Worcester Speaks #6: Nate Sabo
“The only way to get people to listen is if you have 40 people show up and shout about it.”
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Worcester Speaks #6: Nate Sabo
Nate Sabo works in real estate and is a member of both the Zoning Board of Appeals and the Canal District Neighborhood Association. If you haven’t read Bill’s reporting on Nate’s role in scuttling an extraneous gas station, you can catch up here.
Liz: I’d like to start by asking about the Zoning Board of Appeals and what drew you to that particular facet of city government.
Nate: I moved to Boston in 2010. I moved to Worcester in 2019. I wanted to get more involved in the local government, local activities, local things like that. And my background's in real estate, so zoning and planning were kind of a good opportunity to do that. And I learned after a short period of time here that there were some struggles with those areas of Worcester. I thought maybe I could provide some expertise and help.
How would you characterize Worcester's zoning and real estate issues?
Well, I might get the year wrong, but it's been 40-ish years since Worcester zoning was revised. So it's a 1970s, early 80s mindset for planning, for a city that has changed. The city itself has changed dramatically. And what people think is good city planning has changed dramatically. So because of that, almost every new development or anything of any size and scale comes before the zoning board 'cause they need some kind of variance or special permit to do what they wanna do because the zoning is so outdated.
So what does that version of Worcester look like, that dates back to the 70s and 80s? I imagine it's very car-centric.
Yeah. A lot of it has a requirement for two parking spaces per unit, things like that that just don't match up. You can't build something that's dense in the urban core that meets the parking requirements in our zoning in almost all cases, unless there's been some kind of overlay district that was added on later as an exception.
For folks who haven't had the opportunity to interact with their local zoning board, can you give some examples of what you all are asked to consider?
It runs a very wide gamut: the individual who maybe built their porch three feet over the line and needs an exception or wants to add on to their house and needs a two foot variance 'cause it's too close to their neighbor's yard. Because the other big piece of the zoning is the lots in Worcester. Most of them are very old, you know, a 150-year-old definition. And the zoning in the 70s has these requirements for step-backs from the side yard and front yard and things that are virtually impossible and don't exist today on most of those lots. So if you wanna make any change to your house, it immediately doesn't comply with zoning law. So you have to come to the zoning board to get an exception to that.
That's very inefficient.
Yes. Extremely inefficient. And then that ranges all the way up to some of the large multi-family developments, whether it's parking or setbacks again or things like that come before us. And then there's some special things, like all gas stations have to come for a special permit.
I wanted to ask about your and Jordan Berg Powers’ work, along with a whole community coalition, to stop another gas station in Worcester. It sounds like a rare triumph. Can you tell me more about what was at stake there and your role in it?
Well it's interesting because in the last two years or so, I think there's actually been three gas station permits come before the zoning board. One a couple years ago kind of was struck down in the same way as the recent one. You know, it didn't make sense. The neighborhood turned out. And then another one was allowed probably about a year and or so ago. And you know, this last one was kind of maybe the most egregious, you know, it was right in the middle of a neighborhood next to houses in a watershed area where the runoff could potentially go into a conservation area. [There are] much better uses, like there was by-right housing. You could build housing on the site instead of a gas station without coming to the zoning board. So this was one that really just made no sense.
Also, I think over those two years, the community and some of us on the zoning board have done a lot of research and found that per capita, Worcester has two or three times the number of gas stations in most cities. We don't need more gas stations in Worcester. And most of those gas stations are in what I would call environmental justice areas. There's not a saturation of gas stations on the west side. They're in lower income business corridors and things like that, that affect lower income, economically challenged people in most cases. And the health effects [of] living near a gas station continue to come out to be deadly, frankly, to people that live close to a gas station.
It struck me reading about that hearing that people were reacting to a proposal that was pretty obviously a scam in a couple different ways. And I see people getting sucked in by scam promises all the time. But something allowed this faction of the community to come together and be like, no, not today, we're not falling for this one. Do you have a sense of what the magic formula was?
Well, with anything in Worcester politics, whether it's with the zoning board or the city council, the only way to get people to listen is if you have 40 people show up and shout about it. Sometimes the city council still doesn't listen. Sometimes zoning boards still don't listen when those people show up. But the city councilor that represents that neighborhood had them well organized. It's the first time I've ever remembered them taking out extra seats. And that's step one. And then step two, it was going to the root of how everything controversial in Worcester goes: Well, we'll just continue it to the next meeting until people forget about it or it goes away.
And this was one of those things that I thought was so egregious. I was like, we don't need to do this again. Let's settle it here. And even with that, it was kind of engineered where the gas station [proposal] was able to be withdrawn versus not approved, which is actually a big difference because if it had gone to a vote and been voted down, they couldn't come back for two years at all for that special permit. But now that they were allowed to withdraw, they could actually come back again with that same or similar proposal with a different makeup of a board or, you know, on a night when Jordan and I weren't there, you know what I mean? Like, they could come back and potentially get that approved again.
Do you think that'll happen?
I don't think it'll happen. The Garrett's Family Market guy, I don't think he realized some of the things that came out. I was looking at him during the hearing and I don't think he wants to come back and personally go through that again. I don't think he realized there was going to be that kind of opposition to it in Worcester.
You are also involved in the Canal District Neighborhood Association, is that right?
Around the time that the new parking plan for the Canal District related to the ballpark was getting rolled out, the people that live here kind of found out about it. And at that point in time, there weren't a lot of people living in the Canal District, so everybody was focused on the businesses. Now that's changed dramatically in the last five years, but we kind of organized as a neighborhood to say, hey, you know, this is really gonna impact us. We want some input into this. And as we did that, I got to know some of the city councilors including Councilor [Candy Mero-]Carlson, and she said, hey, can you kind of organize the neighborhood? Because we need to be able to come to the residents.
So we went through a big process with the parking and we got a few things for the neighbors, but it basically went forward as is. And we started having some neighborhood meetings and trying to address other concerns, and Councilor Carlson didn't like what the neighborhood had to say, so she just stopped showing up to our neighborhood meetings when we were having them.
It's not really an active group. There's still emails that go out, but we kind of frankly gave up on meetings because without the city councilor and the police and some of the other city groups that just wouldn't show up, it became kind of pointless to have the meetings. And even when they did show up, they say, okay, we're gonna look at this, or we're gonna do this, and then come back at the next meeting and say the same thing.
Did you get the sense that maybe they came to it with the assumption that it was theater?
Oh, a hundred percent. A hundred percent.
Yeah. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the ballpark and how it's changed the Canal District.
So we moved here about five years ago from downtown Boston. [The ballpark] was kind of one of the motivating factors that actually got us to move here. Now fast forward five years later, I have a better understanding of the city and what could have been done with that money and how much it costs and the impact it's had on the Canal District. Like, I wonder if the city had put $160 million into something else, how much of a positive impact that could have had on the Canal District and the whole city. I mean, if we spent that $160 million to encourage housing development five years ago, we wouldn't be in a housing crisis, but instead we spent it on a baseball park.
There were a lot of promises tied to Polar Park, that it was going to be awesome for all the small businesses. And now there’s just nowhere to park. There was a brief moment when I moved here like eight years ago where you could park in a vague, unpaved no man's land. If you were willing to bottom out your car, it was perfect. Do you feel like the ballpark has come through on any of the promises that were made?
A few of 'em. I'll answer that and I wanna come back to the parking, 'cause parking is another one of those issues that could easily be fixed that we just don't change. So I think the ballpark's lived up to maybe having people have a different perception of Worcester, like that there's something going on in Worcester that didn't previously exist. I'm not sure that's from people that live in Worcester, but the people that come from out of town to the game. There's those nice restaurants and there's the ballpark, and there's the public market, and Birch Street Bread.
But the issue is, the parking plan that was implemented when the ballpark opened. Long story short, there was a lot of discussion, a lot of change, and it was like, we gotta put some parking plan in place. The season's starting, we'll put this plan in place and we'll change it [later]. In five, four years now, there's been no adjustment. It's the same plan that was put in.
If they changed the plan, what could be done to make it better?
One of the things that I say all the time now is, we made a parking plan in the neighborhood that applies to really about 40 days a year. There's 60 ball games now, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday games. Parking's not really a problem in the neighborhood on those days. It's really Friday, Saturday, Sunday, every other week during the summer when they're home. But the whole plan is built around those 40 days when there's a ball game. And the best example is that they made two-hour on-street parking everywhere, so that if you were going to the game, you had to park in a lot and you couldn't park on the street. Well, the way the Canal District works [according to] a lot of the businesses, two-hour parking isn't enough time for someone to go to the hairdresser. The parking doesn't work if you come to maybe shop at Crompton Place and have dinner and grab a beer somewhere after that, [it] takes more than two hours. It makes sense on game days to have that, but the reason that we got these new fancy parking meters was because you could change it. You could have two-hour parking one day and four-hour parking the next. You could make easy adjustments, which have never been made.
The other big piece that's about to change in the Canal District is there's thousands of new people moving in with the new development. On game days, there's police to direct traffic and things like that. There hasn't been any change to traffic control or the streets or anything like that to account for what's essentially gonna be game day traffic every day once The Cove and some of these other buildings fill up.
Yeah. Is there a plan in place that you know of to get all of those new neighbors organized?
So, not yet. So District 120, which is one of the new developments that has 85 affordable housing units, was supposed to be part of a five-phase plan. Well, the economics changed for building, and it's no longer a five-phase plan. Boston Capital that owns the land is trying to sell it. And as part of that plan, there was a parking garage and a temporary parking lot for that building. Those didn't get built. So now you've got 85 affordable units that have like eight parking spaces, all of which are handicapped parking places. And when the people moved into the neighborhood, there's nowhere for them to park. If you're paying hundreds of dollars to park your car a month, it's not affordable housing.
Is there anything else Worcester-related that I haven't asked about?
Yeah, there is. I've been pretty outspoken about it, but I probably haven't talked about it: Eric Batista as city manager. There was some optimism that we'd actually get a qualified city manager who had experienced managing a city, and instead they put someone in who'd been a project manager two years before, who didn't have the skills, and didn't have the abilities. And when you couple that with the city council and some of the people on city council, it just makes it so dysfunctional that you can't really get things done. There's a rumor that we've heard from multiple areas that Councilor Carlson and Councilor Ojeda, and probably Batista, have some plan to get us off the zoning board.
Who's the “we” in that?
Jordan Berg Powers. Councilor Ojeda has come before the board twice and felt because we disagreed with him that he was disrespected by Jordan and me. And you know, there's that faction of Councilor Carlson, Ojeda, Mo Bergman, Kate Toomey, where if you disagree with them, you've disrespected their role as a councilor.
A very democratic mindset.
Yeah, exactly. They don't have any interest in representing all of their constituents.
How are you thinking about moving forward now that you and Jordan have this information?
Well, I don't really know. It's just come to light in the last couple days. We heard it from multiple sources, I would say. And it doesn't seem that there's a mechanism to immediately get us off the zoning board. You're on for a term and I don't see how you just remove people from the board. So it's probably something they can do at the end of the term and just make sure they don't reappoint you.
[Nate had previously mentioned that he may soon take an opportunity to move to Toronto.] Does that add to your sense that maybe that you're gonna get outta town or does it actually make you regretful about getting outta town?
Probably makes me regretful about getting outta town. One of the other reasons that Candy Carlson doesn't like me is I was a big supporter of Rob Bilotta for running against her last year. So once that happened, you know, she went around telling people I was nuts and all sorts of things. So, you know, leaving and not being here to work on Rob's campaign, who's a great candidate, who cares about the people in Worcester, who's thoughtful, who isn't someone I agree with on every issue, but as someone who I know will listen to people and try to improve things for everybody in Worcester versus the current councilors we have who don't have any interest in that, for the most part, outside of a handful.
Have you ever considered running for city council?
I have, yeah. Probably if Rob hadn't run last time, I would've run against Candy in District 2. Rob's a much better candidate than me, I'll put it that way. You know, he's grown up here and knows the city better than me and has the connections much more so than I do, and has the right mindset. But I wouldn't have let Candy run unopposed.
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