Joe O'Brien has been a good mayor, a friend to many parts of our community, an open door and a breath of fresh air. On the issue I am most involved with - stopping the foreclosures and keeping people in their homes - he has been a friend and supporter. I agree with Clive that "... his decision not to seek re-election as mayor is a blow to the city." I fear that my own being too busy with other struggles and issues - such as making a living - to help with his reelection campaign may in some small way have contributed to his decision.
Clive also writes "Despite his advocacy for those 'living at the margin,' Mr. O’Brien also understood that helping them should not come at the expense of other residents." Joe's own experience with trying to juggle the mayor's seven-days 60-hour-a-week job and a challenging experience with fatherhood on $35k illustrates a deeper truth: lots of us are struggling to get by, struggling with issues of survival and holding our families together. This is not just a problem that is "over there" in Great Brook Valley, not just an immigrant problem or a "minority" problem.
A politics that deals with this, that supports us all, has to include reaching out to all those on the margins of our city. Our struggles are theirs too, and a politics that includes them is one that makes us more powerful, not less.
Joe's genius is that he understands this. Putting him in the Mayor's office was a win for all the regular people of Worcester. His personal decision to step down, discarding the gains of our past efforts, was a defeat for us all, whether he intended that or not. But we should not let our disappointment blind us to our need to keep his voice on the City Council.
That one person's decision to step down could so impact the work and interests of so many highlights the need for a different kind of politics, one that is not about candidates and personalities.
Showing posts with label Worcester. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Worcester. Show all posts
Friday, September 23, 2011
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Windmill City
Bootstrap pointed out something important: the turbines for these windmills came from Germany. That's a wakeup call!
We are spending a trillion dollars a year on a war machine with 700 foreign bases and troops in 130 countries - mainly to protect US control of the world's oil markets. If the war they are prepared for ever happens it will destroy our civilization, win or lose. But the oil-based technology they are protecting threatens to destroy our biosphere, and perhaps our species! The insanity of this picture is just mind-boggling!
What Princeton has shown is that the answer is right under our noses. If we could take that trillion dollars a year and spend it at home building wind, wave, solar, geothermal and (soon) fusion energy technology and electric vehicles that run on it, we would absolutely not need that oil!
We would put the people back to work, at good-paying jobs.
We would be makers of products the world needs and will buy.
We would be able to lift from our children's minds the dread of nuclear annihilation that most of us have lived with our entire lives, because the last reason for a world war would be gone.
And we would be able to start thinking again about leaving a beautiful world for our great grandchildren and their great grandchildren.
If Washington won't take the lead, Princeton can. And Worcester could too.
Imagine shipping crates being unloaded at the docks of Bremen and Calcutta marked "Another Worcester Windmill - Made with Pride in USA".
Imagine travel brochures at Heathrow Airport shouting "Visit Worcester Massachusetts, the world famous 'Windmill City' where the American Revolution began!"
Imagine being proud to tell people anywhere in the world that you're from Worcester - and everyone not only knows what you mean, they can pronounce it!
Why not?
We are spending a trillion dollars a year on a war machine with 700 foreign bases and troops in 130 countries - mainly to protect US control of the world's oil markets. If the war they are prepared for ever happens it will destroy our civilization, win or lose. But the oil-based technology they are protecting threatens to destroy our biosphere, and perhaps our species! The insanity of this picture is just mind-boggling!
What Princeton has shown is that the answer is right under our noses. If we could take that trillion dollars a year and spend it at home building wind, wave, solar, geothermal and (soon) fusion energy technology and electric vehicles that run on it, we would absolutely not need that oil!
We would put the people back to work, at good-paying jobs.
We would be makers of products the world needs and will buy.
We would be able to lift from our children's minds the dread of nuclear annihilation that most of us have lived with our entire lives, because the last reason for a world war would be gone.
And we would be able to start thinking again about leaving a beautiful world for our great grandchildren and their great grandchildren.
If Washington won't take the lead, Princeton can. And Worcester could too.
Imagine shipping crates being unloaded at the docks of Bremen and Calcutta marked "Another Worcester Windmill - Made with Pride in USA".
Imagine travel brochures at Heathrow Airport shouting "Visit Worcester Massachusetts, the world famous 'Windmill City' where the American Revolution began!"
Imagine being proud to tell people anywhere in the world that you're from Worcester - and everyone not only knows what you mean, they can pronounce it!
Why not?
Monday, November 30, 2009
Declining property values
Good summary, Nick.
One statistic you should have included is the proportion of homeowners - and the proportion of new homeowners - who are underwater now: trapped by a mortgage whose principal amount is higher than the market value of their property. That number is very high, and climbing.
But the engine that is driving the property values in Worcester down and driving our City toward a fiscal and housing disaster is the shocking collapse of the market value of the three-deckers!
Abandonments are spreading. The banks that take foreclosed properties when no one will bid on them are walking away from them. Boarded-up buildings are a fire and crime threat, and drive down the value of surrounding properties. With no one maintaining them, they quickly go to ruin. The effects are felt in Tatnuck as falling home values and declining City services.
This is the central challenge we need to tackle together to save our City.
One statistic you should have included is the proportion of homeowners - and the proportion of new homeowners - who are underwater now: trapped by a mortgage whose principal amount is higher than the market value of their property. That number is very high, and climbing.
But the engine that is driving the property values in Worcester down and driving our City toward a fiscal and housing disaster is the shocking collapse of the market value of the three-deckers!
Abandonments are spreading. The banks that take foreclosed properties when no one will bid on them are walking away from them. Boarded-up buildings are a fire and crime threat, and drive down the value of surrounding properties. With no one maintaining them, they quickly go to ruin. The effects are felt in Tatnuck as falling home values and declining City services.
This is the central challenge we need to tackle together to save our City.
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
The Foreclosure Issue
Foreclosures is the Elephant in the Room that most Council candidates are dodging.
Worcester has had one of the highest foreclosure rates in the state for the last 3 years. Banks are emptying buildings and leaving them to go to ruin. This blight brings rising crime and homelessness, plunging tax revenues, emptying schools and plunging property values, with a huge proportion of new homeowners throughout the City now “under water”.
Only Grace Ross has made this a central issue, organizing residents and shepherding bills through the Council to keep people in their homes and direct public money for home-buying to city residents rather than outside speculators.
Worcester has had one of the highest foreclosure rates in the state for the last 3 years. Banks are emptying buildings and leaving them to go to ruin. This blight brings rising crime and homelessness, plunging tax revenues, emptying schools and plunging property values, with a huge proportion of new homeowners throughout the City now “under water”.
Only Grace Ross has made this a central issue, organizing residents and shepherding bills through the Council to keep people in their homes and direct public money for home-buying to city residents rather than outside speculators.
District 4 results
To me, the big story of this District 4 race was that - as Clive and many others predicted - the "infrequent voters" Grace Ross was trying to engage did not turn out.
The unofficial results of this race were
Haller 62%,
Ross 38%.
The vote totals were almost exactly the same as for the Haller-Simonds race two years ago. Perhaps mostly the same people, voting the same way.
But the real winner was "Not Voting".
As percents of District 4's 14,985 registered voters, the results were
Haller 8.7%
Ross 5.3%
Not Voting 87.0%
I did a little playing with numbers from Wikipedia, and came up with an estimate that District 4 has about 24,500 adults age 18 and over. As a percent of that, the results were
Haller 5.3%
Ross 3.8%
Not Voting 91.4%
Many say that those 87% (or 91%) who didn't vote just don't care, but I've been in enough peoples homes, listening to them talk about their issues, their concerns and their feelings, to know this isn't true.
The problem is that most working people don't believe their vote will matter, that it will make their lives better, or that anyone they send off to represent them will remain on their side. And they are afraid of stirring up a struggle that they aren't ready for.
We're not going to just talk them out of those beliefs. We will have to be there talking and working with them, organizing and leading them and teaching them how to struggle and win *between* elections.
One ray of hope came from an election worker I sat next to at a polling station. At 4 pm he pointed out that there were entire streets where no one had voted, but then there were a few - no different from the others to look at - that always had a good turnout.
He used to live on one of those streets, and he had organized his neighbors to get out and vote, and to get each other out to vote.
Eleven years after he moved away they were still doing it!
The unofficial results of this race were
Haller 62%,
Ross 38%.
The vote totals were almost exactly the same as for the Haller-Simonds race two years ago. Perhaps mostly the same people, voting the same way.
But the real winner was "Not Voting".
As percents of District 4's 14,985 registered voters, the results were
Haller 8.7%
Ross 5.3%
Not Voting 87.0%
I did a little playing with numbers from Wikipedia, and came up with an estimate that District 4 has about 24,500 adults age 18 and over. As a percent of that, the results were
Haller 5.3%
Ross 3.8%
Not Voting 91.4%
Many say that those 87% (or 91%) who didn't vote just don't care, but I've been in enough peoples homes, listening to them talk about their issues, their concerns and their feelings, to know this isn't true.
The problem is that most working people don't believe their vote will matter, that it will make their lives better, or that anyone they send off to represent them will remain on their side. And they are afraid of stirring up a struggle that they aren't ready for.
We're not going to just talk them out of those beliefs. We will have to be there talking and working with them, organizing and leading them and teaching them how to struggle and win *between* elections.
One ray of hope came from an election worker I sat next to at a polling station. At 4 pm he pointed out that there were entire streets where no one had voted, but then there were a few - no different from the others to look at - that always had a good turnout.
He used to live on one of those streets, and he had organized his neighbors to get out and vote, and to get each other out to vote.
Eleven years after he moved away they were still doing it!
Rails to Worcester
In 1959, through trains (4 each way daily) made the run from Worcester to Boston in 58 minutes, with stops with baggage handling at Framingham, Wellesly Farms and South Station. The run from Springfield to Boston took 2 hours and 1 minute, with additional stops in Auburn and Palmer.
With the tracks in comparable condition, including restoring double-tracking where necessary, and using modern rolling stock - not super-trains, just light-weight high-speed cars, with traction on every axle, that lean into the turns - it should be possible to average 20% higher speeds. Cut 2 minutes from every 1959 stop for no baggage and higher acceleration, but add a minute each for 10 or 12 commuter stops, and commuter trains could run hourly from Boston to Springfield in less than 1 hour 40 minutes, and less than 50 minutes from Worcester to Boston.
Expensive? Yes. Pie in the sky? No.
Passenger service never did make money directly. The railroads recouped the expense of providing commuter and inter-city passenger rail service by 'speculating' in land, purchasing it low and re-selling at a huge profit when its value was increased by their investment and service.
As a society we have to start doing that kind of accounting, looking at the value added to our communities by government investment and services - and at how to recover some of it for the cost - not just looking at the bottom line of government balance sheets.
With the tracks in comparable condition, including restoring double-tracking where necessary, and using modern rolling stock - not super-trains, just light-weight high-speed cars, with traction on every axle, that lean into the turns - it should be possible to average 20% higher speeds. Cut 2 minutes from every 1959 stop for no baggage and higher acceleration, but add a minute each for 10 or 12 commuter stops, and commuter trains could run hourly from Boston to Springfield in less than 1 hour 40 minutes, and less than 50 minutes from Worcester to Boston.
Expensive? Yes. Pie in the sky? No.
Passenger service never did make money directly. The railroads recouped the expense of providing commuter and inter-city passenger rail service by 'speculating' in land, purchasing it low and re-selling at a huge profit when its value was increased by their investment and service.
As a society we have to start doing that kind of accounting, looking at the value added to our communities by government investment and services - and at how to recover some of it for the cost - not just looking at the bottom line of government balance sheets.
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