, at $3,750. And a few coins in Kate Toomey’s outstretched cup as well: $1,500. (Gotta sting that Candy got more than twice as much.) Other notable donees are the famously not corrupt at all William Galvin, onetime lieutenant governor Karen Polito, and Charlie Baker 2.0: Maura Healey. Back when the getting was good, it seemed Norton understood that developing real estate required greasing certain pockets. Now he’s... greasing the inside of his Maserati with Uber Eats orders? So weird!
Also, no shame to my delivery drivers. I did that for a few years and it is perfectly fine and admirable work. Any coworker I’ve had in the industry would be looking at Norton on his first day the way I am now, saying “the fuck, dude?” Saul Goodman behind the Cinnabon counter.
Here’s Norton’s OCPF sheet if you’re curious.
And my last thought on the matter: This 2019 Telegram story headlined “Chip Norton is 'bullish' on Worcester” aged like a Cabernet Sauvignon from the Sauvignon region of Worcester Internet.
His work landed him the 2019 Robert S. Bowditch Economic Development Award, an annual honor recently handed out by the Worcester Business Development Corp.
“He’s always been very bullish on Worcester,” said Craig S. Blais, chief executive of the WBDC. “He’s always been very positive about Worcester, that there were opportunities here.”
Positively chewing on that quote. Sniffing the rim of it. Swirling it around the glass. Smacking my teeth. The tannins in this bad boy! *Chef’s kiss.*
Citation Needed
Any loyal Boston Globe readers among you may have already caught a post from last Friday headlined “Patient deaths, government investigations, and a new lawsuit. What’s happening at Saint Vincent Hospital?” And you may have found this name familiar.
Carla LeBlanc, a nurse and union leader at Saint Vincent Hospital, didn’t hold back when she appeared on a local podcast in February to discuss the imminent departure of the chief executive of the Worcester hospital. Short-staffing at Saint Vincent had contributed to the deaths of patients, she asserted, and the hospital’s management and for-profit owner were to blame.
Oh, a podcast appearance in February, you say?
“At this point, I’m not confident that things will be changing for the better,” she told the hosts of the podcast called “Outdoor Cats.” “You know, I’ve learned over the last few years that I can never be confident that this company is going to do the right thing.”
Extremely catty of the Globe and then later the Telegram not to link or mention the outlet, or Chris or me, by name. But whatever.
That’s right, the decision Chris and I made to take Worcester Sucks into the realm of audio has already racked up its first high-profile Consequence for a Guest. (Anyone we’re currently trying to get on should think of it like lightning. No way it’ll strike you too.)
Carla bravely and candidly spoke to us about the nightmare that is working under Tenet, the Dallas-based equity leech draining the “care” out of “healthcare” at hospitals across the country. She did so a few days after Carolyn Jackson, the St. V’s CEO for the duration of the MNA’s historic strike, was shitcanned. The episode was something of a victory lap for Carla, Chris, and me—all of us deeply invested in the strike. But obviously mostly for Carla, who lived and breathed it every day. She was freakin’ hilarious, and so so so righteous.
For doing so, the company fired her, despite her ranking position in the union and long tenure. Now, Carla has filed a wrongful termination lawsuit. And a DPH report acquired by the MNA confirms everything Carla was talking about. And the DPH has reopened an investigation into patient safety. Whoops! Nice move, Tenet.
We cover this extensively on the most recent episode of Outdoor Cats. Check ’er out!
“Episode 34: F*ck, That’s Malicious”
And add the thing to a podcast player of your choice while you’re at it :-)
(Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Overcast, Pocket Casts, RSS link)
Rent Control Now!
Worcester’s own Etel Haxhiaj and Jordan Berg Powers are among the two dozen or so signatories on a new ballot question campaign to reverse the state’s ban on municipal rent control.
Homes for All Mass, a statewide formation of grassroots housing justice groups, is leading the campaign to place rent stabilization on the 2026 ballot. Last week, hundreds of tenants—travelling from dozens of communities across the state—rallied and marched through the halls of the State House to share their stories of excessive rent hikes, and demand that legislators act on rent stabilization legislation.
The coalition now has to collect 75,000 signatures, which is crazy but doable. If they do so, it’ll be on the ballot in 2026.
The need for such a measure is beyond obvious. Homelessness is on the rise, rents are on the rise, and more than half of renters are rent burdened, spending more than 30 percent of their income on having a landlord. The opposition is predictably coming from the real estate lobby—the same lobby that secured this asinine ban from the legislature back in the 1990s and have squashed basically every good idea since.
The details, per a Homes For All release:
The ballot initiative, An Initiative Petition to Protect Tenants by Limiting Rent Increases, would limit annual rent increases in Massachusetts to the cost of living (as measured by the annual increase in the Consumer Price Index), with a cap at 5%. Exemptions would be included for owner-occupied buildings with four or fewer units, as well as for new construction for a building’s first 10 years. For example, the cost of living increase in 2024 was 2.9%, making that the maximum annual rent increase in 2025. In 2022, the cost of living increase was 8% but rent increases would have been limited to 5%. For an apartment that previously rented for $2,500, the ballot initiative would limit the annual rent increase to no more than $125.
In the short term, the introduction of this measure makes rent control a totally fair question to be asking our local incumbents and hopefuls in the upcoming council and school committee elections. Do you support rent control? If yes, hell yes. If no, please explain. Expect the majority of the city council as currently composed to be a hard “no”—and entirely unable to explain why. This becomes important if and when the rent control restriction is lifted. City councils like ours will then be tasked with actually enacting it.
Kate Toomey, for instance, will become a “no” vote the second Anthony Petrone, noted police union official, landlord, and one of two designated handlers for Council Cranks, inevitably calls her and tells her to be against it.
Same goes for Mero-Carlson, Bergman, Colorio, and Petty, if he thinks he can wiggle out of it (he’s good at that!). Same goes for either of the two candidates vying to take over for Russell in District 3. Our council as currently composed would vote down rent control 6-5 or 7-4. With the prospect of rent control now on the horizon, changing that dynamic becomes all the more important.
We simply cannot allow these morally repugnant people to have such a firm grip on power in our city. That has to end.
The subject of our next segment is exactly the kind of person who is sure to be against...
Speculation on Longworth Ave
The Zoning Board of Appeals last week ruled in favor of one Nick Hoffman’s request to split an already small lot in order to build a second house on it. Then, this week, the Planning Board did the same. The Longworth Ave project was fiercely opposed by neighbors. Keith Linhares and Joe Petty both spoke at the meeting. Comments from the ZBA and Planning Board amounted to “this is what we exist to do, sorry.”
Nick Hoffman owns properties in the area under at least five different corporate names. A review of his property holdings shows he frequently swaps ownership between his various LLCs, as well as quickly flipping properties within the span of a few years. Most appear to be single-family homes and small multi-units. I spent a good amount of frustrating time putting together a complete picture of his property game. Unfortunately, I’m pretty junk at spreadsheet work, and this requires a more advanced hand. Anyone who wants to get this over the finish line for me, hit me up. Here’s what I have so far. It’s unclear how many of the properties he rents. The new Rental Registry is apparently down so that won’t be any help.
He bought the Longworth property in question for $500,000 in May, more than $100,000 over the value of its 2024 assessment.
In various promotional material available on the internet, he describes himself this way...
Nick has been an agent since 2016. He has experience with real estate investing in multi-families, single family rentals, value add single family flips, new construction builds, and subdividing lots.
And this way...
Nick has grown his personal investor agent Worcester Massachusetts income-producing real estate portfolio which consists of long-term buy-and-hold multi-family investment properties, single family rentals, and buildable lots. He has experience in subdividing properties that have buildable lots on them.
In short, he is exactly the kind of person the rent control coalition would call a “speculator.” In their release, they link a 2018 report entitled “Homes for Profit” from the Metropolitan Area Planning Council that casts this type of speculator as an accelerant poured on the fire of high demand, low supply. When people treat housing like a short-term tradeable asset akin to stocks, people who need housing suffer.
The impact of this practice cannot be overstated. Not only do investors take properties off the market that could otherwise be sold to families intending to live in a home, but renters often suffer from investors buying their buildings and hiking up their rents, if not evicting them outright without cause.
Between 2004 and 2018, the period they studied, they found that 21 percent of the property purchases in the greater Boston area were made by speculators. A little less than half of these properties, at 9 percent overall, were flipped within two years, yielding returns anywhere from 55 to 85 percent. Nice work if you can get it. What flipping does, however, is take affordable homes off the market, and in the areas that need them most. Like most evil things, this is a phenomenon that hits low income areas harder, as is evidenced by a map the group attached, updated as recently as 2024.
Another edition of Every Map Is the Same Map.
Is this how they picked the Shotspotter coverage area?? Cuz damn.
As the report puts it:
… our research finds that investor activity is most likely to occur in the region’s high-density urban submarket with relatively low housing prices ... which is home to the highest share of renters, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC), and immigrant populations of the region’s seven submarkets.
It’s almost like real estate speculation as a business relies on the precarity of a working class? Hm.
The rotten practice was at the center of arguments against Hoffman’s Longworth subdivision. Keith Boucher, a neighbor leading the charge, highlighted that the home has been empty.
This applicant could, by right, build an accessory dwelling unit today if more housing were the true goal. Instead, the home at 7 Longworth Road remains empty while the applicant seeks to subdivide the lot, build new construction and inflate the value of the existing structure by holding it off the market. This is a strategy seen in speculative real estate markets where artificial inventory scarcity is used to drive prices upward.
District 1 council candidate Keith Linhares focused on the “hardship” argument Hoffman was using to apply for the exemption.
If the ZBA allows this argument that a real estate speculator is facing a hardship in this situation, then we're setting a dangerous precedent. We're effectively saying that a real estate speculator being unable to maximize profit fits the definition of hardship.
They do this, he said, with the help of longstanding city policy.
Secondly, real estate speculators who specialize in buy and hold tactics contribute to a false sense of scarcity. Land is plentiful in Worcester. We are just using it poorly through things like mandated parking minimums and allowing so much one level development, and by encouraging and rewarding these types of speculative buy and hold tactics.
A tough act to follow, and Joe Petty failed miserably.
The city struggles with housing and also making sure you don't change the character of a neighborhood. I think he had some legitimate questions asked. I don't understand all the law involved here, but maybe someone can answer those questions. My only concern is that when you change the character of a neighborhood, it doesn't help the City of Worcester. I'll just look at some of the questions we were asked and make sure we give them the right answer and bring the City forward.
That’s his comment in full. Notice how he doesn’t make a clear demand or stake out a clear position. He just says “character of the neighborhood” should be taken into consideration. Clearly a case of someone asking him to speak, and him following through with the absolute bare minimum.
The response from both the ZBA and the Planning Board was essentially, “We hear you but our scope of authority is too narrow to get into all that.” Both approved the project unanimously with little discussion.
I would like to note, however, that Albert LaValley, Planning Board chairman, took an approach I think others in city government would do well to emulate. Rather than get his back up and bristle and scoff at the upset neighbors like most would, he demonstrated empathy. He gives the technical reasons for his support, all of which are wonky and beyond me, then says,
I do understand that development next door can be frustrating, and feeling like the process is rigged can also, is a really unfortunate outcome of this. But that said, I think that it's really important that we keep the purviews of our institutions within their bounds. So the court exists to have an appeals process for the zoning board of appeals, which you are welcome to pursue. I'm not a lawyer, I can't tell you whether that will work or not. But that's the venue that we have established as a society for dealing with these types of conflicts.
Maybe it goes to the courts, maybe it doesn’t. My main takeaway: It’s time for rent control.
Odds and Ends
All right that’s all for me today folks. I am totally wiped on writing as explained up top and need a little recharge.
Don’t forget about Election Squad #2 on Thursday! 7 p.m. Steel and Wire and there miiiiight be a special fun singing related activity.
And I really so so so appreciate everyone who supports this outlet! Pride of my life doing this thing. I’ll keep it going forever if I have the means to do. And that part falls on you guys unfortunately! Direct reader support is the last and only model for local alternative journalism. The legacy of the grand craft and tradition of the alt weekly here in this city depends on your One Dunkies A Month.
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Here’s a good song/cool new-to-me band for the road…
Oh shit and Hot Dog Safari tomorrow! See you there.
I don’t see the issue with the zoning thing. He’s taking a lot where there was 1 house and putting 2 there. Isn’t that exactly what we need more of?
What adult man in this day and age who isn’t a baseball player is going by the name “Chip?”