Lowell Buried

What a garbage year it’s been! Shockingly (at least to me, given how endless and abbreviated it has managed to feel all at once), we’re already well past the halfway point.

What follows is a series of photographs I took during a snowstorm in March, as well as some preparatory notes on the Lowell LINC project. There isn’t an immediate relationship between these two things, other than the fact that I took the photos in March and the end of that month is when the rollout of the LINC project began publicly.

These notes may be part of a longer and more developed piece in the future, but this is not that. I’m not tying everything up in a bow here, it’s really just an assemblage of observations on this project – about which I’ve seen obnoxiously little public dissent in the media sphere in Lowell – alongside a few stabs at integrating these events into a broader understanding of gentrification and development incentives. On one level, that’s sort of what I think blogs like this are good for: things can get started without the pressure of having to get it all perfect right at once, but it’s still somewhere that others can take a look at and offer ideas on.

I don’t think it serves anyone to be romantic about these things, especially when it’s white, US-born, English-speaking people like me who aren’t going to be suffering the most as gentrification progresses waxing lyrical about a community that they (I) only know portions of. But I do love this city, I am sad to see the way things are moving, and the way it’s being treated as inexorable, whether that resignation is accompanied by applause or groans. I don’t believe the development of small urban areas like Lowell towards being unaffordable commuter hubs for larger cities like Boston or aggressively policed consumer playparks for the heavily credentialed (or those pursuing heavier credentialing) is in any way inevitable, it’s just very hard to reverse given the political economy in which we live. I hope these notes can serve to make that political economy a little less obscured to anybody reading this, since writing it has been nothing but a process of trying to do exactly that for myself.

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The Lowell Innovation Network Corridor (LINC) has been rolled out this year in an extremely well-planned and -executed public relations campaign. State and local lawmakers stood alongside the CEOs of defense contractor companies and, most prominently, UMass Lowell Chancellor Julie Chen to lay out a vision for the future of the former textile company town of Lowell, Massachusetts. I’m impressed by whatever person or team of people planned this campaign. They clearly knew well or studied up on the major corridors of power in this city, split between a capacity-starved municipal government and a nonprofit sphere supposedly attempting to fill in the gaps by creating vehicles for their Executive Directors to self-promote. Both are hungry for exactly the kind of private capital that this project promises to lure into town. (The private capital already here, largely though not exclusively concentrated in real estate companies like Winn, is what constitutes the third major corridor of power in the city right now. This category arguably includes UMass Lowell itself given its real estate holdings in the city and weight in local planning and development.)

The Lowell Sun article on the project’s announcement gives about as good an overview as the release on the Massachusetts State Website put out after the initial press conference featuring Governor Maura Healey. (Or, for that matter, any of the several articles released by third-party news outlets which are largely just copy-pastes of the State release.) Essentially, the project is a majorly expanded version of the East Campus project, a previous plan to develop five parcels of land in the area by LeLacheur park where several dorm buildings and the larger of UML’s two gyms anchor what’s known as East Campus. For context, UMass Lowell’s geography is divided into three regions: South Campus, where humanities majors like I was are shoved; North Campus, where people who might actually pay off their student loans someday go; and East Campus, where students are piled on top of each other at Fox Hall and other dorm buildings. There’s also a West Campus, technically, but it’s disused and mostly populated by abandoned, fire-damaged buildings that I would of course never advise anyone to break into to try and find ghosts.

The expanded plan involves creating, I guess, an “Innovation Network Corridor.” If you’re like me and don’t know what that means, from what I can tell it’s basically a plan for developing certain properties in a line stretching from East Campus through the Acre, past Downtown and into the Hamilton Canal Innovation District (another area-specific development plan with “Innovation” in its name). Development of these buildings will take place “in partnership” with companies like Wexford Science & Technology and Draper Laboratories. The former is a development company who mostly seems to do stuff like this, having developed similar purpose-built urban plots with an aim towards attracting clusters of research-heavy institutions in places like uCity Square in Philadelphia (the web page for which sounds like the sort of planned community a scientist-hero in a 70s sci-fi movie would think was utopian until she discovers something dastardly underneath it all). The latter is an R&D company that works in complicated things like navigation systems for military vehicles and would presumably be well-positioned to hire UML engineers fresh off their undergrad once they’ve set up in Lowell.

So it’s a very big real estate development plan initiated in the hopes of using UMass Lowell’s large supply of students in STEM fields who need jobs and internships to attract big companies to the area, convincing them to kick in money at a scale that the City of Lowell itself doesn’t have into buildings and infrastructure that will be cheaper to rehab in Lowell than they would be in a bigger city like Boston. Okay. Putting it that way makes more sense to me, personally, than lines like the one that open the Sun’s article:

UMass Lowell Chancellor Julie Chen unveiled a multimillion-dollar development plan that leverages the prestige and innovation of the university and the resources and history of the city of Lowell with the job creation capabilities of industry to envision a vibrant urban village/main street model and economic engine for the city.

Which is saying the same thing, just with more frills. More recent news releases on the project have been using language that’s slightly more comprehensible:

Announced in March, LINC is a new commercial real estate development that will translate the university’s success into economic development gains for Lowell and the Merrimack Valley.

The benefits of this plan are being touted as not just serving UMass Lowell, students who need to repay their loans, and companies who need students desperate to repay their loans to take jobs with them, but as serving the community in Lowell at large. The press release on the State site says very early on:

The project is expected to generate over $3.7 billion in economic activity and create 2,000 permanent jobs over the next decade. It will also create 1,300 construction jobs and result in nearly 500 units of new housing in Lowell, along with several million dollars in new annual property tax revenues to the City.

That basic trio of selling points – 1) big-numbers “economic activity”, 2) more jobs, and 3) more housing – are repeated across the media coverage of the plan. Chancellor Chen has pointed towards them in all the public appearances she’s made in support of the project. The Sun article quotes her throughout:

“We believe the Lowell Innovation Network Corridor or Lowell Inc or LINC, is going to transform Lowell in its economic development,” Chen said in a Zoom meeting on Thursday that was attended by City Manager Tom Golden…

“These efforts will not only bring companies out to the East Campus, but will very quickly lead to opportunities in the HCID,” Chen said. “And housing wise, the MBTA and commuter rail communities.” …

“Building that (Phases 1 and 2) is maybe 250,000 to 300,000 square feet and the university would occupy about 20% with our faculty, staff and students, and the rest would be companies coming in and bringing jobs to the city,” Chen said.

The pitch is recognizable: more big companies means more jobs, which means more housing since people need places to live when they aren’t at their jobs. At its most basic, this is what people are talking about when they talk about creating an “economic engine” or “anchor institution:” find a way to make somebody with money bring that money near a place that needs public goods like housing or infrastructure (or solar-powered high-speed intercontinental railway networks), and hopefully that will eventually mean there is more money available for those public goods. That will happen partly through tax revenues that those big companies will fight tooth and nail to avoid paying and partly through a sort of ill-defined fiscal osmosis.

The problems that “solutions” like this gesture towards addressing are very real problems. The pitch wouldn’t work so well if they weren’t. Communities across the country are experiencing a housing crisis, with rents becoming increasingly difficult to afford for most working and low-income people. The number of people who are forced into houselessness by this state of affairs has grown rapidly in recent years, and Lowell has seen a spike in homelessness at the same time as many locally-owned businesses have shuttered. My issue isn’t with the idea that there are real problems that an influx of resources could put something towards solving, it’s that LINC isn’t actually a plan to address any of those problems. It’s just selling itself as one.

The LINC project is described as having three phases:

The first two phases will happen roughly simultaneously, each adding mixed-use space. One will build out land next to the Tsongas Arena, and a counterpart will take aim a stone’s throw away near the Wannalancit Mills.

Chen said both locations will each add about 300,000-square-foot buildings, about 20 percent of which UMass Lowell will occupy. Companies who want to be close to campus will lease the remaining space…

For both new mixed-use spaces, developers will build housing next door, geared toward recent graduates and young professionals. That development will add nearly 500 total units of housing to Lowell’s stock.

All of the articles about LINC lead with how this will bring “more housing” to the city. Only after that headline are the specifics addressed, which is that the only housing mentioned is “geared towards recent graduates and young professionals.”

This is part of the problem with phrases like “housing stock” – in their unspecificity, they obscure more than they reveal. The problem isn’t that there’s not “enough housing,” it’s that the housing here now is too expensive for the majority of people who need it to afford. I assume the Thorndike Exchange building added units to Lowell’s “housing stock,” but it’s too expensive for most people in this city to actually live there. It certainly hasn’t done anything to make rent more affordable for more people or bring anyone living outside into stable housing situations, and I haven’t seen anything specific in the LINC announcements about addressing these particular issues. Simply adding more units on its own isn’t going to do that, and the people who are falling into houselessness and being abandoned by our social support institutions (such as they are) are not people who would be stably housed but for a tragic lack of entry-level biotech jobs.

The promise of “new jobs” is doing something similar. Unfortunately, having a job is something most people have to do to afford to live, so promises of “job creation” are a pretty standard way for companies to pretend like what they do benefits anyone other than their top executives and shareholders. Obviously, during the period where actual, active “development” (ie people building and rebuilding stuff) is taking place, we can expect an increased need for people who know how to do the on-the-ground work of building things, but the actual projections around jobs are quoted in the Sun as:

LINC is projected to generate more than $3.7 billion in economic activity statewide during the next decade, 1,300 construction jobs, 2,000 permanent jobs from entry-level positions to CEO in multiple industry sectors, and $4 million to $6 million in potential new tax revenue for the city of Lowell.

Building Trades unions in the area area already making noise about creating a PLA for this plan (a Project-Labor Agreement, which would be a legal agreement between building trades unions and construction companies involved in the project about things like working conditions and the use of union labor on these construction projects). So much the better, since unions are, unlike any of the other parties currently involved in LINC, institutions which are actually structured to advance the interests of the workers they represent. But the construction jobs only account for 1,300 in the publicly-stated estimates, while the other, larger chunk of 2,000 explicitly “permanent” jobs are expected to be distributed across “multiple industry sectors,” as well as across levels of prior professionalization necessary to enter. Frankly, I think the idea of “creating” a CEO-level job as being a community benefit is laughable, and the fact that this is used as one end of the spectrum of jobs being lumped into that 2K makes me curious as to what else is being included. But even assuming that the majority of jobs included in that figure are significantly below CEO-level (which I think just mathematically they would have to be), I suspect that the vast majority of the “multiple industry sectors” in which those jobs are going to be, given the nature of this plan and the companies involved in it, are not going to be in fields that working-class and low-income people who live in Lowell right now will be getting into.

Again, this lack of specificity glosses over very real and very important inequities in who is supposed to be benefiting from this. While gesturing towards issues like housing and job insecurity, the actual solutions being offered are, by their own admission, largely supposed to benefit people who are already decently positioned to nab the kinds of jobs that get you the salary you’d need to afford extremely unaffordable places to live. These people are part of a class that, I think it needless to say, are not the most vulnerable to those problems.

It’s also pertinent to note that, even though there is talk about a PLA for the project, there isn’t actually any agreement yet and I don’t know the likelihood of one coming to pass. Nor is there a CBA, or Community Benefits Agreement, which would be a similar sort of binding agreement between the parties to the LINC project and a coalition of community members and groups in Lowell to codify the kind of benefits that the press around LINC keeps promising. I’m sure that the companies buying into LINC aren’t being put in this position – being asked to take it on faith that the project will work out as they’re promised without any contracts or legal guarantees. But without measures like a PLA or CBA, that’s exactly what’s being expected of people living in the town that LINC is going to have such a large and long-term impact on.

The last promise, the one about “economic activity,” is the least defined of the three. Which is saying something, given all the foregoing. Part of the anxiety that this point is trying to tap into is what I mentioned earlier about lots of locally-owned businesses in Lowell closing in the last several years. The thought, then, is that having more big companies in Lowell employing more people will mean that more small businesses like restaurants and cafes, indie bookstores and stationary shops and fashion boutiques and stores selling music in archaic mediums, etc., etc., will open because the people working at those companies will provide a customer base for them. Honestly, that seems fairly likely to me; I have to imagine innovators appreciate being able to get coffee and sandwiches in the middle of the day like the rest of us slackers do. This is the “ill-defined fiscal osmosis” I was referring to earlier. I don’t pretend like it wouldn’t be kind of nice to have all those businesses in walking distance, but I think it’s 1) not as serious and immediate a problem as people not being able to afford to live (nor is it actually putting anything towards solving that problem), and 2) disingenuous to pretend like it’s somehow the major chunk of what “$3.7 billion in economic activity” is referring to.

(I’ll also cite again a piece I linked to earlier when talking about housing, as it makes the point that the same market forces that are contributing to the housing crisis – namely the inordinate structural power of landlords – also make it increasingly difficult for small businesses to continue operating. This is a necessary caveat to any optimism around locally-owned businesses benefiting from the LINC development.)

The other and deeper anxiety this plays/preys on, the one that is more immediately frightening to exactly the kind of people that LINC is most likely going to displace, is what is often euphemistically called the “cost of living crisis.” In the wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic, this has become the preferred media term for talking about income inequality and the fact that the majority of people aren’t paid enough to live decently given how expensive everything is. The large-scale economic shocks of the last twenty years – most spectacularly the 2007-8 subprime mortgage crisis and the recession ushered in by the COVID-19 Pandemic – have eventually ambled into “recoveries” that don’t feel much like recoveries to the majority of the population. Even if GDP or other homogenizing macro-scale financial metrics have “returned” to where they were prior to these shocks, this has not translated into greater stability or bigger savings cushions for people who aren’t in upper-level income brackets.

To speak very generally: As capitalism in the second half of the twentieth century increasingly internationalized and financialized – as investment and returns on investment increasingly occurred in convoluted speculative arenas and international regulations were weakened so that investment in material production could find the lowest-paid workers in the world with the least protections in order to keep profit margins increasing – real wages remained largely stagnant or lowered for workers in the industrialized economies of the Global North. The increased consumption that occurred over the course of the same period in the second half of the twentieth century when the necessary deregulation was occurring for that process to take place was largely based on credit schemes that pushed the few who could afford it – along with a large number of people who really couldn’t – towards homeownership as a form of collateral for buying in. Other forms of housing and tenancy relations were largely stripped of government funding and protections in the meantime.

Under these circumstances, economic measurements that could broadly be thought of as correlating to the quality of life of the average working or low-income person have generally decoupled from those simply related to “economic activity” or productivity. Steps taken to ensure economic recovery in the wake of these shocks have therefore had less effect on the average person’s living conditions than we should want them to. Indeed, they have largely taken the form of government stepping in to provide a backstop for the largest firms to generate unsustainable levels of debt as a way to drive “productivity” back up, at the expense of smaller firms and resulting in increased overall precarity for the majority of the population and a general perception that things just keep getting shittier and meaner and more expensive. Under such circumstances, there is no reason to believe that something as nebulous as “increased economic activity” will have any actual impact on most people’s ability to live decently.

This obtains at different levels of scale. Zooming in on Massachusetts, the “recovery” from the COVID-19 recession has been, as those trends would indicate, uncertain and uneven. Mass Benchmarks, a journal run out of the UMass Donahue Institute that produces regular analysis and updates on the state economy of Massachusetts, wrote in their most recent “State of the State Economy” report:

“Annual benchmark revisions to payroll employment significantly changed our understanding of job growth in the state since the height of the pandemic. The revised data indicate that employment in Massachusetts in April 2024 remains 13,000 jobs below its pre-pandemic peak…

According to the revised data, year over year, in December 2023, the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics] revisions reduced Massachusetts job growth from 1.9 percent to 0.7 percent. During the same period, U.S. job growth was 2 percent. An aging state labor force, coupled with recent patterns in domestic outmigration, continues to focus state policymakers’ attention on the cost of living and other threats to economic competitiveness. This slowing growth has taken its toll on state tax receipts. For much of Fiscal Year 2024, state tax revenues have been below consensus estimates, resulting in the need to lower expectations and to implement midyear “9C” budget cuts and other fiscal adjustments.”

I cite these examples not out of a nostalgia for the historically anomalous postwar economic compact that I wasn’t alive during, or even because I think that the kind of economy that we would be “recovering” back into from these crashes, were such recovery metrics to take things like real wages into account, would be an unqualified good. I think, for instance, that even just using jobs added and lost as a measure for public good is a fairly questionable thing to do on its own – especially given that the jobs that Mass Benchmarks is referring to were added during a period of high interest rates and overall inflation, one has to wonder what the actual quality of these jobs are and why anyone would want to work them in the first place if they weren’t afraid of starving or missing rent payments otherwise. What I am citing these examples to show is that, if LINC’s promise of “increased economic activity” were to actually result in positive gains for working and low-income people in the communities it is going to impact without any concrete plans about how that is going to be made to happen, this would be miraculously out of step with the economic trends of recent history. You don’t swim against the current without actually putting in visible effort.

I’m not an economist, and I don’t have access to the data that I assume is being used to create these projections for the benefits of the LINC project. Even accounting for my deficiencies in these areas, though, I would think that if the data were projecting things like lowered general rent burdens throughout the city, an increase in the real wages of Lowell-based workers, or more funding for public or social housing programs, this would be something a member of the public could find relatively easily. Even some accountability measures for how the increased tax revenue is going to be spent would be nice, if we are supposed to believe that it will be going towards public goods. In the absence of these, it seems like the actual goal is not for people living in Lowell right now to have their quality of living elevated. The goal, rather, is to move people in who were already probably going to live pretty well wherever they ended up, while moving everybody else out, until you can claim that the quality of life rose by virtue of having gotten rid of anybody whose life and its quality would have been inconvenient to that claim.

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[The photos in this post are all shot on an Olympus OM-1n camera with Kodak Ektar 100 film. I was really surprised by how much I liked the results this film got – with the exception of the first photo in this post, none of the images have any color correction done on them besides converting from the scanned negatives. The resulting images aren’t especially true-to-life as far as color goes, but that isn’t why I like shooting with film in the first place.]

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