I know the exact area you're talking about.

My most striking memory from that Storm was Southbridge not canceling school. We didn't get hit as hard as a lot of the surrounding towns but conditions outside were still very dangerous and a lot of our teachers didn't live in town so they were expected to commute from areas that were hit a lot harder than we were.

Also if you lived within a mile of school you had to walk, couldn't bus. (Or something, don't remember the actual distance.) Which was DANGEROUS.

Needless to say almost no one actually showed up. I didn't go in, even my 1/4 mile walk was kind of terrifying downhill after an ice storm, and a lot of teachers just called out. One of mine remarked that she took ten minutes to get down her frozen steps, hit the pavement, immediately busted ass, and said fuck this and called in too.

I played a lot of Fallout 3 cause we were lucky enough to not lose power.

Really just don't do it at night in general. Obviously Halloween is the worst for it but it's a gamble to go at night year round.

M-M-M-M-MONSTER JAAAAAAMMMMM!

They're also re-releasing Titanic in theaters for Valentine's Day. Given that you guys apparently weren't alive when that movie came out in theaters (fuck, I'm old) that could be worth considering? It was a sensation for a reason. A big, beautiful, sappy blockbuster that's just incredible to look at on the big screen.

A restaurant that I went to like once when it opened, forgot about for like a decade, and then went again recently and said, "Fuck why have I not been coming here regularly?" Great food! (Not that that should be surprising, Rovezzi's was only ever good when Joey was the one in charge.)

And not just another baseball stadium. An exact replica of Polar Park. Bonus points if it's located across the street from the actual Polar Park.

Aside from affordable housing and something other than 'the worst trash pickup I have ever seen' this is my biggest wish for the city.

Cinema Worcester does indie showings at the Park View Room (located in the same building as the Cornerstone Bank on Park Ave, just across from Elm Park. I believe one of their long term goals is to eventually get an actual space but that could take a while.

And I believe Cinema320 at Clark is still kicking.

But we really need an actual Coolidge or Amherst Cinema-esque theater. It's insane how far you have to travel sometimes to catch even some of the more noteworthy smaller releases.

Yeah, a well designed rent-control policy could theoretically do a lot to stabilize a market like Worcester's, the problem is actually designing one. Government subsidies are a more effective solution.

>in fact makes it worse at is disincentivizes investment in new housing.

Landlords will also just take existing units off the market and convert them into units exempt from rent control which is part of what happened in San Francisco.

Would have been smart to introduce inclusionary zoning before they approved a bunch of market rate units. Instead they greenlit a bunch of developments then started talking about it.

I would also back Mike's in Grafton. Fantastic work, great prices.

Looks a little slushy for me but not sticking too bad. Work from home though so I haven't actually been outside to check yet.

Hell of a first day for ya.

I've done this and literally watched from my window as the trash collector picked up the box and threw it back on the ground.

That's because they are.

There's always two answers people give to this and neither one is satisfactory:

a) break it down - which would be a reasonable suggestion except that when you break down a TV sized box it takes up like 90% of the tiny recycling bin we get, so now you have no room for all your other reycling.

b) "Most towns won't pick up recycling you just leave on the ground." - Maybe so, but I'd bet most of those towns give you a recycling bin that's big enough to hold more than a single box.

I mean...kind of easier to keep one open when you're running a crime ring out of it.

I worked for this city for five years and let me assure you that is way more foresight than anyone in City Hall actually puts into shit like this.

Politician Answer: We can use that money to invest in our communities!

Real Answer: It doesn't!

It was literally just a Distracted Boyfriend meme about working for the city of Worcester.

Here it is.

I made a better one.

It's not exactly a great solution if you need air now but if you're ever in the Webster/Dudley area, or just on the state line, pop over to CT for a second. It's still free to put air in your tires there.

The insidious thing about NIMBYism is how prevalent it is even among people who claim to want to help these people. As Phil Ochs once said about liberals, "Three degrees to the left of center in the good times, three degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally."

It's very funny that, again, multiple points of the article they link undercuts their suggestion that market rate housing is, in any way, a solution to the problem. It literally points the finger at market-rate developments for exacerbating the homeless problem:

>Half a century ago, America invented modern homelessness.

>The stage was set with the shuttering of psychiatric hospitals in the wake of abuse scandals and the introduction of new psychotropic medications. Then cities started offering tax incentives to owners of flop houses, or single-room-occupancy hotels, to convert their properties into market-rate rentals, condos and co-ops. In New York City alone, more than 100,000 S.R.O. units that had housed substance abusers, elderly singles, former inmates and the mentally ill were lost.

And nowhere does it imply that building more of them was the solution to Houston's problems.

>Encampments like the one in the underpass lay bare decades of calamitous decisions by planners, politicians and health and housing authorities. One in every 14 Americans experiences homelessness at some point, a population that is disproportionately Black. Eradicating homelessness would involve tackling systemic racism, reconstituting the nation’s mental health, family support and substance abuse systems, raising wages, expanding the federal housing voucher program and building millions more subsidized homes.

Or here:

>The Houston that Ms. Rausch grew up in has changed. A once-abundant inventory of affordable housing has shrunk drastically. New construction focuses overwhelmingly on the top of the market. As elsewhere, giant investment firms like Blackstone have been gobbling up housing stock, pricing out middle-class and lower-income residents. Making matters harder, eviction filings in Harris County are now soaring: they’re higher than they were before the pandemic.

>“Meanwhile, housing costs are rising faster than incomes,” points out Bill Fulton, the director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, a think tank in the city, “And, as a result, a large majority of Houstonians have been shut out of homeownership and become renters, half of them rent-burdened, meaning they pay more than a third, and often more than half, of their income in rent.”

Hmm, now why does that sound familiar!?

>Houston has gotten this far by teaming with county agencies and persuading scores of local service providers, corporations and charitable nonprofits — organizations that often bicker and compete with one another — to row in unison. Together, they’ve gone all in on “housing first,” a practice, supported by decades of research, that moves the most vulnerable people straight from the streets into apartments, not into shelters, and without first requiring them to wean themselves off drugs or complete a 12-step program or find God or a job.

OP seems to read this part and conclude that "housing first" means just building more housing, except what "Housing First" really means is:

>an intervention for homeless people with severe disabling conditions that combines four elements: “(1) program philo- sophy and practice values emphasizing consumer choice; (2) commu- nity based mobile support services; and (3) permanent scatter-site housing... Because [Housing First] does not require psychiatric treat- ment or sobriety as a precondition for attaining housing, the model includes a fourth component, harm reduction, so that support services can help reduce the risks associated with psychiatric or addiction-re- lated behavior”

Really not sure why you decided to use that quote. The article isn't about that dude. He's mentioned twice, and it's never in the context of building more market rate housing. Hell, it's not even really an article that specifically says "more market rate housing will fix everything." In fact, large swaths of the article are about how cities are failing to build affordable housing, and several parts of the article specifically undercut what you're trying to say here.

>If mental-health issues or drug abuse were major drivers of homelessness, then places with higher rates of these problems would see higher rates of homelessness. They don’t. Utah, Alabama, Colorado, Kentucky, West Virginia, Vermont, Delaware, and Wisconsin have some of the highest rates of mental illness in the country, but relatively modest homelessness levels. What prevents at-risk people in these states from falling into homelessness at high rates is simple: They have more affordable-housing options.

Also from the article:

>When we have a dire shortage of affordable housing, it’s all but guaranteed that a certain number of people will become homeless.

And what does Worcester have? A shortage of affordable housing. As the WRB's report specifically points out (emphasis mine):

>Worcester may simply need more housing for all to mitigate rising costs. And both the City and private developers are on track to create that housing. For example, according to the Worcester Regional Chamber of Commerce , there are about 24 proposed or under-way housing projects in Worcester lined up for the next few years, creating hundreds of units. Most of these units may be market-rate, however, which may not immediately help to alleviate some of the cost-burden.

While yes, part of the problem is that Worcester doesn't have enough housing, the other half of the equation is that Worcester's residents are increasingly cost-burdened, spending more than 30% of their income on housing. This is happening because incomes in the area are static, while the housing costs keep going up. While building market rate apartments might alleviate some of this problem, it's a big maybe, and the majority of the homeless are people who can't afford to live in that new housing anyway. Building more market rate housing also drives up rents on nearby properties, potentially forcing those residents into homelessness, creating a vicious cycle.

>The housing market is interrelated. The same rules that make it difficult and expensive to build market rate housing make it even more difficult and expensive to build affordable housing.

Except developers are not struggling to build market rate housing in Worcester. As I said, there are 24 housing projects in development in this city and most of them are going to be market rate. Seems like it's actually pretty easy to build market rate apartments in Worcester. Almost like city government is encouraging it. The city could have, y'know, chosen to not greenlight some of those market rate apartments in and offered incentives to build affordable ones, or forced developers to include a less expensive units in those developments, but it didn't, because it was worried that it might scare away developers because that's not as profitable for them. (The horror!) It's only now, after greenlighting nearly two dozen market rate housing projects, that they're considering inclusionary zoning.

>But if we don’t build new market rate housing to keep up with population, then more people become homeless as rents go up and the growing number of renters fight over the same amount of housing.

Except building more market rate apartments increases the rents on nearby properties, causing the very same problem you're claiming it helps avoid. If people are being forced out of their $800 apartments because now the landlord can charge $1500, a glut of $1750/mo apartments is not the solution. This is literally already happening. If 1500+ people are competing for 42 affordable housing units in Main South, chances are those people cannot afford to live in this new housing. Even if building them slightly brings down the rents, and that's a big if.

Build 'em all, let the market sort 'em out is wankery.

How is more market rate housing going to prevent people from becoming homeless? According to that recent WRB report on the rent prices there's 24 housing projects in the pipeline and most of those are going to be market rate which won't do anything to lower rents. That's not going to solve anything.

Literally every restaurant on the Common has better food than Beer Garden, better atmosphere too. If Revolution Pie and Pint were still open then maybe Beer Garden would only be the second shittiest restaurant in the city.