This City Kills Children
Who’s really to blame for the social murder of a 13-year old girl?
Hello everyone! Today I’m mostly handing off the reins to contributor Greg Opperman with a great piece contextualizing the recent death of a 13-year-old girl hit by a car on Belmont Street—an entirely preventable tragedy that deserves of all the scrutiny we could possibly give it.
To underscore the dire need to reckon with pedestrian deaths in this city, I’m pulling a section from Marco Cartolano’s story on the matter over at the Telegram. He came across a video of the crash, and the description is horrific:
The footage, which was taken from across the street and does not have the clearest view of the victim, shows someone walking down Belmont Street, before she crosses the middle of the street to get to the median between the lanes. The western portion of the street appears to be clear of cars in her immediate area when she begins to walk.
As she crosses the street, she begins to run as a white car comes into frame and collides with her. The impact appeared to be strong enough to send the girl into the eastern portion of the street, going past the median.
The white car, which remains the only visible vehicle on the western portion of the street, veers into the right-hand lane after the collision and appears to stop driving seconds after the crash. A picture provided by the auto shop showed the victim lying on the right lane of the eastern portion of the street with people gathering around the scene.
Ghastly. This should never ever ever happen. And, as Greg will elaborate on, that it happens here so frequently is a symptom of decades of policy choices.
Gianna Rose Simoncini,13, now joins Candice Asare-Yeboah, 5, as some of the youngest additions to the Worcester Pedestrian Deaths List. Since 2015, there have been at least 35. If these 35 people were killed by gunfire the city would be on Fox News every night but since it’s two-ton hunks of metal doing the killing it’s treated mostly like a freak weather event every time it happens.
After Greg’s piece, I have a few shorter sections. Another Blood Meridian-ripoff table of contents because I like the form:
Social murder on Belmont—untenable rents—Harlan Crow comes to town—the real estate cartel and the EDCC—book club update—tenant rights workshop—odds and ends
This City Kills Children
By Greg Opperman
A 13-year-old girl was killed after being struck by a car on Belmont Street last Thursday, June 27. The teenager, identified today as Gianna Rose Simoncini, was attempting to cross Belmont Street between Plantation Street and Lake Avenue, a six-lane artery sandwiched in the middle of a residential neighborhood and UMass Memorial Medical Center. Gianna’s death comes at the tail-end of an often embarrassing campaign to undo the traffic-calming redesign of Mill Street, and just in time for the debate over lowering the city-wide speed limit to 25 miles per hour. Gianna’s father, Jose Diaz, described the incalculable loss via a message on GoFundMe:
“Gianna was more than just my daughter; she was a bright light in our lives, a source of joy, and a soul full of dreams. Her sudden departure has left us devastated and grappling with emotions beyond words.”
We typically think of these kinds of incidents as unavoidable tragedies, but let’s call them what they are: Murders. Gianna Rose Simoncini was killed as a part of a vast conspiracy that has resulted in the premeditated murder of thousands. Planners, engineers, and politicians designed a system of roads that, for the sake of cars, made pedestrian deaths permissible. This kind of capricious negligence has a name: social murder (more on that later).
Belmont Street is a road designed to kill, mixing a high-speed, multi-lane traffic artery with a local access street. It’s a six lane monster cutting through the heart of the city, designed to get residents to and from Trader Joes, Whole Foods, and other Shrewsbury businesses as quickly as possible. The term for these kinds of thoroughfares is stroad: not quite a street, not quite a road. Stroads are often noted for their high speed limits and lack of safety features, such as traffic calming measures, adequate street lighting, and crosswalks. In a tweet, Bill Shaner was quick to point out the half-mile distance between crosswalks where Gianna was killed.
According to the Governor’s Highway Safety Association (GHSA), over 60% of pedestrian fatalities occur on stroads, due in part to the speed of traffic that they encourage. As a car’s speed increases, it becomes exponentially more deadly. The speed limit on Belmont Street east of Lincoln is between 30 and 35 miles per hour, with travel at 40+ miles per hour being common. When a pedestrian is hit at 20 miles per hour, they have a 90% survival rate, meaning 1 in 10 will die. Increase to 30 miles per hour, and the chance of survival is a coin flip: 50% survive, 50% die. When increasing speed to 40 miles per hour, the results are grim: only 1 in 10 pedestrians survive crashes at that speed, or a fatality rate of 90%.
Our infrastructure is designed to prioritize cars above everything else. As a result of decades of building roads for faster and denser car traffic, pedestrian fatalities have reached an all-time high. According to NPR, “every day, 20 people walk outside and end up killed by a moving vehicle.” The GHSA reports that 7,508 pedestrians were killed in traffic accidents in 2022, the highest number since 1981:
Those who are too young or too poor to drive risk their lives every time they leave the house. In Massachusetts alone, the fatality rate was 1.43 pedestrian deaths per 100,000 people in 2022. For comparison, the homicide rate in Massachusetts, which includes vehicular manslaughter, is 2.5 deaths per 100,000 people.
Knowing what we know about public infrastructure, the only reasonable conclusion is that 13-year old Gianna wasn’t just killed, she was murdered. While the driver certainly did not premeditate, nor have motive, we can easily identify those responsible: the politicians and residents, past and present, who demand that we prioritize car travel at the expense of all others, and fight tooth and nail against even modest improvements to public safety. Even before cars were invented, this phenomenon was named and shamed by Friedrich Engels in his 1845 book The Condition of the Working Class in England:
“When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live – forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence – knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual.”
At the time, Engels was referring to the trappings of the industrial revolution: exploitative and unsafe workplaces, horrific living conditions, lack of health care, and other material conditions of the 19th century working class, problems that persist to this day. Social murder, unlike more traditional forms of homicide, is a crime of the political elite against the poorest and most vulnerable in our society. Social murder is the culmination of years of systemic neglect, thousands of intentional choices compounding to produce horrific outcomes. Pedestrian deaths aren’t just unfortunate realities, they are the result of intentional choices made at the local, state, and federal level.
In Worcester, even a modest redesign to calm traffic can provoke fierce pushback from residents and city politicians. The Mill Street redesign was a key point of contention raised by Jose Rivera, who mounted a failed campaign to unseat city councilor Etel Haxhiaj’s in last year’s election. During a council meeting on Mill Street, Donna Colorio embarrassed herself by attempting to mischaracterize crash data for Mill Street, all but asking the city manager and Worcester police to fabricate data to agree with her conclusion that the redesign is dangerous (it’s not). Moe Bergman has pitched an expensive project to undo the traffic calming measures and to give city council veto powers over future road redesigns. Bergman’s proposal was dashed after a wave of public support for more inclusive streets, but the fight’s not over: Public hearings are about to be held about a similar revamp of Chandler Street, another busy and dangerous artery through the city.
City council is also considering lowering the citywide speed limit from 30 to 25 miles per hour, a measure Boston implemented in 2017. In Boston, the change produced a 29% drop in driving over 35 miles per hour, speeds we know are particularly fatal to pedestrians.
When we build six-lane highways in the middle of dense neighborhoods, people die. When we cheap out on traffic-calming measures, people die. When we fight, roll back, or sandbag infrastructure improvements to make pedestrians safer, people will die. We can’t just brush off these deaths as the unfortunate cost of living in a modern society.
The city of Worcester has an opportunity to save lives by making smarter, data-driven decisions as we redesign our transit infrastructure. Credit where it’s due, city hall is trying. The Department of Transportation & Mobility is executing on a pedestrian safety initiative called Vision Zero, and City Manager Eric Batista has signaled commitment to the issue. He frequently and pointedly uses the term “traffic violence,” identifying it as a core issue of his administration. But, as discussed, these initiatives are endangered by pushback from the city council.
If the resistance to traffic calming measures is successful, blood will be on the hands of those that fought it, especially councilors Bergman, Colorio, King, and Mero-Carlson. As the debate rages on for safer streets in Worcester, we must ask ourselves: Is shaving a few minutes off of your commute worth murdering children in cold blood?
If you’d like to make a difference and support lower speed limits across the city, you can fill out this City of Worcester public survey. Information about the Chandler Street redesign and how to get involved can be found here. You can support Gianna’s family by giving to their GoFundMe.
Greg Opperman is a software engineer and former newsroom developer at the Boston Globe. His past writing for Worcester Sucks includes pieces on Mill Street and the 2023 municipal election results. Follow him on Twitter @gopperman.
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Aright now for a few sections from yours truly.
Rents out of reach
The 2024 Out Of Reach Report is out, and it’s as bad as last year if not worse. Released by the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the annual report is a national survey of rent prices versus wages. The picture it paints of the rental market here and across the state is an awful one. In a recent statement, District 5 City Councilor Etel Haxhiaj provided a summary of the Worcester numbers:
The Out of Reach Report paints a grim reality for Worcester’s many low-wage renters and essential workers, who are just one paycheck or health crisis away from homelessness or displacement. The Fair Market Rent for a two-bedroom apartment is a staggering $1661. To afford this rent and utilities without exceeding 30% of their income, a household would need to earn $31.94 an hour. Worcester's estimated mean renter wage is a mere $18.27 per hour. At this wage, a renter must work a backbreaking 70 hours per week, 52 weeks per year, to afford a modest, two-bedroom apartment in Worcester.
The report’s website allows you to compare jurisdictions, so I punched in Massachusetts and Worcester. Here are a few choice tidbits.
Exhibit A here is the annual income needed to afford an apartment without being “rent burdened” (spending more than 30 percent of income).
And now Exhibit B: the median income of renting households:
You’ll notice the median income is lower than the 50 percent area median income both across Massachusetts and in Worcester. In Worcester, the median income is just above the income needed to afford a one-bedroom, and well below what’s needed for a two-bedroom.
The big thing to consider though is the space between “50 percent area median income” and the median income of renters. In Worcester, the 50 percent AMI is $58,650 and the median is $52,353. That means that more than half of all renters make less than 50 percent AMI. But, despite that, our city council and manager balked at a proposal to require developers to set aside a small number of units for 60 percent AMI. Remember the inclusionary zoning drama last year? For the benefit of the developers, the inclusionary zoning policy was changed from a 60 percent mandate to an 80 percent mandate with a 60 percent option.
That’s what passes for affordable housing policy here, in these dire times. At best, it’s ineffectual. At worst, it’s a conscious weighing of hedge funds above city residents. And, as with most things, Worcester is unremarkable in this regard. We are simply parroting the company line of a state government which refuses to seriously address the problem—and faces no threat of consequences for that failure. Massive long-term consequences, of course, as cities cave in on themselves under the weight of social fracturing ushered in by displacement. But ours is not a system in which the extended forecast threatens the position of the current power elite.
The majority of renters make less than 50 percent AMI, and the political reality is such that even setting a small number of fixed rents at 60 percent AMI is outside the realm of possibility. When you hear the mayor or the city manager say they’re “doing all they can” regarding the affordability crisis, remember this. They’re not even doing the bare minimum. They’d be fools to earnestly think they’re doing anything.
But at least one local official has our back on housing, as much as she can at least. Upon release of the Out of Reach report, District 5 Councilor Etel Haxhiaj sent a blistering statement.
The growing gap between wages and rents is swallowing many residents’ income and leaving little for food and other needs. For many of our Worcester residents, including many in District 5, affording rent means working multiple jobs or living in overcrowded conditions, and unsanitary, unsafe apartments. More renters face high utility bills, food insecurity, displacement, and evictions. We primarily rely on nonprofits to gather data on how renters in Black, Indigenous, People of Color, and low-wealth communities are doing under these conditions.
Etel is the exception when it comes to local and state messaging on this issue. More often, we’re met with the spurious line that incentivizing developers (read: tax breaks) to build luxury rental housing will cause a “trickle down effect” alleviating the pressure on older, cheaper housing stock and thus driving down rents. Classic Reaganism.
A Healey Administration housing bill is currently making its way through the state legislature. It includes money to repair and modernize public housing, but not to build more of it. In the most recent version passed by the House of Representatives, public housing maintenance comprises $2 billion of the roughly $6 billion proposal. The majority of the money is dedicated to a slew of grants and funds that will necessarily make their way to developers in exchange for tepid affordability restrictions. The administration has also frequently announced tax credits for developers as a key part of the solution.
Lately, we’ve seen this premise start to fall apart at a crucial seam: All the incentives in the world won’t make a difference if the developers can’t get financing. And they won’t take windfall profit off the table in order to get that financing. For these private developers that the state has made responsible for seemingly all new housing construction, it’s either a 6 percent margin or bust—easy during the period of zero interest that hedge funds enjoyed in recent years, but not so much now.
A recent Boston Globe article on the so-called “construction pause” puts this reality into a stark relief. Focusing on the Suffolk Downs development, which has languished for years, the Globe asked the developer about the hold up. The answer:
That is ultimately what O’Brien says is preventing more construction at Suffolk Downs. HYM is working on a deal to build a second apartment building on the Revere side of the site, but right now it would cost roughly $400,000 a unit. He figures he needs to get that down to $350,000 to secure a deal with investors. So HYM has been working to simplify the architecture of the building and cut back some amenities to make the costs balance.
“The equity is literally like an on-off switch,” O’Brien said. “Either you get to the six and a half percent return on cost, or you don’t have a project.”
And that quote right there is our housing policy in a nutshell. Developers get their windfall profits or they don’t build, and all the government gets to do is ask them “what do you need from us.” The strategy is all well and good during boom periods like the Worcester Renaissance that got Ed Augustus his housing secretary job. But what’s the contingency plan when there’s a market downturn, borrowing is no longer free, and there’s still a major supply demand problem in the housing market?
There just isn’t one, and no one with power has any reason to say so. Our state’s entire housing policy is built on the premise of hungry for-profit developers nudged by tax credits and subsidies. And we’re entering a period in which developers are increasingly losing appetite.
The local examples are abundant.
Just this week, the developer pulled the plug on a 218-unit development at 225 Shrewsbury Street. In April, they applied for an extension. But now it’s fully off the table. The company, like so many, cited vague “market conditions.” Add that to the list of more than 2,000 such units delayed in recent memory.
Meanwhile, real investments in new public housing are completely off the table, as are meaningful zoning reforms. Healey’s housing bill only gently pushes municipalities to consider zoning changes, and only pushes money toward the deferred maintenance of existing public units. It does nothing to address the emerging economic reality causing private developers to pass on new construction.
For struggling renters like myself, and I imagine a good number of my readers, the promised salvation of rents evening out by way of an influx of new high end units is an entirely empty one.
In her statement, Haxhiaj addressed that too.
The development boom in Worcester has slowed down, and thousands of market-rate units haven’t come online, primarily due to economic reasons. It will take a long time before these new developments help decrease rent costs for the rest of our residents.
The market is not going to fix this, but officials keep clinging to the idea that it will against the available evidence. Policies like rent control and new public housing construction remain off the table, despite the obvious benefit and obvious societal costs of inaction.
To summarize, Massachusetts housing policy is a dang ol joke man. In the next section, we’ll get to why it might be a joke on purpose. But first... one more interesting tidbit I noticed. For a senior living off Social Security in Massachusetts, a fair rent is $317 a month.
There is absolutely nowhere you can find a rent like that anywhere in the state, least of all Worcester.
That bit stuck out to me because of another factoid that’s been rolling around in the back of my mind. In a recent report on homelessness, city officials said there’s been a 29 percent increase in senior homelessness since 2018. That’s a massive spike.
“This demographic shift underscores the growing vulnerability of older adults in our city,” the report, written by Health and Human Services Commissioner Mattie Castiel, reads.
The spike is not a mystery: Rents go up, SSI stays the same. Seniors living on SSI lose homes.
Another tear opens in the already tattered social safety net. No one is coming to repair it. Those who fall through are made to believe they deserved it. They become pariahs.
What a wicked society that allows this to happen. Where there’s no driver at the wheel to correct such an injustice. Where a real driver is widely understood to be a pipe dream. Fodder for the naive.
Harlan Crow comes to town
I’ll see the nightmarish portrait painted by the Out Of Reach report and raise it: Harlan Crow—the one from uhhhh… the news—is soon to be a Worcester landlord.
That’s right folks the Nazi swag collector with a pet Supreme Court justice recently bought a 220-unit apartment complex on Oriol Drive, per the Worcester Business Journal. Through a few LLCs and hedge funds, Crow dropped $4.5 million for the plot of land on Oriol Drive that’s slated to become another big box housing development with a fancy name: Alexan Worcester. It’ll look a bit like this…
While we don’t know for sure, safe money is on this being a “luxury” development with “market rate” rents. Because what else gets built? And as we’ve covered even the mandated “affordable units” if there are any won’t be very affordable and likely won’t be required.
So anyway, now Crow Holdings, Harlan Crow’s real estate company, is officially in on the Worcester grift.
Given his little pet Clarence Thomas was one of six Supreme Court justices to recently rule that being homeless is a crime, this bit of news comes as an extra ‘fuck you’—especially when you consider this project is right down the street from the Quality Inn permanent supportive housing project, one of the biggest components of the city’s alleged “housing first” homeless strategy. It’s possible this Harlan Crow development will get built first, as the Quality Inn project has lagged and lagged with Candy Mero-Carlson and “the neighborhood” fighting it tooth and nail. In a recent report, Health and Human Services Director Mattie Castiel said the 90-unit supportive housing project should be up and running by 2025. We’ll see.
Meanwhile, Harlan Crow is at the center of a national and criminally under-reported rent fixing scandal—the one you may remember also involves former Worcester City Manager Mike O’Brien.
While multiple lawsuits implicate dozens of massive real estate companies (like O’Brien’s WinnCompanies), it all centers around a spurious piece of technology called RealPage. Broken open by a 2022 ProPublica investigation, federal investigators are looking into whether RealPage, an algorithmic rent-setting software, is actually just a ploy by massive real estate companies to artificially juice rents around the country, operating as a giant cartel. There’s a lot of evidence to suggest that! And a recent FBI raid on a developer’s headquarters shows it’s getting serious.
Harlan Crown is a central figure in a nebulous and nefarious lobbying group called the National Multifamily Housing Council. In fact the council was led by Crow Holdings executive Ken Valach from 2022 to 2024. Shocker: RealPage is a member of the NMHC board of directors. Further, Crow Holdings and RealPage have been in a “strategic partnership” since 2019.
Back to Crow’s pet, Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court justice voted to strike down the Center for Disease Control’s pandemic-related eviction moratorium twice, at the behest of loud calls from both the NMHC and Crow Holdings. The moratorium was, of course, struck down. Dark!
When you hear an Eric Batista or an Ed Augustus or a Maura Healey talk about developers as the solution to the housing crisis, this is who they’re talking about. Remember that.
The more I learn of late about the machinations of the real estate game at the large developer level, the more I start to see something in Worcester city hall that a concept like “regulatory capture” doesn’t quiiite encompass. Mike O’Brien, appointed by Tim Murray, is now caught up in a massive developer scheme. His successor Ed Augustus was appointed in eerily similar fashion by Joe Petty. He is now the state housing secretary. In that post he steadfastly toes the line that incentivizing developers is the solution to the present crisis. He has immense control over which state-level housing policies advance and which don’t. Now we have Eric Batista, who’s dutifully neutered every real housing policy that’s crossed his desk. He was appointed the same way Augustus and O’Brien were, by the same small group of people. Candy Mero-Carlson backed Batista on the grounds that “the developers like him”—something her campaign contributions suggest she knows a thing or two about. There was no search or interview process.
All three city managers have maintained a shadowy and unaccountable advisory committee called the Economic Development Coordinating Council. Don’t know what that is? Why would you! There’s almost no reporting on it, despite the massive ramifications of its existence. In a short 2015 writeup, the Worcester Business Journal put it this way:
If you are looking for the true economic and political power in Central Massachusetts, you should start by walking into the Worcester city manager's office at 8:30 a.m. every Friday.
There, the executive committee of the Economic Development Coordinating Council holds its weekly meeting to discuss various proposals that impact the lifeblood of the city and region.
...
The EDCC is the brainchild of the city's key political and business leaders, who sought to lock several economic development organizations under one vision. Its formation was an agreement between the city, the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce, the Worcester Business Development Corp. and the Massachusetts Biomedical Initiatives.
There are no notes, no minutes. A search of the city website yields no hits. And yet, if the scant reporting is to be believed, the group is behind seemingly all of the notable developments in Worcester: Polar Park, CitySquare, The Reactory, UMass College of Pharmacy, who knows how many others. There’s no minutes!
The board over the years has consisted of people like Mike Angelini, Tim Murray, Joe Petty, etc etc. The people you’d expect. Basically the Worcester version of these guys from Killers of the Flower Moon:
In a 2022 WBJ article about “Worcester’s inner circle,” Craig Blais of the Worcester Business Development Corporation put the purpose of the EDCC perhaps a bit too bluntly:
“It allows for coordinated priorities to be advanced with grants, incentives and permitting assistance for developers interested in investing in Worcester.”
And none of that is done in public. By design! In a 2018 Commonwealth Beacon article, Augustus is quoted saying “keeping it private allows for more open, productive discussions.”
Open and productive for whom, Ed? A few lines down: “every developer interviewed for this story echoed those remarks.”
Because of course they did. It cuts the democratic process out of the deal making.
“It was very easy to do business in Worcester,” says Charles Monahan, who is president of the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health, which opened a campus in the city in 2000. “They can’t do enough for you.”
Which entity has more power, you think: the Worcester City Council or the Economic Development Coordinating Council? Which has done more to substantively reshape the city?
The answer is obvious, I think. The entity that meets in public and presents the appearance of an open process is downwind and less than the one that meets in secret by design. The EDCC is what the council should be, but conveniently absent public participation and security. The “inner circle” is fine with that. So, apparently, is the majority of the city council. When it comes to development, the city council merely launders the decisions made by the EDCC—Polar Park being the most crystal clear example.
Harlan Crow is, to the EDCC, a partner among partners. And at the same time someone the city council never has to talk about, let alone answer for.
Affordable housing policy is anathema to the EDCC’s goals. Rent burdened residents are at best collateral damage. But every Friday morning, faithfully, Worcester’s real power brokers meet with the city manager in secret, plotting the city’s next big renewal. They need not concern themselves with whether it’s good for residents. Once they decide on something, the council and the local press launder it as progress.
When you look at it a certain way it almost seems like city hall isn’t just beholden to a real estate cartel but rather a party to it?
So much more to say on that idea, but I’ll save it for another time. This post is already getting long and lord knows the EDCC is not going anywhere.
Now to some updates on Worcester Sucks-adjacent endeavors! Fun stuff!
Next Book Club Meeting: Aug. 1!
The next Worcester Commenter’s Union Book Club meeting will be Thursday, Aug. 1, 6 p.m. coffee hour, 7 p.m. start! Those on the email list should expect an email soon! Live in person at Rewind/Cordella’s and on the Worcestery Council Theatre 3000 Twitch page (give it a follow if you’re a Twitch person).
We’ll be reading Part III of Eight Hours—chapters 4, 5, and 6. The chapters cover “conflict” generally between the elite and the working class, over drinking and shooting fireworks and who should be doing what on playgrounds. Really good stuff. The meat of the book, I think.
Here are some scans if you don’t have a copy:
Chapter 4 / Chapter 5 / Chapter 6
Folder of all the scans so far.
After that, one more meeting on Eight Hours in September to finish up the book. Then we pick a new one! Get on the WCU Local 69 Book Club email list if you’re interested in participating. Or sign up for the Rewind Video Club Patreon to get updates there.
Tenant Rights Workshop on WCT3k!
On Tuesday, the Worcestery Council Theatre 3000 team is putting on a tenants’ rights workshop with Ben Levine, an attorney with the Central West Justice Center. Starts at 6:15 p.m. like usual over on the Twitch page. We’ll be interviewing him and taking questions from the audience! Come hang.
This idea came out of the comment section, as most good ideas tend to. Lots of people over the past couple weeks have had lots of good questions on how to navigate the often sour and usually abusive relationship between tenant and landlord. Ben’s an expert on the subject and we can’t wait to pick his brain! It’s going to be a good time.
Odds and ends
If you made it this far you must like what you’re reading! Consider helping us keep the scrappy little independent local journalism engine humming.
There’s a public safety subcommittee meeting on Tuesday taking up police drones and a report on how rental inspections work, which has proven quite challenging for city councilors lately. That reminds me: need to put a FOIA in for the Worcester’s Worst Landlords review.
The strange “homemade explosives” story from a few weeks ago was advanced by a Worcester Police Department advisory—two weeks after the fact—to "encourage the public to be mindful of unattended items, particularly coolers. Do not attempt to tamper with these items. Instead, call the authorities immediately." What is going on, lol.
This week a Telegram headline read “Asbestos removal part of demolition work at old Doherty High in Worcester.” Scary! But the story didn’t mention that the asbestos had been properly contained for years. Love a good fake controversy!
The long-dormant Amazon warehouse that replaced the Greendale Mall might start actually doing stuff this year. Not gunna hold my breath. Really think eminent domain should be considered here.
A developer interested in converting the former Fallon Health building on Elm Street into residential units got $2.5 million in state funding, on top of a $4 million TIF deal from the city. Will they get their financing though? Time will tell.
The very strange tunnel in downtown Worcester is set to close for good, presenting an opportunity to do something cool with an architectural oddity. It would be the coolest location in maybe the world for a DIY skatepark in the Worcide tradition just saying.
Lastly check out how badass this is. Unreal.
Ok til next time!
Great piece 👏