Worcester city councilors on Tuesday rejected a controversial municipal plan to fine homeless people for sleeping outside on public property, with some councilors saying the city needs to “have a little more compassion.”
City Manager Eric Batista brought the proposed homeless encampment ban before the City Council as part of his administration’s larger strategy to address homelessness and connect unhoused people with more resources.
Although the manager has stressed that being homeless is not a crime, his encampment ordinance would have fined homeless people $25 per infraction for camping in tents or sleeping anywhere on streets or sidewalks. People living in cars for 24 consecutive hours in public parking lots also would have been subject to the fine.
Throughout two hours of public comment to start off Tuesday night’s meeting, dozens of residents excoriated Batista’s plan, saying it would criminalize homelessness and leave unhoused people in debt if they can’t pay the fines. Some homeless people, like Kevin Lynch, asked where they would be allowed to go if they couldn’t sleep outside on public property.
“Please let’s think about a little better approach to this,” Lynch said.
As soon as councilors began discussing the proposed ordinance, they also called it a non-starter. Councilor Gary Rosen said “this plan needs a lot of work” and told Batista to “get rid of the criminalization of the homeless. Get rid of those ideas.”
Mayor Joseph Petty, who chairs the City Council, added the city needs to “show some dignity and respect” as it tries to address homelessness. Petty questioned whether Batista’s proposed ban would even have significant benefits.
“We go take an encampment down, what then?” Petty said. “They just go to another neighborhood. Then they come back.”
Petty and Rosen said there were other aspects of Batista’s larger strategy on homelessness that they liked. For example, they agreed the city needs to enhance its shelter capacity, improve data sharing between social service agencies and optimize processes for connecting homeless people to supportive services.
Rosen filed a motion that most other councilors supported, sending the strategy back to Batista so that his administration could remove the proposed encampment ordinance and incorporate councilors’ feedback.
Batista had framed the ordinance as necessary to mitigate public health hazards that come with people living outside. In a Sept. 15 memo to councilors outlining the proposed ban, he wrote that “it is simply unacceptable to live in inhumane conditions” outside and there needs to be “a local option for enforcement that we have seen lacking at the regional and state-wide level.”
Like other cities across the state, Worcester has spent years trying to grapple with rising homelessness as median rents have soared.
This year’s annual count of unhoused people in Worcester County identified 1,187 people. Although that’s down 56% compared to last year when the point-in-time survey counted 2,862 people, Batista has said the tally is a “single, isolated data point” that may not reflect everyone who’s homeless.
Housing advocates stress that part of the problem in Worcester is that demand for safe shelter space exceeds the supply of 197 permanent beds across four shelters. City leaders acknowledge this is an issue, and as part of his larger strategy to address homelessness, Batista wants to expand shelter capacity and create a real-time data dashboard showing the number of beds available each day.
He and the city’s Health and Human Services Commissioner Seema Dixit, who helped develop the homelessness strategy, say Worcester also needs to strengthen community partnerships in order to expand housing options and improve access to critical social support services. The proposed ordinance banning homeless people from sleeping outside is the other main component of the city’s strategy.
At the City Council meeting Tuesday night, Dixit defended the encampment ban, saying it will help direct homeless people toward more services in addition to avoiding public health hazards that come with people living and using the bathroom outside.
Councilor Khrystian King responded that the city already has laws that penalize people for creating safety hazards. The ordinance fining people just for sleeping outside, King said, is a “homeless incarceration act.” He also criticized the city for not consulting with social service experts or anyone with homelessness experience while developing the ordinance.
“That is a glaring omission,” King said. “We know there are a number of issues here. We know that services and housing is needed, not handcuffs.”
In the past, Worcester leaders have tried to prioritize a homeless assistance approach known as “housing first” that entails giving unhoused people apartments as quickly as possible without requirements that they be sober. Batista told councilors that since 2018, the city has built about 60 permanent supportive housing units consistent with the housing first approach. The problem, he said, is the city doesn’t have enough funding to scale up that response.
That explanation didn’t satisfy Councilor Rob Bilotta, who said the city can spend more money to help tackle homelessness. The question, he said, is whether the city wants to do so.
“We invested over $150 million to build Polar Park,” Bilotta said. “We should be investing more on this problem.”
