You like beer? Don't forget to hit up Greater Good!

Tower hill lights in Boylston. College basketball game?

It can be tough to keep a kid entertained during the winter breaks in Worcester. There just isn’t that much in the area that feels worth it for the amount it costs. And there’s almost nothing thats free outside of sledding and playing at a park. If you’re up for a bit of driving you’ll have more options.

Things we have done to keep busy (some these may not be entirely appropriate for the 3 year old):

Trampolines at Launch

Bowling

Tubing at Ward - isn’t cheap, but fun.

Art museum

Ecotarium

Dave and Busters at the Natick Mall

Discovery museum in Acton (11 and 13 y/o might think this is lame - depends on their personalities)

West Boylston cinemas - is cheap, still fun

Ice skating at the oval

Free options:

If it snows, sledding at green hill park or Quinsigamond CC

If it’s not too cold go kick a soccer ball around at a park while the 3 year old plays on the playground. If they prefer basketball head to Dean park in Shrewsbury, the basketball court is right near the playground.

All excellent.!!!!

Deadhorse hill or Lock50 are solid places for a good dinner.

For excellent fancy cocktails, go to Muse by the theater.

For culture go to the Worcester art museum.

For an up and coming Worcester vibe with that has that whole old mill factory history, go walk around the canal district where the Worcester public market is. There will be food, breweries, and fun local shops there. Very entertaining. I recommend Birch Tree Bread Co for coffee and breakfast. Seed to Stem is a fun plant store with a lot of oddities. Bedlam books is a cozy bookstore that makes good coffee and smoothies.

I just moved out of Worcester, but my wife and I lived there for seven years while she completed med school and started her residency. We honestly loved it. The food is great (Sole Proprietor, Momos, Akra, Bean Counter, Burger Bah, Culpeppers, and City Line were all personal favorites). We enjoyed being outdoors, so we spent a lot of time at Green Hill park, Hadwen Park, and exploring all the walking trails around Barre and Rutland. If you’re into night life, then the canal district is a great place to hang out.

Armsby Abbey, Chashu Ramen, Redemption Rock Brewing.

There's a commercial complex in the Canal District that houses Bedlam Books, Birch Tree Bread Co, a bougie plant store, an art gallery/bar, and a large antique store. Next door to that is Worcester Public Market with a number of good food options and a brewery. I wouldn't spend all your time in the Canal District if you want to get to know the wider city, but there is good stuff there.

For places with a local feel, I recommend Vincent's, Hotel Vernon, Steel & Wire, Miss Worcester Diner, Theatre Cafe.

For culture stuff, Worcester Art Museum, ArtsWorcester, The White Room (the art gallery/bar I mentioned above).

FYI, check websites/socials for anywhere you plan to go, because small businesses around here tend to close for a week or two during this time of year so they can spend time with family.

Enjoy! Drive safe!

NIMBYs upset and confused to find out that homeless and low income people don’t just disappear when you gentrify a city.

beautiful, best comment

It's very funny that, again, multiple points of the article they link undercuts their suggestion that market rate housing is, in any way, a solution to the problem. It literally points the finger at market-rate developments for exacerbating the homeless problem:

>Half a century ago, America invented modern homelessness.

>The stage was set with the shuttering of psychiatric hospitals in the wake of abuse scandals and the introduction of new psychotropic medications. Then cities started offering tax incentives to owners of flop houses, or single-room-occupancy hotels, to convert their properties into market-rate rentals, condos and co-ops. In New York City alone, more than 100,000 S.R.O. units that had housed substance abusers, elderly singles, former inmates and the mentally ill were lost.

And nowhere does it imply that building more of them was the solution to Houston's problems.

>Encampments like the one in the underpass lay bare decades of calamitous decisions by planners, politicians and health and housing authorities. One in every 14 Americans experiences homelessness at some point, a population that is disproportionately Black. Eradicating homelessness would involve tackling systemic racism, reconstituting the nation’s mental health, family support and substance abuse systems, raising wages, expanding the federal housing voucher program and building millions more subsidized homes.

Or here:

>The Houston that Ms. Rausch grew up in has changed. A once-abundant inventory of affordable housing has shrunk drastically. New construction focuses overwhelmingly on the top of the market. As elsewhere, giant investment firms like Blackstone have been gobbling up housing stock, pricing out middle-class and lower-income residents. Making matters harder, eviction filings in Harris County are now soaring: they’re higher than they were before the pandemic.

>“Meanwhile, housing costs are rising faster than incomes,” points out Bill Fulton, the director of the Kinder Institute for Urban Research, a think tank in the city, “And, as a result, a large majority of Houstonians have been shut out of homeownership and become renters, half of them rent-burdened, meaning they pay more than a third, and often more than half, of their income in rent.”

Hmm, now why does that sound familiar!?

>Houston has gotten this far by teaming with county agencies and persuading scores of local service providers, corporations and charitable nonprofits — organizations that often bicker and compete with one another — to row in unison. Together, they’ve gone all in on “housing first,” a practice, supported by decades of research, that moves the most vulnerable people straight from the streets into apartments, not into shelters, and without first requiring them to wean themselves off drugs or complete a 12-step program or find God or a job.

OP seems to read this part and conclude that "housing first" means just building more housing, except what "Housing First" really means is:

>an intervention for homeless people with severe disabling conditions that combines four elements: “(1) program philo- sophy and practice values emphasizing consumer choice; (2) commu- nity based mobile support services; and (3) permanent scatter-site housing... Because [Housing First] does not require psychiatric treat- ment or sobriety as a precondition for attaining housing, the model includes a fourth component, harm reduction, so that support services can help reduce the risks associated with psychiatric or addiction-re- lated behavior”

Yeah the long and short of it is we need to address the missing middle, and there's no incentive for private developers to do that. Doing things like changing zoning regs that require more affordable housing and allow for more housing types to be built might be somewhat helpful, but there's really no solution to the housing crisis that doesn't involve building more public housing.

"It seems high"

Whos that never heard of him lol

Yes, we do need more housing. On top of the 20,000 people who have already arrived here, the exodus from more expensive Boston area towns shows no sign of slowing. Worcester is projected to still be one of the hottest real estate markets in the country in 2023, and that's what's driving these new market rate residential buildings being built. Not some sort of sympathy for the people already here.

There's no real incentive for developers to build so much housing that rents and property values go down even a little. That's the real problem with relying on the market to fix things. These market rate housing developments will slow things getting worse, so I'm not really complaining about them existing. But to really tackle the housing crisis requires more. Even in your Houston example "build more housing" was such a small part of what was actually successful.

Yes, we have on-demand hot water heaters, not sure if that makes a difference. We don't have a septic tank we're on city sewer, so our bill is technically for trash/water/sewer.

My mom has told me this story that when I was a baby in the early 90's, just before Christmas, she was doing some holiday shopping at Spags and walked out to the parking lot with me in my baby stroller, and realized not until she was at her car putting me into my car seat (after trudging across the lot when there was bad wintery weather happening) that I had snuck like 3 pairs of mittens from the store into my stroller without her noticing. Since she was in a rush, had a baby with her, and just needed to get out of there because of the slushy snow coming down, I believe she ended up in a moment of frustration not going back into the store to return the unpurchased mittens I snagged, but later she donated them to a local shelter to equalize her karmic debt for enabling my baby crime.

Ronda Santis?

So if we built no market rate housing to accommodate the 20,000 people who moved here in the last 10 years rents would go down? I totally agree the rising cost of living is the #1 problem in Worcester and I’m well aware of the market rate developments going in the city. I also totally agree we need more affordable housing to reduce the number of people that are cost burdened, but there is no city in the world that can afford to publicly build the scale that’s needed.

My point is that if Los Angeles can spend over a billion dollars on see the problem get worse, we need to learn from that and see that there’s more going on than a lack of political will to spend on affordable housing. I used to live in Houston which is one of the fastest growing and most diverse cities in the country and it has managed to cut its homelessness rate by 60% over the last 10 years by improving city/nonprofit services and making it easy to build housing of all kinds.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/14/headway/houston-homeless-people.html

Thats a great idea! Name checks out!

Lol I mean it feels like an elephant is stepping on my wallet, thats for sure.

Single-family house in Worcester, two person household. We have a dishwasher and high efficiency washing machine, and did frequent drip irrigation of a couple areas of the yard through the summer. Bill for 6/1/22 to 9/1/22 was $116.60 (water and sewer combined).

I almost did 😅 its a 3 family with 3 units rented out i did fix a leak in the main in the basement in February. Very slow leak and in the end, didn’t seem to change anything on my bill.

I was expecting maybe I had to pay 1000 because I kept forgetting to call about the water bill for the year I owned it. You could imagine my surprise when they said my total bill is 4300 dollars for the year.

You just reminded me that I have a cheesecake to run over. Thanks!

The cardinal has no authority over the bishop. The diocese are separately accountable to the Vatican directly.

Your 10/06/22 bill makes it seem like you’re washing elephants at your house. Wicked high and I had a water feature in my backyard for years, I would know.