One of the most frustrating things during 12 years of advocacy for Gay kids in a public school district was that, regardless what progress had been made, with every administrative change, with little chance of just moving on from the point reached, I would have to repeat some previous work to get them up to speed so at least their obstruction would be current, or would have to deal with an old argument or objection long since dealt with and, being new and unaware of the past, they attempt to use a certain tactic as if it is new and had never before employed in the many years preceding its latest use, meaning I had to take the time, even if a little, to brush that crumb off the table.
Those doing negotiations in a Union setting or representing a member during the grievance procedure have had that eye-rolling moment when they have to deal with a manager’s using some newly discovered loophole to get around the contract whose previous usage makes this discovery as valid as that of Columbus.
But you deal with it.
I am a retired teacher who had been and to a retiree’s degree remains very active in my Union and the Labor movement in general, so when the new owner, a young man, tries what to him might be a new and clever way to defend his ill treatment of the tenants he is displacing, and it is just a redoing of past excuses, one takes notice.
In past blogs I have written about those tenuous, coincidental, and direct connections between people and events that might only consist of names showing up in multiple tales of disparate people, that background movie extra you see in movies and begin to notice in other movies where he is just a member of a crowd, a person walking by, or some person just there as a piece of the scenery.
Not connected in any way to the plot, but necessary for the movie.
With no real, straight-line connections, there is that line from the Gorey House in Yarmouthport to the whale ship Milo in the Civil War and the destruction of the North Pacific whaling fleet in 1871 when arctic ice crushed it. Although none of these and many other connections have any direct relationship, the people and ships in these disconnected events intermingled so they were connected tenuously like Third-Class relics to the First-Class ones for those familiar with this idea, or like we would be in that kids’ game, Electricity.
I have written about these connections in past blogs when enough dots have been connected. I had grown used to this finding of dots because of my volunteer work at the Whaling Museum, past Union work where my job was to connect what seemed disconnected to win a grievance or get a provision in a contract, and, as a cartoonist, just observing.
As a volunteer I produce work for the museum without their having to expend salary and benefits, and as a volunteer who provides free labor, there is a certain degree of job security. While salaried employees may have to adhere to schedules and projects, my transcription duties allow me to go deeper to investigate some stumbled upon interesting detail, hopefully uncovering some, as yet undiscovered factoid.
This, combined with the interest in history of the city this involvement engendered, had me joining local groups that dealt with the city’s history, and occasionally, when just looking into some mention of a person place or thing I come across something unknown to most people, even the city history buffs.
I have written about some.
During all this business about gentrification and my apartment, one thing is certain. Truth is not a requirement when the new owners deal with the tenants they want out. While some tenants panicked and grasped in desperation at the first straw, and one had to leave in an emergency situation since losing his non-union job after anxiety had him careless at work and he injured himself, there are those tenants a little slower to jump but faster to collect information that reveals in letters sent by the new owners, each of which was assumed headed for the trash can upon receipt, the inconsistency of the new owner and the arbitrary way the tenants are being treated.
In defending the treatment of tenants, the owners want to promote the impression that regardless how bad this looks they are doing what is best for the city.
There are working people in the building along with people on Section 8, a retiree or two, and people employed in various occupations. In my time in the building, others have come and gone for various reasons, at one point mainly because people who had been there for years and had grown too old to live alone and went to senior housing. Some moved for work or love. Also, during my time there was a fire in one apartment that had nothing to do with the tenant, EMT’s have had to come for medical reasons, a death or two, and a single woman who along with her baby lived upstairs and allowed her boyfriend to use her place from which to deal crack during “regular business hours”. This last was unacceptable to the tenants as the customers did not got off to smoke and then return to re-up, but hung around the back landings of the apartment on the floors below hers so they could get another rock quickly after finishing the one in the glass.
Tenants were the ones reporting this.
When describing the building, the owner’s agent ignored the reality of the building and implied that the tenants were not contributors to the city or just not the right people, the takers not the givers.
According to the local newspaper Mr. Osofsion, described the building as
“meant to be workforce housing for the people who live and work in New Bedford. 95% of the tenants who live at our other properties work within 20 miles of the city and we expect that trend to continue with Elm St.”
Apparently, the retirees and those unable to continue working, as in the one case where a passed problem has affected one tenant’s ability to be employed so he gets assistance, and the working people on site should not remain in “the workforce housing for people who live and work” in the city.
Of course, he also tells the tenants who he is putting down as he is displacing them that he owns other properties not too far away, but hasn’t bothered to offer them to the tenants as they are “for the people who live and work in the city”.
He also said that the property has a checkered past and has been labeled a “nuisance property” by the City of New Bedford since 2017, the year of the crack dealer whose girlfriend supplied him the retail space in the apartment she got because she was related to someone who worked for the previous owner and who has been gone for four years, unless people being sick and an apartment fire are deemed a nuisance.
But, there seemed something familiar in this- the wrong people living where the right people should be and labeling the place as “nuisance “property”, when the idea to sell the building may have first been considered at the beginning of the gentrification boom.
And I remembered a connection.
Long after the original Quaker core belief in the equality and dignity of all people and its not being correct to flaunt your wealth in front of the poor and advertising your better station, lost out to extravagance and wealth flaunting, the equality of man began to take a back seat to the “us, the right people, vs “them”, the wrong people, and city leadership took advantage of this, if not outright promoting class differences to their benefit.
I was looking up some obscure reference to something I had read about a whaling captain that had caught my interest when, jumping from link to link, sometimes finding relevant items, sometimes hitting a blank, uninteresting wall, I happened upon a proposal from just after World War I to repurpose a section of the city by the waterfront where a large number of Cape Verdeans who worked on the docks lived for a more restricted use.
They were accidentally on desired real estate, living in the housing the waterfront afforded and close to where they worked. This had become desired property but the convenience to the cape Verdeans living and working there would make purchasing the land and buildings from them difficult.
They had to be moved but the move had to be justified to the general public as quite a few people in the city fell on the “Them” side.
So it was that within the proposal was a description of the area that would justify why it would be better for the city if this group of homes and those they housed were torn down and the residents displaced.
One hundred years ago the area was described as having prominent buildings that presented “a neat and attractive appearance” on its West side, a dwelling and a shop on the North side “which were not seriously detrimental to the neighborhood”, and to the South was a similar house and building block. To the East were the undesirable conditions produced by a cheap restaurant and “seven houses closely crowded together, occupied largely by slacker Cape Verde Portuguese, continually under police inspection. The owners required revenue and no other people desired to be tenants.”
Their words not mine.
The Cape Verdeans living in the city then and now are hard-working people.
Those making the proposal 100 years ago were city leaders who may or may not have been the people calling the police who, actually, may not have ever been called.
No one ever told me I was living in a “nuisance building”, and when I tell locals where I live, they recognize the building and know its original name, and some have told me of their time living there. No one has ever cautioned me about living there.
But the building had to be sold to make the city a better place and provide housing for the right people like was done with the Cape Verdeans and assigning the present residents an undeserved and false reputation so that people, not knowing the facts, will be glad they have been moved out.
The new owner’s rationale is faulty and has been used before.
The opposite of a building “occupied largely by slacker[s]” is one “meant to be workforce housing for the people who live and work in New Bedford.”
This excuse is 100 years old, not new, and not based on the reality on the ground, and I found this relevant connection and similarity of approach quite by accident.
