Montague Reporter ‘Out of the Streets and Into the Sewers’

April 4, 2019

by Mike Jackson

GREENFIELD— “These are moderate reforms,” Sheila Gilmour said, kicking off the municipal socialism conference on Saturday by laying out its basic premise. “They’re things that even the most conservative of our neighbors should be able to get behind.”

The 120 or so people who showed up at Greenfield Community College at 8:30 a.m. for workshops, sandwiches and a keynote address were a mix of locals and out-of-towners, baby boomers and younger activists.

The event was the first major public showcase for Franklin County Continuing the Political Revolution (FCCPR), a group that formed in the wake of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign and has since organized local task forces on single-payer healthcare, campaign finance reform, climate change, labor and more.

Gilmour said David Cohen who sits with her on the FCCPR coordinating committee, originally conceived of the conference as focusing on “sewer socialism,” a term originally used to deride the moderate goals sought and often won by socialists in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, between the 1890s and 1930s.

“The Milwaukee socialists sort of deemphasized the social theory and revolutionary rhetoric around socialism,” Gilmour told the crowd. “Instead they started working on moderate reforms like cleaning up neighborhoods and factories, putting in new sanitation systems, city-owned water and power systems, and improved education.”

Pooling Our Resources

Though the morning’s first workshop time slot offered sessions on solar power and broadband, over half of the attendees crammed into a single upstairs classroom to discuss “affordable housing.” Representatives of the Pioneer Valley Land Trust, Bernardston Country Estates, and Pioneer Valley Habitat for Humanity were each invited to explain how their organization helped provide shelter at cheaper-than-market rates, followed by an hour-long, free-ranging discussion.

The three organizations, it turned out, each offered an approach to reducing the cost of homeownership. The land trust splits the ownership of houses from the land underneath them; members own the houses themselves while paying a small lease fee on the land. The Bernardston site clusters 38 manufactured homes onto 12 acres, and members pay a maintenance fee into a coop that covers water and other infrastructure costs. And Habitat, a non-profit, uses donated materials and labor to build houses that it mortgages to income-qualifying families.

“A home is anywhere from $50,000 to $60,000 cheaper than it would have been if it came with the ownership of the two acres underneath it,” Aric Savage explained of the land trust model.

Paul Parda said the homes in his Bernardston neighborhood were “affordable for us to own because we don’t have to pay for profit to somebody else–all of our profits go right back into the corporation… We just roll it over into the infrastructure of the park.”

“Because of the community support that goes into it, we put a deed restriction on the house that stays with the land and the house in perpetuity that limits the resale prices, so that it’ll be affordable to the next person when they go to buy,” explained Habitat director Megan McDonough.

The panel elicited a very wide range of reactions from the socialist and socialism-curious attendees.

“I’m wondering what our town could do to attract affordable housing,” said a Conway resident named Bob, who spoke of high taxes and the lack of businesses. “How would you encourage people to be willing to lease their land through the land trust for somebody else to build a house on? We have a lot of people who put their land in trust, but it’s just to leave it wooded and alone.”

“We just redid our zoning bylaws in my town, and there was this absolutely archaic definition of ‘family,’” said Elizabeth Irving of Montague. “It was a 30-year terror response to the evils of communes. But there’s no reason that heteronormative family structure, and the production of children, needs to be tied with ownership–I don’t know how many towns have, deep in their bylaws, things that prevent ‘a certain number of unrelated individuals’ from living together.”

“You have to change the zoning to be more dense,” advised Marc Horne, director of a Lowell neighborhood group called the Coalition for a Better Acre. “You just can’t make affordable housing work on multi-acre zoning. And the second structural barrier that municipalities actually have control over is water and sewer.” Horne argued that leach field requirements are “onerous” and have not kept up with septic system technology.

“People just simply need to make more money,” he added. “The inputs required to produce housing rise at a certain level, and income does not track with that, so the affordability gap grows all the time.”

“What are ideas for creating truly affordable housing–for people who make less than $25,000 a year, which is me and most of the people I know?” asked Elliot Ezcurra of Turners Falls. “I think that tying affordable housing with ownership kind of limits who that’s available to. For many people that’s never going to be within their means.”

Doug Selwyn asked whether a better way to help people afford rent is to “simply give people a living wage,” citing Finland’s basic income experiment. “All the results aren’t in, but they’re saying it’s actually cheaper to give people enough money to live than to try to support them, when they can’t live, with what is.”

Another man pointed to the broad public housing in Vienna. “Public housing has been put through the gauntlet in terms of funding and political support–it’s a shell of what it could be,” he said. “It always has been, since it was developed in the ‘30s.”

First Hampshire state representative Lindsay Sabadosa said that while Northampton has public housing, tenants have very few representatives in the housing authority, and her office fields numerous complaints about conditions in the system. “Yes, public housing,” she said, “but we need public uprising to support the people who already live there.”

“I love this idea of people-owned cooperatives, where we get apartments, and not necessarily places that people have to own,” Sabadosa said. “I think what’s going to happen, if we don’t start to take this seriously, is we’re just going to be a really old retirement community…Every time I talk to someone in town, they’re like ‘yeah, I’m moving to Easthampton, or Holyoke, or up into Franklin County.”

“This idea that we need these elaborate schemes to come up with money to scrape by is something that power is always going to have control over,” observed Eleanor Finley, also of Northampton. “I’m curious what the possibilities are for this region for kinds of direct action: building tenants’ unions, and building homeless people’s unions.”

“I want to encourage us to think outside of this ‘municipal socialism’ because that is going to be fiercely resisted,” said Jean Derderian of New Salem. “If you go in front of your town, in these conservative towns, and say ‘oh, municipal socialism,” you’re invoking a whole political barrage of things that have no place in our understanding of how we live and operate. I would encourage us to rethink that: call it ‘the commons,’ call it something else, call it what it really is, because we are not socialists.”

“I am a socialist,” a man in the back of the room piped up quietly, to murmurs of approval.

Roxann Wedegartner, a Greenfield planning board member making a bid for mayor, said that while the county seat has long met the state benchmark for affordable housing under Chapter 40B, “we still struggle to provide affordable housing, so we’re definitely looking to the communities around us to also begin to solve that problem.”

Wedegartner said her board had pushed for an accessory dwelling unit bylaw, which would make it easier for homeowners to rent out apartments. “It was quote shocking to us, the number of people who really did not want to see that happen… We did get it. It was a struggle–it is indicative of some of the barriers we have to creating affordable housing.”

“It’s really hard to accept change,” said McDonough. “We might be in favor of affordable housing as a general concept, but people often push against it when it’s in their own neighborhood.”

Asked how Habitat responds to local opposition to affordable housing development–including from residents who fear it could attract new people to the region, putting pressure on schools, hospitals, and job markets–she cited the organization “yes in My Backyard Pioneer Valley as a “way for people to get together on a pro-housing agenda” to make a case in local towns.

“I’m wondering if there are ways we can broaden our impact by connecting across communities,” Selwyn asked. “Housing is a common problem across all of our communities…and socialism, I think, is not a word we should run from. What does socialism mean? It means pooling our resources for the good of everyone, and I’m okay with that.”

Ferd Wulkan said that the hosting group, FCCPR was a “county-wide, multi-issue organization, that until now has not had a housing group..I’m hoping that’ something that can come out of this discussion.”

Harnessing Energy

While many workshop topics dealt with broad strategies and goals for popular power (affordable housing, public education, worker cooperatives, public banking), others addressed specific infrastructure: solar power, broadband, and hydropower.

The hydropower workshop turned out to be a presentation by a Bennington, Vermont, resident named William Scully who successfully developed a small, disused local dam to generate electricity for the grid–presumably a project that might be of interest to municipal socialists, though Scully focused more on the nuts and bolts of assessing dams’ feasibility.

Scully said he had involved environmentalists in the design of his project at the former Vermont Tissue Mill Dam in North Bennington, and described various ways he said the hydro development actually helped restore aquatic habitat.

Only 3 percent of America’s 84,000 licensed dams, Scully said, are harnessed for energy, and he argued that this renders the removal-versus-green-energy debate beside the point: “We need to look at things on a community level, and on a basin planning level, and we need to tear a bunch of dams out, and we need to develop a bunch of dams. But right now we’re simply doing nothing, other than arguing over ideology.”

Rivers and streams were once widely seen as a source of green power, he said, but Reagan-era transfer of development incentives from hydropower to fossil fuels devastated the domestic turbine industry.

“One hundred years ago, everybody knew what I’m telling you now,” Scully said.

He fielded a series of questions from Greenfield’s Jim Terapane about whether the Mill Street Dam at the former Wiley & Russell tap and die plant could be appropriate for hydropower redevelopment.

Asked about the Southworth plant on the Turners Falls power canal, which closed in 2017 and is in tax taking, Scully said he believed the onsite hydroelectric turbine was recently rebuilt.

In both cases, Scully said he would need more information before advising a project be taken on.

After the workshop sessions, attendees reconvened in the dining commons for a keynote address by Gianpaolo Baiocchi, a sociology professor at New York University, who has published books on leftwing popular movements in Latin America and elsewhere, and their relationship to government power.

Baiocchi touted “Communities Over Commodities,” a report housing alternatives he had helped draft for the Right to the City Alliance, and urged attendees to learn about FUCVAM, a federation of housing cooperatives in Uruguay that houses over 90,000 people.

Baiocchi said FUCVAM’s “secret” lies in developing in its members a “non-capitalist ownership, a sense of investment in the human.”

Baiocchi spoke against the tendency of some socialists to isolate themselves from mainstream institutions in pursuit of purist politics.

“It really is a disservice to our case to think that you have good ideas, and the power of those are going to carry the day,” he said. “We cannot give up the ground of being with real people and listening to the things that they want.”

A number of the conference’s young participants turned out to be members of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), some hailing from places like Lowell, Lawrence and Pittsfield. Pioneer Valley DSA member Willie Thompson asked Baiocchi about the “limits of local control.”

“What does local control mean in a segregated society?” he asked.

Baiocchi summarized the “municipal hypothesis” as holding that “the local level is more porous to our influences…therefore municipal spaces are potentially more liberatory.”

But, Baiocchi agreed, “local power does have a nasty history, too–if you think about all the towns that segregated themselves from large urban centers in order not to pay taxes to people of color…”

To this he added the agenda of “states’ rights,” regressive school boards, and the limited leverage municipal governments have to improve residents’ lives.

“It’s not enough to say, ‘all power to the local,’” Baiocchi argued. “Opening up the institutions is one part of it, but competing and going to those places, and having those political and ideological discussions with the people in those towns that are serving means of local control, is the other part.”

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