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(In the event it is of use for whom it is of use, this is another chapter in gentrification of Elm.

To be clear, that the building was bought and sold, and the new owners see a gold mine in it is not the problem, it is the total lack of truth, openness, and respect of the tenants and how the sale happened and the sudden need to get out that is.

This has been, is, and will continue to be happening to many people in the city, and, unless they are complicit in selling the city from under its citizens, city leadership needs to get a handle on this now.)

It was 7:30 am this recent Saturday morning that anyone in my apartment building, attempting to sleep in on the weekend, was rudely awakened by a buzz-saw taking down every bit of vegetation in the garden-like courtyard outside my windows and removed. Within two hours all that was left in the courtyard was dirt and the concrete walkways.

The letter from the new owner stated specifically that the 12-18-month renovations would begin on November 1. We were still a few days ahead of the November I deadline to be gone and the commencement of renovations, so this was yet another “misstatement” by the building manager in a line of many such as his assuring us it was imperative he meet with each and every one of us to talk and make the moving as easy as possible transition, but never did.

Almost immediately after we go the notice the building had been sold, a big red dumpster was dropped off in the parking lot taking up three spaces at least and it just sits there, unused, as a reminder we are to leave.

Among things specified in response to my second request for clarification, which contained the specific mention that this was my second such request, on promises made in the original letter, it was explained that the new owners would help with the moving costs  at an amount far less than what a move would cost in first, last and/or security deposit with assurances of paying the cost of moving possessions as far as ten miles out of the city, a promise faith in which is severely undermined by no previous promises being fulfilled.

We are still waiting for the meeting that was so important.

The assistance in helping to find a new dwelling consisted in suggesting that we look on Zillow, Trulia, Apartments.com, along with some others that tenants had already been looking at as some had used them in the past as I had.

I was happy in the apartment and, after a life of living and working in various parts of the country and having had to deal with many controversial things as a Union, Gay Rights, Civil Rights activist who was involved in advocating for the voiceless, marching on picket lines and demonstrations, getting involved in the politics that would produce the right legislation and conditions for those to whom I lent my voice and my skills, was ready to just lay low and dabble in activism as an ally.

When the notice to quit arrived and due to some suspicious activities, I began speculating on my blog which led to articles being written by various news outlets on my building’s situation as what is happening with this one building is a much bigger problem than just this one building. These led to a meeting of community groups to deal with housing now and in future as gentrification will make it a continuing problem, and this resulted in the gathering of people who could offer housing assistance or at least information to the soon to be ousted tenants on the sidewalk next to the parking lot of the apartment building.  

On the afternoon of the day following this helpful gathering, I received a phone call from the new owners’ building manager asking how things were going.

I explained that there is a housing crunch, that I have every email related to all my attempts to find housing so I have proof I have been looking, that, on average, there are 34 applicants seeking each apartment, that telling us to go to Zillow et al did not constitute real help just a sloughing off, and that I would not be out by November first but would continue looking and adding to the proof I am doing that.

Although he wished me well, he did insist that they had been helping people find housing claiming they had already moved several people, although no one has been seen moving out of any apartments, but unfortunately, they could not help in actually finding an apartment, but would be there to help in the move.

The call was dropped, and not being pleased with the brush off  I was receiving before the call drop, I immediately texted the building manager so he would know I had not cut off the call in anger and knew he did not as well.

I texted,

“Somehow, we got cut off. I will inform you of any progress.”

The response, apparently offered as evidence of how hard he is working to help in finding a new place, was a “helpful” link to an apartment on Zillow, one to which I had already applied and the application for, the receipt of the application, and a follow up from Zillow were already in my file of all saved apartment search documentation.

This was not help.

I responded,

“This does not help. I applied early this morning and am #34 on the list. Got any pull? If you do, I’m out of here sooner.

Now, considering this gentleman is the agent for a property management company that is part of a larger real estate empire building enterprise, one would assume there would be connections with other real estate professionals as there are most likely realtor associations unless this conglomerate is so distant that it has no local connections only connections to widely spread real estate holdings.

The response seemed to validate the latter suspicion.

“I don’t have any pull. I would encourage you to continue grinding and hopefully something works out. We will let you know if any other units come up that we can try to reserve for you.”

Besides this being an illustration of the total lack of a real intent to be of any help it seems to go against what was written in the letter of introduction from the owners’ agent that contained the promises of help for a smooth transition.

“WE have worked with dozens of tenants in similar situations and are confident that we can provide you with viable options to assist you in relocating during the construction period or remaining at the property if you choose to do so. It is important that I sit down with you and explain all the options so that we can figure out a plan that works best for you.”

The letter may say that they have worked with dozens of tenants, but there is no mention of the degree to which they did work or how successful they were. If this present situation is any indication of what working with the tenants was, it was just to recommend apartment rentals sites and advise them to be of good cheer.

The word that there was an option to stay during construction was immediately canceled by the notice to be out by November First. This is not how a choice is offered and made. While they had kept the sale of the building and all the negotiations that preceded it by months secret from the tenants denying them a less panicky search to find housing most likely to keep the building with tenants as a tenanted building has more value than an empty one so a higher price can be demanded, the tenants were led to believe in writing that they had time to look and move, only to have this immediately replaced with an order to quit in 30 days.

And, while all this time with the promise of much needed and very important meeting to speak to all tenants for our and the company’s good, the building manager did have the time to stop by briefly to speak with the workers removing the vegetation having yet the time to speak to tenants unless we call him or email knowing it may take a few before a response is received.

The further disregard of the tenants was in the fact that three days before what the tenants had been told in writing was the start day of construction, November 1, they were rudely awaken at 7:30 am by chain saws and little Cat plows with no one having informed us of this change in schedule.

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To make sure that people can own as many types of firearms as they want, even at the cost of innocent lives, while ignoring teachers and other realities, school “experts” have dreamt up some desperate attempts to appear to care, but not enough to insist on reasonable gun laws.

They have even come up with see-through plastic backpacks as if a kid would carry a gun into school when there are backpack and jacket checks and metal detectors at every entrance in the morning and not leave it somewhere outside but close to the building for later retrieval, ways to barricade the doors swiftly, arming teachers so that during a shooting first responders cannot tell them apart from the actual shooter, having human lockers installed in classrooms into which students can lock themselves during a school shooting, and any number of precautions rather than make guns less accessible to those who should not have them forgetting that as nothing has really been done about school shootings, among the students who have been trained from kindergarten as to what to do in a shooting and where people should hide are the potential shooters who will come back and apply that knowledge to the best effect.

The next step is to list all scars and blemishes along with DNA so in the event there is no face to identify the victim, there will be other means.

Or they could enact reasonable gun control.

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When Walt Disney bought land in Anaheim California, he was limited in how much land he could purchase with his company’s finances, and the amount of land originally hoped to be sufficient was quickly found to be inadequate. As a result of the popularity of Disney Land other attractions and vacation related businesses bought land around the park effectively limiting its expansion.

Needing more space and knowing they could increase Disney profits by making Disney more accessible to those East of the Mississippi, the company decided to buy land in Florida, a climate similar to Southern California, but knew quite well that when word got out that Disney was buying, the owners of the orange groves and swamp land would have demanded top dollar for their land and this would mean that Disney would be in the same position as in California, unable to buy the amount of land to prevent encroachment and allow expansion because of cost, and this would have sunk the project.

To get the land at dirt cheap prices, when land in Orlando began changing hands, the identity of the actual buyer was hidden as multiple fake companies were established to buy it.

Local landowners were happy to sell their land for the prices they were offered not knowing how much more they could have gotten and only found this out long after the papers were signed and sufficient land bought. It would stand to reason that local government had some awareness of the dealings and let it happen because of the future economic advantage and perhaps because of silence bought by greased palms. 

People began to notice the sudden interest in land that was being bought up by what they assumed were unrelated companies, speculating that some large industrial companies, like Ford, might be coming to town.

In spite of denying it was the purchaser after a grocery store clerk told the Orlando Sentinel about a number of men from California who had started coming to get sodas at his store, and a waitress said she had seen Walt Disney in her café, people began to suspect the real buyer was Disney.

Paul Helliwell, an attorney for Walt Disney Productions, recruited the president of the First National Bank of Orlando to help with negotiations with landowners telling him that he was representing a client whose identity would have to remain secret until all the land purchases had been made.

Such agreements are not made without some advantage to the keeper of the secret.

This resulted in setting up fake companies such as the “Reedy Creek Ranch Corporation”, the “Latin-American Development and Management Corporation” and “M.T. Lott Real Estate”, a little taste of Disney humor.

Miami real estate agent Roy Hawkins was the person who was recruited to make the offers on different tracts of land in the area and he used a real estate company, Florida Ranch Lands Inc., to make the purchases.

Hawkins then contacted an Orlando real estate firm expressing an interest in two large tracts of land and swore them to secrecy about who it was that was interested in the land even as they were not told who the buyer actually was.

Real estate agents then spread out in Orange and Osceola counties negotiating to buy land and offering paltry sums to people who thought $107 an acre was a lot of money not knowing how much more it was actually worth. The easy land buy was also the result of those who may have fallen for the old line, “I have some land for sale in Florida”, only to find the land bought sight unseen was a swamp or a plot of land they may or may not ever get around to building a retirement home on and wanted to divest themselves of a bad investment. The worthless swamp land they had been swindled into buying became the land whose sale was a second swindle.

The Disney Company was able to continue buying more tracts of land and keeping its identity secret by delaying the recording of the deeds on the first two purchases of properties until it had gotten more land under contract because, once the deeds became public record, everyone would’ve known who was buying the land. 

The company also made purchases in cash to eliminate a paper trail.

Because of the California scuttlebutt that the obvious need for Disney’s expansion would call for a location in another state with weather similar to Southern California, the Disney lawyer and the Miami real estate agent went to Martin Andersen, the publisher of the Orlando Sentinel. Whether he had known of the sale before being approached or learned of it when approached, the publisher kept the secret to protect the economic bonanza that would come to Orlando and said nothing.

When the first purchase of 8,380 acres of swamp land was recorded, an article in the Orlando Sentinel only speculated on what the property was going to be used for and who bought it, and later the paper published an article addressing the Disney rumor but dismissing it because Walt Disney said publicly that he was not interested in having a park on the East Coast even as the publisher knew he certainly did.

Florida Ranch Lands completed deals with 47 other landowners, purchasing 27,400 acres for over $5 million from 51 landowners for the average price of $182 an acre.

The Orlando Sentinel’s Florida magazine editor, Emily Bavar, ran a story claiming when the smoke cleared Disney would be found to have been the buyer who could have certainly paid the landowners more, and this forced the truth to come out.

This news resulted in land prices skyrocketing in Orlando, in some cases up to $80,000 an acre as opposed the $182 Disney paid which at the time had seemed like a lot to the orange growers and swamp owners.

Although it was an economic boon for the city and state, Disney’s presence started the building of other theme parks in the area and the people who had lived there before Disney were eventually forced away as property being bought to capitalize on the new tourist catered more to that industry than the people who had been living there and had to move on.

While Disney, a weaver of dreams and fuzzy fiction, was buying up property and people experience displacement, the public impression was that real estate companies were the good guys buying bad properties with their offers presented to people glad to get rid of a bad investment as the best they could get for their land, there were locals on the ground, the agents and newspaper publisher for example, who knew what was happening and for whatever advantage it afforded them kept the secret.

Could civic leaders have been so clueless as to have this happen around them without them being aware to any degree?

The three-story apartment building in New Bedford up on Elm by County Street was sold by Standish Associates to TI Partners V the fifth in a string of LLCs that appear to be subsidiaries of another real estate company, Terra Incognita Partner.

Research by a local news outlet found that the State filings list the LLC’s legal point-of-contact as Registered Agents Inc and that the company’s signatory, Mauricio Rauld, is a California lawyer whose firm specializes in real estate syndications, a group of investors pooling their money to buy real estate to build real estate empires.

Terra Incognita has been buying other apartment buildings in New Bedford, but, as with Disney, it’s true identity and those of the other LLCs connected to it in the area are not known.

Who is buying New Bedford, and who is benefiting from all the gentrification either directly by profiting off insider real estate investments, having their palms greased, or with plans to move on using their alleged acumen in rebirthing a city as proof of their worth, while the refugees they create for this are fanning out in search of housing?

New Bedford seems to be the new Orlando. Companies, many from out of state, are being allowed to buy up the city like Disney got to do with Orlando without the people of the city knowing who actually owns it.

Which suits are benefitting from selling out us “Great Unwashed”?

And who gets invited to the buyer reveal party?

New Bedford, the Orlando of Massachusetts.

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Special Education as a serious approach to dealing with students with certain limitations is actually a relatively new field.

In the past, pre-1970s to be exact, there were three basic types of special needs, and each had places where these people would be sent.

The visually impaired (Blind) were sent to places like Perkins institute for the Blind, those who had hearing impairments (Deaf) were sent to schools for the deaf, and those with a severe mental handicap (Mental Retardation as it was called) were sent to institutions where they were treated like oddities and simply kept occupied and alive.

Those who could not get put away in the big residential settings went to public school and were considered “Special Class” usually hidden deep in the bowels of the building out of eyesight of everyone else on campus.

Laws were enacted to give Special Needs Kids as much of an equitable education as their status would allow, and as the field and laws evolved with new studies, it was found there were more limits to regular education than eyesight, hearing, and IQ. There were other types of “disabilities” that are not as obvious but just as limiting.

Regardless how a child might be classified according to their presented need, all Special Needs children experience some degree of anxiety, frustration, and emotional overlay just dealing with their limitation in a world of expectations, but this is multiplied among those children whose limit was not as obvious and so went unaddressed. There is a possibility of emotionally approaching a situation through frustration and this was a major problem when those in charge of school districts, uninformed by age or lack of willing ness to learn, gathered the obvious Special Needs kids and sorted them out and grouped them in locations where no one had to deal with them.

I was there in the early years of state and national laws being passed, and some school administrators had a difficult time accepting the various gradations within any single group and a real hard time accepting that there were more forms of Special needs than the historically recognized three-Blind, Deaf, and “retarded”.

What they did not understand they often lumped together according to their limited or non-existent experience and ignored the teachers who were informed, trained, but unfortunately ignored.

Autistic kids were usually placed in some classrooms on the mistaken belief they were “Mentally Retarded” and the placement made things worse for these kids.

Kids whose emotional problems, whether an innate problems or ones created by environment, were considered kids with discipline problems and punishing them was preferable to a special placement where the problems could be addressed.

For the longest time after a school district had to start a class for kids with Emotional Disturbance and I was hired, I was held responsible for the district’s not being allowed to expel these kids for bad behavior like they could do in the old days, and whenever I attempted to bring my class to an assembly for Special Needs kids, I had to often argue for admittance for the “bad kids” who should not even be in school.

More than once when teaching students with Emotional Difficulties, improvements to the program or proposed approaches based on student needs were often turned down because time, energy, and money should go to the good Special Ed kids and not the criminal element.

A program based on the Sheltered Workshop model that would have taught the ED students ways toward self-control and self-discipline, math, banking and finance as important skills, money and time management, and the skills needed to get and hold a job had an uphill battle for acceptance because the school should not be rewarding criminals with financial opportunities. When the program was finally allowed, the student who worked the hardest, was the most organized, and who consistently met the requirement of all pre-lunch class work must be successfully completed before spending an hour after lunch to do the piece work for a local founding company who paid a decent piece rate wage, and astounded the other students with the amount of money he made was the Autistic kid who was placed in my class because Autism was so far beyond administration’s understanding that they just plugged him into a room that was not filled with the Blind, Deaf, or Mentally Challenged.

The wages of the other students rose when they began to model their piece work and schoolwork effort to his.

As those set in their ways and either could not ,or would not learn beyond that with which they were comfortable began to retire or die, more informed people entered school district leadership and eventually correctness was reached.

I had been there in the beginning in Massachusetts, taught during the middle years in Los Angeles, and ended my Special Education Teacher career in Oklahoma City when things had advanced far beyond the early days and there is little reluctance to accept new categories of educational needs.

It did take time, decades, to morph from glorified babysitters keeping the Special Needs kids occupied in the basement room by the boiler and understanding the layers of the field and willingly seek ways to educate all students as equitably as was possible.

As things evolved in schools, so they did in society and much of what was obstructed in the past because it was not the way it had been, the various categories of Special Education, are just part of a school’s landscape and not remarkable or controversial anymore.

Accusing the less obvious Special Needs kids, like the ones with dyslexia who were considered lazy or stupid, the kids with Emotional Difficulties being treated as “bad kids”, or the Autistic kid placed among those labelled “Mentally Retarded”, of playing the system was a common claim by the uninformed, and writing them off not only did not help the child but also exacerbated the presenting problem and without possible help these kids lived limited lives they could have risen above.

Beyond the acceptable trinity of Blind, Deaf, and “mentally retarded’, over the years 13 disability categories have been established which in reality has always been there but went unknown- Specific learning disability (SLD), Autism spectrum disorder (ASD), Emotional disturbance, Speech or language impairment, Visual impairment, including blindness, Deafness, Hearing impairment, Deaf-blindness, Orthopedic impairment, Intellectual disability, Traumatic brain injury, and those with Multiple disabilities.

Before the 1970s most of these needs went unaddressed, and anyone who attended school from that point on would have noticed an increase in Special Ed classrooms and most taxpaying adults whose towns are building more up to date schools will have noticed that there are classrooms dedicated to specific disabilities and the boiler room is now only for the boiler.

For a while, from the 1970s to more recent times, those in charge were more comfortable having all the required paperwork filled in properly with less care and attention going to educating the students.

Intelligent people would be happy, and seem to be, with this progress and growth and its effect on the lives of those labelled Special Needs.

And now, here we are decades past the beginning of Special Ed and accepting new information and while those who slowed the progress in that area are gone, the attitude and attendant actions based mainly on the refusal to broaden information and accept there are many things we do not know about now or even knew existed in the past is back.   

Although Gay people have been around in abundance, they had to hide from those who oppressed them, and when we started becoming visible you would have thought that we were spontaneously generating in huge numbers when the suddenly appearing crowd had been there all the time hiding in the shadows, ala Film Noire.

Mainstream society had to get used to these non-heterosexuals who they had, heretofore, been able to be keep out of sight because we were standing up for ourselves and our rightful place as citizens of the United States.

The initial euphoria brought about as Gays and Lesbians became more acceptable and reluctantly part of the bigger society, was somewhat tempered by the realization that just as earlier generations had done with Special Needs kids, the extent of acceptance only went to recognizing Gay men and Lesbian women, but beyond that, just as had been with Blind , deaf, and mentally handicapped, there was nothing further.

Heterosexuals are men and women, so it was easy to accept that non-heterosexuals had them too. A mirror image of themselves.

Once the veil of unacceptability was removed from gender study, it was found that, just as beyond the easy trinity of Blind, Deaf, and “Mentally Retarded”, there was more to special needs than the obvious, it was appearing there was a lot more to gender than male and female Gay or Straight.

To be clear, this is not to say that there is a similarity between Special Needs and Gender Variance, but to point out that the same attitude that had been detrimental to the students in the past until reality was accepted is the same attitude upon which the refusal to accept gender variance is based- the fear or refusal of people to accept new information beyond the familiar and act according to it.

Gay men and Lesbian women is easy to accept, but it does not mean that is all there is, and this is important when dealing with students still in their formative years before adulthood and it does not require 100% understanding by 100% of the people.

How many people who, not knowing the details about a category, and decide to a mistreat someone based on that are still be acceptable to the rest of us? How acceptable would it be if someone did not like Deaf people and acted on that at every opportunity?

So, with gender. None of us has to be a gender expert to see why personal feelings toward new information is not the criteria for its reality. I don’t have to understand every nuance of everything for it to be accepted or rejected by me. There are somethings I will never fully grasp and I should not base my actions and justify them on the basis of my not understanding something but feeling free to act on my professed lack of knowledge.

I watch the far right going ballistic about new gender information and attempt to pass legislation to prevent reality from existing.

You can ban Homosexuality, but it will not end Homosexuality.

And you can pass laws that deprive a certain group of students of a full education putting them under bushel baskets because you fear the unknown but knowable.

Since the closet door has been open and gender studies have progressed, the simple non-heterosexual being Gay and Lesbian paradigm has been found to be just one of humanities variants.

There have been 68 gender variants delineated so far, and everyone does not have to understand fully every one of them to render them real nor should being uninformed by chance or choice be acceptable reasons for depriving non-heterosexual students anything that a school has to offer.

68 is a big number and no one is expected to be fully versed on all 68, but the expectation is that where one might fall short in the understanding of all categories one should not use that as an excuse for mistreatment and abuse.

During the years with my autistic student, with his disability not being understood by the vast majority, as odd as some of his behavior might have seemed, it was not an excuse to treat him as a lesser even if the powers that be took no steps to understand Autism.

Some are easy to understand while others are more complicated but their reality is not dependent on universal understanding.

The learning of information is not an acknowledgement of embarrassing ignorance, but a realization that there is something to learn

If her father had not been a stubborn man yet willing to learn and apply something new, Helen Keller and all that followed would not have happened as she would have been let to wander around aimlessly in a silent and dark world caning chairs and selling pencils until such time as her time was up.

The world learned that a disability was not all controlling and dealing with one makes all involved better, the individual and the society to which they contribute. As soon as society learned this, the better it became.

As soon as school administrators moved away from the past and learned about kids with disabilities and the various forms they take, the better it was for all. What they clung to had to be abandoned first.

The same is happening now with old people making decisions about young people and new information as if unwilling or unable to move on which is amazingly anti-education.

People in charge of passing on knowledge in both cases refused the knowledge to be passed on and acted on that choice.

The people in charge of schools, as they had done in the past with Special Needs kids, are repeating this mistake with all non-heterosexual students.

A lack of knowledge, especially when facts are readily available, should not determine another’s future when making polices that affect every kid who enters a school building.

Years from now as happened with Special Ed kids, their parents, and the teachers, when the keepers of the past move on and schools act on facts not politics, people will look back on the foolishness and ask what it had all been about.

Special Ed was also once a political football.

See how acceptable teaching these kids according to their needs has become.

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It is a classic plot element in many old Western movies, the John Wayne era ones.

The impending arrival of the railroad is known only to a few, the town’s government, usually the mayor, and some influential businessmen, including the mayor, and knowing what the value of land adjacent to the line and from the tracks to a reasonable distance away will increase, has them touting the value of the train to the citizens to get them excited about it, while these people quietly buy up property which they will either turn around and sell at a profit, or use as build to suit rentals.

In the movies there is always someone, a rancher who refuses to sell or the newspaper editor, a real one, attempting to expose what is going on in the cigar smoke filled backroom. With the happy ending a hero brings justice and foils the speculators’ abusive plot. In the more noire ones, the defender of the people is a martyr of goodness, and the bad guys keep their ill-gotten gains as the citizens are woken too late by the sacrifice.

That is the movies, though. It’s all acting. It’s fictional escape.

In the real world, just the rumor of a possible train coming to town sets the speculation in motion and by the time the train comes the speculators triumph, the Mayor can gloat about how he made the town what it is and have his place in history, people will be attracted to town so the hidden buying frenzy pays off, but conditions for the people who have been in town will either remain the same or worsen as the cost of living increases and real estate becomes competitive.

With real people and real consequences, not actors who are paid to bring a script to life.

Other than the convenience of an occasional trip to the big city for the citizens, the real benefit goes to those who knew what was coming but were silent, acted on that knowledge, and got support from the people about to be reduced by touting what the train will bring them while hiding what the train is bringing to themselves.

When Oklahoma City was just a tent town after a land run, speculators bought up huge tracts of land in what would become the city. These people started the trolley line bringing people from the center of the city to the lake from which the water to generate the trolley electricity came. There was a beach there along with a dance hall and other early 20^th Century attractions at lakes. The city was land locked, as is the state, so this beach was one destination for residents while a branch trolley line brought people to a second lake closer to the city’s downtown.

As part of the plan, these men having bought the land through which the trolley lines ran, divided each single plot into quarters and put them on the market. Each round trip to either lake brought passengers by the lots for sale and people bought them.

The city expanded and the people, who were in a position to, cleaned up.

As a side note, this did not happen on the East Side of the city as the “wrong people” lived there by Jim Crow rules.

Years ago, New Bedford stood to have an aquarium, a huge money-making attraction. This prize was lost as was another, a plan involving a casino.

The greatness of the city had been long gone and the rape of the city’s historic features with a six-lane highway to nowhere so trucks from the fish processing plants would not be clogging city streets gave the city the air of a pass-by thing somewhere between Cape Cod and Rhode Island.

A mayor who could overcome these sins and bring some prominence back to the city would be a hero for those who remained or arrived after the renaissance. Making a once prominent city a Class-A city again would be the feather in any mayor’s cap, and if done right, would be very lucrative for those on the inside, the Club members.

As was told to me at a public meeting about the train coming to town by the MBTA’s community liaison, or some such title, when I explained that with the possible increase in rents and housing costs, people presently living here will be forced to  move perhaps to places they have never had a desire to and is foreign to them, this train is an economic boon for the city and people have to accept it is all about the economy. People will just have to accept this and move.

So, this, having been stated over three years ago, is a reality long known to those with connections.

Over a ten-year period, the city’s public schools made phenomenal improvements so much so that the need for charter schools whose purpose is supposedly to pick up the slack was not there. Citizens chose to eliminate future charter schools and keep the money in the public school to increase or, at least, maintain the improvements made thus far, and did so by ballot. Yet, the mayor gave a closed public school building free of charge with no money going to the taxpayers but money coming from them so a charter school already in town could have another campus.

He knew the public schools had eliminated the need for charters and their money draining, yet this.

If the people already here do not need the charters, who are they for?

If rents increase in town, especially within a zone fanning out from the train station by degrees, people already here will have to and are expected to move because the new out of reach rents too high for locals will be a bargain for those who had been renting in Boston.

The daily 3 hour round trip from New Bedford to Boston might seem to rule out this being an attraction to move, but during Covid we saw how working remotely meant people could do their jobs even better remotely, so the 3 hours would only be needed for the occasional trip to the Big City.

Are these schools a way to entice young parents to move here because of those “good” schools to which their children can go and not have to mingle with what is left of the Great Unwashed in the public ones?

Yes, the city is about to change, and this is natural.

What seems unnatural is that those who knew from the spark of the idea to its completion paid little attention on how it might be a good idea to address ways to allow some of the people who kept the city alive to stay or assist in finding affordable housing within city limits.

Since my building was bought and all tenants received the 30-day quit notice because the original owner had sold the building at a great profit while saying nothing to the tenants during negotiations between asking, offered , and a final acceptable price, and the new owners want a complete remodel and upgrade so they can charge twice to three-times the present rents, although there are people living here as they seek another home, it is obvious the owners are playing the waiting game as the property has been accumulating trash where it had never before, in the alleyway and what has been tossed onto the first floor outside landings, and the heating system has so far turned on a day or two for two hours each in mid-afternoon, but not when people are home at night.

It is a waiting game. We are going to move, so we will be tolerated until that can happen with an insulting offer to help in our moving costs, in spite of the owners being a property management company that has to have properties for rent or has connections with others in the field they could refer people to or even influence.

The mayor’s connection?

My neighbor’s job brings him into contact with the mayor regularly both in business and socializing. Weeks before we heard anything, the mayor off-handedly mentioned to him that he heard the building had been sold. My neighbor did not believe it as no one had yet said anything and his follow up inquiries went unanswered.

The mayor’s comment was verified when my neighbor and the rest of us received the 30 day quit notice.

The mayor knew we, citizens in his city, were about to be displaced while the tenants were still in the dark. He just watched citizens get displaced in the name of a Class A city standing.

In spite of knowing it would happen and acknowledging one case where present tenants are being displaced in favor of more affluent tenants, and knowing this is going to be an ongoing city-wide occurrence for the next few years, the city has not set anything up to help the displaced.

Besides online rental apps and driving around looking, if the city has put in place anything to help assist those being about to be displaced, they have made it hard to find.

The housing references on the City Hall website on housing assistance are entries dealing with future plans and future building, but nothing relevant to what is happening to people now.

The mayor is complicit in selling the city from under the residents who kept the city alive.

If the mayor is seeing it happen and is casual about people being rendered homeless or transient, knowing it would and is happening, he should set up an office to aid the displaced in finding homes in the city.

Right now, according to the various rental websites, the average number of applications per apartment is over 34 people each and that is only those who have applied not necessarily everyone looking.

I went to view an apartment for $850 a month. Had I gotten it, the owner wanted first, last, and security which is often half of a month’s rent. Going with that figure, the move-in cost, not counting the cost of physically moving possessions, comes to $2,125. As the new owners of my building have finally explained they will help pay that cost but not cover it completely to an amount equal to twice the present monthly rent,  supplying only $1,500 toward that leaves me with a debt of $625 to start off in a new place along with any costs of various hook ups for utilities or basic wifi etc.

I am a single, old guy. I have lived a good life in many places and with little by way of important property or any spouse or kids, can find accommodations much easier than can a family. This situation just has me looking elsewhere as I can live in a hotel room with stuff in storage more easily than a family can.

Knowing about the impending displacements, the city should have and still could establish a program to help residents facing these forced debts and to ban the requirement for a $20 fee for a background check especially when those fees are only accepted in cash (Checks bounce and who has a card swiping thing handy anyway), during hours-long open houses where tens of people are filing in and out and, desperate for housing, hand over the background check fee even if the owner decided to give the first person in the door the apartment and spent the rest of the time pocketing a good day’s untaxable take.

There can be a moratorium on this during the residents’ turnover and until such time as real estate settles.

The mayor will get his plaque and the backroom dealers will make their profits, but nothing goes to the people who kept the city alive. City pride maybe, but that will not last long after a forced move.

The gentrification and displacement of the Great Unwashed is not a surprise. Cities change.

It is the total lack of caring by those in power who will benefit monetarily and in reputation with the connected currency it brings that is disturbing.

Like my building’s new owners, the city will just wait out the inevitable exodus and replacement, and, closing the curtain on the city as it is, will welcome the newcomers to the city built for them and the return of their insider investments.

Step up mayor, until the plan drives us away, we are still citizens of the city you run.  

The city should have been prepared to help people rather than have them hunt for assistance.

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As the result of an email dump because of an ACLU Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA) request regarding a specific matter, the suspicions that Sheriff Thomas Hodgson was attempting to ingratiate himself with the Trump, administration at a cost to Bristol County residents. Was pr0ovenj true. It was found he was reporting to the White House on local issues, people, and institutions when he thought they were going against Trump. The greatest example was his reporting on his own parish church for being Christian in their approach to immigrants.

Until 2020, when Trump began to claim long before election day that the voting would be rigged meaning that if he lost it would be because the election was stolen, there was no talk of the failure of local law enforcement to effectively secure polling places.

Suddenly in 2020 this was a major concern based on nothing, and as we have seen with the January 6 Committee, the plan to make this claim and then just plow through with it was being formulated by the Trump team long before election day. Any possibility of confusion would be accentuated and used to explain this had affected the election results.

The little confusions added to the bigger ones may not prove there were irregularities, but they would be useful for the narrative. Just look how their nonexistence is still being touted by the GOP.

There are many people in Bristol County who question the sheriff’s activities and lack of duty performance and want him gone. He is, however, the Republican anchor in the state.

His sudden concern for polling place security seemed odd in itself, and this prompted the local state representative to propose a bill and get it passed that made existing law undeniably clear. Local Law enforcement alone is responsible for poll security and others can help if called on by them to do so, but others, like the sheriff, cannot office decide this was its job now.

The original intent was to curb the sheriff’s desire to increase his power, importance, and self-promoted image.

It is only now that we are seeing that this little action had a greater effect.

Being a Trump acolyte who had done his utmost to get noticed and even got to be the Honorary Chair of the Massachusetts Trump Re-election committee, with honorary being one of those nice to be included handoffs to keep someone happy and cooperative. I was an honorary chair once and never got a notice of meetings. The committee wanted my name and that was it.

Considering the number of times Sheriff Hodgson went to Washington to give Trump plaques for being a tough anti-crime guy and a quiet supporter of Constitutional Sheriffs, showed up in pictures with Trump operatives from 2017-2020, bragged about his Kim like love affair with Don, reflexively claimed that any attack on him was an attack on Trump, and is known to have reported on local citizens to the White House if he felt they were not in lock step with the trump administration, it would be hard to dismiss the idea that there might have been unknown communications between Bristol County and the White House, or at least Bristol County being included in whatever the Republican Party planned as a national move to control elections.

This would explain the sudden alleged need for sheriff’s deputies to augment local law enforcement at historically under-control polls.

The aim was not to ensure that the elections were fair and correct, but to have a presence that would enable someone, especially one as creative in his fictions to justify his being sheriff and extol the wonders he has wrought as Tom Hodgson, the sheriff, is to make whatever claims about conditions at the polls they may find useful.

If Trump won this Bristol County acolyte could nod his head and intone he could verify the vote was legit.

If Trump lost, certainly there would be things claimed to have been seen that would have brought into question the votes in Bristol County, the bruise that would spread and affect the vote count and legitimacy of it state-wide and we would have had yet another state that could be used to muddle what was, actually, a very clean election.

And this one, Massachusetts, would have been quite the prize.

Hodgson had to get into the polls because he was the only person on the state with the need to be accepted at the cool kid’s table and a way to play a role.

He would have been believable because he was the law and order sheriff who, incidentally, breaks the laws that get in his way professionally and personally while demanding all county residents follow all laws or face time in his “not a country club” jail.

I don’t know if it is proper to mention Antonio Cabral’s name, but the law intended to avert a local ego trip in preparation for running again two years later and using the polls as his photo-op and self-promotions tool, turned out to have very possibly kept Massachusetts of the lists used to pretend there were problems with elections and kept this prize out of the national mix.

This is the man who stood in front of cameras, microphones, the media, the people of the county, and God saying that the video of the riot at his ICE detention center showed that while the inmates were the instigators, he was the one who stood strong and attempted to properly handle the out of hand situation, only to have that video show the opposite.

Fabrication is in his toolbox.

Recidivism.

Suicides.

Covid mess.

Violation of human and civil rights.

The riot.

There are always stories, but the fictions are getting weak.

The sheriff is running again this year. No talk so far about his department needing to be present at the polls. I suppose it would be bad form if his deputies and he were present on election day and when he loses, claim one of his men, or he himself, saw an irregularity that would call the votes into question.

But there is still time for him to lay his foundation to deny the election results if they do not go his way.

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I think it is somewhat ethical if a person finds that friends, family, associates, work, any number of daily interactions become part of a person’s personal therapy, but only if they are asked or at least informed that is their role as they should have the option as to whether or not they assume it.

What would be unethical would be using people as therapy without their knowledge so their interactions with the person in need of therapy have layers of which they are unaware but to whose affects they are held responsible to a degree.

They may cleverly hide this misuse of friends, but its affects are there even if unexplainable by the uninformed therapy.

I was once in a chorus where the new musical director, who came with great credentials began after a while to become too intense in his choice of music and his requirements both at rehearsal and in performance with the sudden shift to those beginning shortly after the first chorus performance under his leadership.

Eventually it became clear that after the dissolution of his relationship with his significant other who was the director of the chorus from which our new director came, mainly because his significant other did not respect his musical taste and often put him down embarrassingly in front of that chorus, his choice of difficult music was to show he could conduct a chorus singing it while the passed-on gossip from members of his former chorus to our director about the ex’s predictions of his future failings often dictated which one-upmanship pieces we would be doing in performance.  

The chorus had become his therapy and we were losing our spirit.

We declined to continue in that role. He was replaced and we sang music to sing music once again.

Governor DeSantis has a hang up with the idea of Transgender people but clearly not really with them or the facts about them as he refuses to learn. He may even know the truth, but Trans people are his convenient scare tactic.

He first began by ignoring reality claiming he was keeping children safe by making it against state education policy for a teacher in grades one through three who may be in a same sex marriage from mentioning it and for a teacher to deal with same sex couples even if the child of one such couple is in the classroom and might naturally speak of family.

In grade two one student asking another his mother’s name might find the other student has two fathers and will have some follow up questions that must be brushed aside at all costs.

DeSantis has this whole thing about Trans girls playing on the appropriate team because as “former boys” the fragile girls must be protected from the superior male, while nothing is said about the inferior “former girl” being any form of threat to the superior boys.

Now Desantis has moved to a new level of working out his hang up by using the state and the gullibility of its citizens as his therapy.

The DeSantis Florida Board of Education unanimously passed a strict mandate that not only prevents transgender youth from freely using bathrooms that match their gender, but also requires public and charter schools that recognize the reality of being Trans and respect the students as the people they are to notify all parents of their policies that allow Trans students to use gender-appropriate bathrooms and locker rooms by mail and by posting them on their official websites.

These mailings and postings must include which facilities are and are not separated for use according to “biological sex at birth” and the “student supervision” measures implemented in locker rooms.

Schools that have inclusive policies must now designate to which restrooms and other school areas admission is limited by biological sex at birth. They must specify spaces from which Trans students are excluded.

It is standard procedure that all books in a school library are accessible to parents including hardcopy books, ebooks, periodicals, and videos, but Florida’s new rule also includes teachers’ individual classroom collections.

I had books on a shelf behind my desk that were available to all students and, if they were in the room for a legitimate reason, the parents too. Having people going through books in my classroom and removing some with which they did not agree hours after the school was closed for the day was another thing entirely.  

Teachers of students from Kindergarten to third grade face having their teaching certificate revoked in addition to other non-enumerated penalties if they deal with gender identity with their students in spite of the reality of some students in the room. There are, after all, parent teacher nights and other parent student events where even kids in K-3 can see classmates’ parents and notice differences they may ask about in school.

Added to this is the vagueness of the law which leaves words like “discuss” open to interpretation with actions based on individual and uneven application.

This is part of Governor Ron’s war on “woke indoctrination” and any indication that it’s okay for young people to be Trans.

It is his obsession and one of his enablers is his Board of Education.

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