By Julia Davidovitz
Recently, the staff of Abundant Housing Massachusetts was honored at MHP’s annual Housing Institute with the Housing Hero award. The Housing Institute took place in Worcester, the second biggest city in New England and the home of AHMA staff member Joyce! Usually, when the AHMA team gets together, we’re at our office in downtown Boston or on a team trip like Austin, Texas for this year’s YIMBYtown. So we were all excited to take this opportunity for a mini field trip to Worcester, expertly guided by our colleague Joyce!
We started the morning by walking over to Worcester’s Union Station, a beautiful but sadly empty train station. Joyce told us that the station used to have trains going from Worcester to destinations like New York City and Providence, but now the passenger trains from Union Station only run back and forth between Worcester and Boston. With Joyce providing this historical context, I could imagine the cavernous train station as it must have been decades ago, bustling with people commuting and taking longer trips. I hope the train station can be better utilized in the future!
Then, we headed over to the Union Hill neighborhood. Joyce told us that in the early 20th century, this was a historically Jewish neighborhood. She described the kosher shops that used to line the streets, as well as the last remaining synagogue on the East side of Worcester, which she wrote an incredibly moving blog post about for her blog Jane Jacobs in the Woo. Read part 1 and part 2 of Joyce’s beautiful account of the last minyan of Shaarai Torah East – if you’re anything like me, it will bring a tear to your eye! She also pointed out a building that used to be an ice cream parlor run by famous anarchist revolutionary Emma Goldman.
Then, we had a delicious breakfast at the Broadway Diner (I had latkes – yum!) and started walking over to MHP’s Housing Institute. On the way there, we stopped by Crompton Place – a formerly vacant industrial building transformed into an incredible mixed-use space, with beautiful shops, a great café, and two to three bedroom apartments. We happened to run into Dino, the developer of Crompton Place and a friend of Joyce’s. He offered to give us a tour of a unit that is currently being built! Catnip for housing nerds – we told him we’d be back after the conference.
After the conference and a delicious dinner at the Worcester Public Market, we toured an in-process unit at Crompton Place and Dino shared how he became a small, local housing developer. He aspires to build community among the tenants in the building, and says living on-site gives him a better understanding of his tenants’ needs. He said that the triple deckers in Worcester started deteriorating after the landlords stopped living on-site and lost sight of their tenants’ needs. I thought this was a really interesting and helpful perspective – of course people will be more invested in their tenants’ living conditions if they live in the same building.
I had an inspiring and educational day in Worcester! There’s nothing like seeing a city through the eyes of someone who loves their city. Despite spending most of my life in the greater Boston area, I was woefully unfamiliar with the merits of New England’s second largest city, and I’m so happy I got to learn more about Worcester’s past, present, and future on our field trip.