a Better Bubble™
The plastics industry has long pushed for recycling as a way to clean up its image. But large-scale, effective plastic recycling remains a myth. In 2021, the United Nations Environment Program reported there were 75 million to 199 million tons of plastic waste in the oceans. Plastic continues to drive climate change and threaten human health, biodiversity and the environment — sometimes in ways the public can’t even see.
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The plastic crisis has grown exponentially. Despite marketing claims, less than 10% of the plastic waste from recent decades has been recycled. The rest gets incinerated, is buried in landfills or piles up as litter on land and in the water.
Today, it is widely acknowledged that everything about plastic — from extracting fossil fuels to make it, to manufacturing products that use it, to disposing of it — can seriously harm public health and the environment. Plastics are a growing driver of climate change. As growth in renewable energy threatens the rule of fossil fuels, that industry is clinging to the creation of new plastics as its Plan B.
Now, the plastics industry faces a new threat. World officials will gather at a United Nations meeting in November to start negotiating the text of the first legally binding treaty on plastics. A final version is expected next year. If the agreement limits plastic production or use, the implications for the businesses that rely on it could be enormous.
So it wasn’t a surprise when those businesses sought to influence the discussion. But what has been jarring to environmental advocates and scientific researchers is who has been there to boost the Big Plastic platform: the United Nations itself, along with other globally respected groups.
This dynamic is evident right now in New York City, as global leaders, business executives and climate activists convene for Climate Week, an annual gathering organized by the nonprofit Climate Group in partnership with the United Nations.
Event organizers granted an opening ceremony speaking slot to a senior partner at McKinsey & Company, the powerhouse consulting firm that has advised fossil fuel companies. Top event sponsors include major brands that rely on plastic packaging and associate members of the American Chemistry Council, a leading plastics lobby.
“Our position on climate change and the urgent need to reach net zero is unequivocal, and we have been backing up those words with action for decades,” a McKinsey spokesperson said in an email. The American Chemistry Council didn’t return requests for comment.
A Climate Group spokesperson defended the inclusion of McKinsey and major plastics brands. “We won’t tackle climate change by only speaking with businesses or governments who are top performers. We need to engage with those who have further to go still.”
To those hoping for a strong plastics treaty, one of the most disappointing developments came from a report published by the United Nations Environment Program this May.
Co-written with Systemiq, a consulting firm that has advised the fossil fuel and plastics industries, the report generated a flurry of media attention for the main takeaway: that the interventions it listed would reduce global plastic pollution 80% by 2040 compared with what otherwise would have happened.
But its authors did not consider feedback from a large group of independent scientists and suggested several solutions that are favored by industry.
The report was “written from a certain worldview” that reflects business interests, said Ewoud Lauwerier, plastics policy expert at the advocacy group OceanCare. He called the report “highly problematic” in a 33-point thread on Twitter (now X).
Critics say the United Nations report emphasized waste management over the most important intervention — limiting the creation of new plastic. It’s a tactic that oil-rich nations like the United States have used in efforts to weaken the plastics treaty.
Putting the focus on managing waste risks getting locked into a cycle where people have to keep producing plastic to feed those waste management systems, said Jane Patton, campaigns manager on the U.S. fossil economy at the Center for International Environmental Law. Some environmentalists have called for phasing out single-use plastics by 2040.
The report is “not a reflection of industry talking points and it did not involve industry players while formulating the narrative,” Llorenç Milà i Canals, the lead report author from the United Nations Environment Program, said in an email on behalf of his institution and Systemiq. Milà i Canals is an expert on assessing the environmental impacts of products from creation to disposal.
The report did not predict how total plastics production would change. It focused on “short-lived” plastic products like packaging, which make up about two-thirds of all plastic waste. The report said the listed interventions would decrease production of these plastics 9% by 2040 compared with 2020.
Much of the reduction would come through eliminating single-use plastic or using replacement materials like paper. But the report’s inclusion of other controversial solutions alarmed many advocates and scientists.
Chief among them is chemical recycling, which transforms plastic on a molecular level. Research has shown that the process sometimes requires more energy than making brand-new plastic. A Reuters investigation found the industry has struggled to make it work on a large scale. Baked into the report’s estimated reduction in plastic pollution is what it projected to be a massive expansion of the practice: a more-than eightfold increase over 20 years. That growth rate is based on work Systemiq did with The Pew Charitable Trusts that resulted in a peer-reviewed paper.
“There’s no evidence anywhere showing that chemical recycling is sustainable from an environmental perspective or an economic perspective,” said Bethanie Carney Almroth, an ecotoxicology professor at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden. She fears the report will encourage governments to invest in chemical recycling, locking them into a harmful practice.
Chemical recycling is “included only as a last resort” for situations where plastic waste can’t be eliminated or processed via traditional recycling, Milà i Canals said. Chemical recycling “may have a role to play,” but “of course reducing the size of the problem is the top priority.”
The Pew Charitable Trusts, in a statement, said that its study set out to analyze “all existing and emerging technologies” to “assess their maximum feasible growth over the next 20 years” The analysis acknowledged that chemical recycling is “controversial” and could only tackle 6% of the plastic waste by 2040, so it “certainly cannot solve the crisis on its own.”
Incineration is another point of contention. Some “sub-optimal solutions will be needed” for certain non-recyclable plastics, the United Nations report stated. One option is to continue the practice of burning plastic as fuel for cement kilns. Since many countries already have cement kilns, the authors wrote, it wouldn’t require new investment and could reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
“Plastic itself is a fossil fuel,” said Sedat Gündoğdu, a professor in the Faculty of Fisheries at Çukurova University in Turkey. He said the report didn’t pay enough attention to the toxic footprint of incineration, as there’s “no proper solution” for the dioxins and other carcinogens emitted by burning plastic.
Many countries will turn to this report as a basis for future policy, he said. If the United Nations Environment Program lists incineration as an option, the least it could do is describe minimum health and environmental standards, he added.
Milà i Canals said the report stated this method is “strongly discouraged” and the authors did not recommend building new kilns. “We accept that we could have been more explicit about the limits of this solution.”
The report also suggested some of the costs of incineration could be covered by plastic credits — programs where corporations can claim to neutralize some of their plastic use by paying people elsewhere to recycle, incinerate or otherwise clean up existing plastic pollution.
Experts accused United Nations officials of being naive for their endorsement of plastic credits, saying that such programs will only justify more production of plastic while at the same time harming residents near incinerators. They have “no idea what’s going on on the ground,” said Yuyun Ismawati, senior adviser of the Nexus3 Foundation, an environmental group in Indonesia.
Her organization worked with a community in Bali near a polluting plastic waste recovery facility. Waste processed by the plant was linked to plastic credits pursued by a subsidiary of Danone, the French yogurt brand. The advocates sent Danone letters in June describing “filthy acidic smells” from the plant and residents’ complaints of nausea and severe headaches. The letter also denounced Verra, an American nonprofit that registered the plastic crediting project. Verra has been repeatedly criticized for selling worthless carbon credits. ProPublica reported in 2019 on a Verra-managed carbon offset project where half of the forested area that was supposed to be preserved was cut down after a decade.
Representatives from Verra and Danone told ProPublica the Bali project never produced actual plastic credits, and they were working to address concerns on the ground. The Verra spokesperson said the nonprofit is updating its carbon offset rules in response to recent criticism.
The Danone spokesperson said more research is needed “to test the effectiveness of plastic credits, and we continue to explore various solutions for plastic recycling.”
Milà i Canals said his report “does not provide a blanket recommendation” for plastic credits and cited references that warned of risks.
The United Nations Environment Program received notes on all of these concerns before publishing. It invited comments.
Since last year, the Scientists’ Coalition for an Effective Plastics Treaty — a group of 280 scientists from 55 countries — has volunteered its time to provide technical assistance on the treaty. In early March, the United Nations Environment Program sent out a draft of the report to representatives of the group, giving them a week to review the 80-page document. Thirty scientists from different countries dove in. Carney Almroth, the professor from Sweden, spent the weekend typing at her kitchen table on a shared document.
Their final submission contained more than 300 comments about the report’s general framing and critiques of specific paragraphs. “Many solutions that have been presented (e.g. different forms of recycling) have failed, or are not scalable, or were pure greenwashing campaigns from the start,” she wrote in one comment.
Their feedback fell into a virtual black hole. The final report didn’t alleviate their main concerns, Carney Almroth said, even though it was published two months after the comments’ submission.
Milà i Canals said the email was filtered to a spam folder. Everyone was so busy that “nobody noticed” the “unfortunate mistake” until the report was published, he said.
They did take other people’s comments into account, Milà i Canals explained. In total, the authors received more than 1,000 comments from 75 external experts working for civil society groups, academia, industry and government, he said.
Our comments had the potential to “reshape the whole report,” and that’s “not something the industry wants,” Gündoğdu said. He and others said the United Nations program should have done more to vet Systemiq before hiring them.
Milà i Canals said Systemiq is a “mission-driven” company that was founded to help achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and the Paris climate agreement, “and it does this by transforming markets and business models.” He cited Systemiq’s “excellent track record” analyzing plastic, including the firm’s prior work with his institution, academic researchers and Pew.
According to its website, Systemiq is “a collaborative system designer, developer and disruptor” striving for “a thriving planet where sustainable economic systems drive prosperity for all.” It was founded in 2016 by consultants with decades of experience working for McKinsey.
Like McKinsey, Systemiq has advised the fossil fuel sector. Yoni Shiran, the lead Systemiq author of the United Nations report, said the firm has done so “very rarely” and only to “help them move away from fossil fuels.” A 2022 Systemiq report written for Plastics Europe, an industry trade group, described how to reduce the environmental footprint of the most commonly used types of plastic, which make up 75% of all plastic. Aggressive policy changes could keep the amount produced from rising between 2020 to 2050 in Europe, the report predicted. (A spokesperson for Plastics Europe said it was an “independent report” advised by a steering committee of experts working in the public sector, civil society and industry.)
The United Nations report lists 17 lead authors: eight from the United Nations program, five from Systemiq, and four from a university and another consulting firm. Two of the Systemiq authors previously worked for McKinsey.
On Tuesday, Systemiq will release a new report, titled “Towards Ending Plastic Pollution by 2040.” It was commissioned by the Nordic Council, a regional parliament. Many of these countries are part of a “High Ambition Coalition” that seeks aggressive terms on the plastics treaty.
A spokesperson for the Nordic Council said the group was “very aware” of the criticism received by the United Nations report, adding that “many of those concerns” were taken into account and “addressed more directly” in the new report.
An early copy provided to reporters shows that the report predicts total plastic production will increase by 9% in 2040 compared with 2019. Without the suggested interventions, the report said, production in 2040 would balloon by 66%. Shiran, one of the lead authors, said 9% “actually represents a pretty ambitious reduction” since the United Nations predicts world population will grow by 2 billion in 2040, with rising plastic consumption per capita.
The report didn’t mention plastic credits and presented scenarios with and without large growth in chemical recycling. Shiran was also a lead author on the Pew and Plastics Europe reports.
Experts said these repeat publications create a loop in which reports cite and legitimize one another.
If you have one consultancy that’s constantly self-referencing its own work, it doesn’t expand our knowledge or prove their case, said Patton, the Center for International Environmental Law advocate. If an environmental group had this much influence, she added, “I would absolutely have the same concerns.”
Shiran said the models underlying each report took years of work and took feedback from expert panels made up of academics, government officials and civil society groups. The reports are “intentionally linked to build on previous knowledge,” he said. “This is a strength of the work, not a weakness.”
Do You Have Experience in or With the Plastics Industry? Tell Us About It.
Kirsten Berg and Alex Mierjeski contributed research.
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Deb Libby is running out of time to find a place to live.
Libby, 56, moved to Worcester, Massachusetts, four years ago, in part to be closer to the doctors treating her for pancreatic cancer. She rented an apartment — a converted garage — and spruced it up, patching the walls and repainting all the rooms.
But Libby’s landlord, who has been trying to get her to leave, now wants her out by the end of the month. She can’t find anything else she can afford. Libby earns only a little more than minimum wage working at a hardware store and often has to take unpaid time off when she doesn’t feel well.
She thought she found a potential solution nearly a year ago: She applied for state public housing, a type of subsidized housing that’s almost unique to Massachusetts. But she’s heard nothing since.
“It’s frightening,” she said. “I seriously don’t know what to do. It’s like the system’s broken.”
In a state with some of the country’s most expensive real estate, Libby is among the 184,000 people — including thousands who are homeless, at risk of losing their homes or living in unsafe conditions — on a waitlist for the state’s 41,500 subsidized apartments.
As they wait, a WBUR and ProPublica investigation found that nobody is living in nearly 2,300 state-funded apartments, with most sitting empty for months or years. The state pays local housing authorities to maintain and operate the units whether they’re occupied or not. So the vacant apartments translate into millions of Massachusetts taxpayer dollars wasted due to delays and disorder fostered by state and local mismanagement.
As of the end of July, almost 1,800 of the vacant units, including some with at least three bedrooms, had been empty for more than 60 days. That’s the amount of time the state allows local housing authorities to take to fill a vacancy. About 730 of those have not been rented for at least a year.
The vacancies are aggravating a statewide housing crisis. Massachusetts is spending $45 million a month to house people temporarily at hotels, shelters, college dorms and a military base. Gov. Maura Healey declared a state of emergency in August to deal with the wave of homelessness. Massachusetts reports that the number of families with children staying in emergency shelters has almost doubled in the past year to 6,386.
Our investigation found that one cause of the prolonged vacancies is the flawed online waitlist system the state rolled out four years ago. Massachusetts replaced town-by-town waitlists with a single pool of applicants that 230 local housing agencies draw from. But the state failed to implement an efficient system for selecting potential tenants. Understaffed and underfunded local agencies have to screen applicants for income, criminal background and other eligibility criteria. Apartments are left in limbo as some candidates turn out not to qualify. Applicants often indicate they would accept housing in many towns, but then reject offers from communities that are far away from their current location.
Deb Libby, a Worcester grandmother with pancreatic cancer, has been on the waitlist for state-funded housing for almost a year. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)“I think it’s the most horrible, horrible, inefficient program,” said David Hedison, executive director at the housing authority in Chelmsford, a town 30 miles northwest of Boston. He said the agency spent six months contacting 500 people who were on the waitlist for a three-bedroom apartment, before it finally found one who responded and qualified for the unit. “The whole sense of helping residents in your community is gone,” he said.
Since the centralized waitlist went into effect, local housing agencies have increasingly told the state that they need extra time to fill vacancies, requesting more and more waivers to extend the usual 60-day deadline. The number of waiver requests has tripled since 2018, state data shows.
Massachusetts Public Housing Agencies Are Filing More and More Waivers to Keep Units EmptyIn 2019, Massachusetts replaced local waitlists with a statewide system. Since then, the number of waivers that local housing authorities have filed because they couldn’t fill a vacancy in the 60-day time limit has more than tripled.
Source: Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities (Data analysis by Todd Wallack/WBUR, chart by Jason Kao/ProPublica)The state’s new secretary of housing, Ed Augustus, acknowledged that there’s no justification for having so many vacancies.
“I think it’s unacceptable,” said Augustus, who was sworn in less than four months ago. “I think that we need to do everything we can to make sure that every single one of our precious public housing units is filled and the amount of time between tenants is as short as is humanly possible.”
Zagaran, a small software developer in Boston, created the program that runs the state’s central waitlist system. Co-founder Josh Zagorsky put the responsibility on state officials, saying that complaints were about “matters of policy, not Zagaran’s software.”
In most states, low-income residents seeking affordable housing must rely on federal housing, vouchers for private housing and other assistance. But Massachusetts is one of four states — alongside New York, Connecticut and Hawaii — with state-funded housing. Massachusetts has more than twice as much state-subsidized housing as the other three states combined.
With tens of thousands of units, Massachusetts public housing is a linchpin of the social safety net for seniors, people with disabilities and families with limited resources. Adding in 31,000 federally funded units, Massachusetts has more public housing per capita than any other state, according to a WBUR analysis. But so many people are in dire need of housing that both the state and federal systems have lengthy waitlists.
The Massachusetts public housing system was originally established to accommodate low-income veterans after World War II. The state typically spends more than $200 million a year on operating expenses and renovations to keep rent affordable for low-income tenants. When units are empty, the local authorities miss out on rental income, but they generally continue to receive the state money.
Massachusetts ranks as the third-most-expensive state for private housing. But tenants in state-funded units typically pay less than a third of their household income in rent. That means a family earning $30,000 per year would pay a maximum of $800 a month for a two-bedroom, far below the state median of about $3,000 a month. And when families in state-funded housing don’t have any income, they only pay the $5 monthly minimum.
But actually landing one of those apartments is extremely difficult. Doris Romero, a housing coordinator at the Women’s Lunch Place day shelter in Boston, has helped dozens of women sign up for state-funded housing. But, she said, only one has actually moved into a state unit in the past year. She was stunned to hear about all the vacant apartments.
“Honestly, that’s a travesty,” Romero said. “The commonwealth should be ashamed.”
Brady Village, a state-funded family housing complex in the western Massachusetts town of Agawam, is a microcosm of a statewide problem. Barbecue grills and children’s bikes stand outside some of the units where families live. But Agawam Housing Authority Executive Director Maureen Cayer points out one vacancy after another. Ten of the 44 units were empty in July, including seven that had been unoccupied for more than a year.
“They’re clean. They’re bright. And they’re empty,” said Cayer, who is responsible for overseeing the buildings and filling the vacancies. “It’s not the way it’s supposed to be.”
Cayer blames the statewide waitlist for the vacancies in Brady Village. Historically, local agencies with state-funded housing each managed their own small waitlists for homes. But critics complained that some local housing authorities played favorites, and that the process was cumbersome for prospective tenants, who had to file separate applications, often in person, for every community where they were interested in living.
Maureen Cayer, executive director of the Agawam Housing Authority, discovers that birds have been nesting in the exhaust vent of a long-unoccupied unit in Brady Village. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)To address the concerns, the Legislature ordered the state in 2014 to create a statewide online system, called the Common Housing Application for Massachusetts Programs, or CHAMP. The system was supposed to make it easier for people to find housing by allowing them to apply anywhere in the state with a single form. Each housing agency receives a state-generated list of people who indicated an interest in that area.
The system, which has cost the state $6.8 million, ran into problems as soon as local housing authorities began using it internally in the fall of 2018. In January 2019, a state housing official sent a memo to all local agencies alerting them that they might need additional staff to screen applicants. The memo said that the new system created an “acute administrative challenge” to determining who qualifies for priority placements. The state gives priority to people whom it considers homeless through no fault of their own, due to reasons like a natural disaster or domestic violence. As a practical matter, it’s almost impossible for families to obtain state housing without priority status.
When the new system launched for the public that April, more than three years behind schedule, housing authorities immediately complained it made it harder to sift through the flood of applications and find tenants who qualified for the units. “The system is not working,” the housing authority in Warren, a town in central Massachusetts, told the state in November 2019.
Despite these shortcomings, Massachusetts officials hailed the new statewide waitlist as a success. At a formal celebration at the Statehouse in December 2019, complete with a reception and appetizers in the marbled Great Hall, then-Gov. Charlie Baker honored the development team with an award for “excellence in public service.”
In the four years since, complaints from local housing officials have only grown louder. Under the old system, it would take the Agawam Housing Authority a couple months to find a new tenant, Cayer said. Now, it takes years. Baker did not respond to a request for comment.
The first problem is that the application is lengthy and complicated. Agawam’s old form was eight pages long. The new statewide form is 26 pages. There is no initial screening or check to see if applicants have the paperwork they need, so housing agencies generally can’t identify problems until late in the process — when an apartment is available and someone’s name comes to the top of the list.
Cayer recalls a two-bedroom unit in Brady Village that was empty for two and a half years before finally getting a tenant this past February. Agawam housing officials went through roughly 600 names, grabbing a batch from the waitlist almost every week and mailing out letters with a 15-page supplemental form to determine eligibility. Applicants had 10 business days to reply.
Most never responded. Or it turned out they weren’t eligible for public housing. Or they had to be moved down the list because they didn’t qualify for priority status as they contended they did. Or, when they were finally offered a home, they turned it down because they had competing offers or they decided Agawam was too far away from their work or family. The typical applicant seeks housing in 20 communities, according to the state.
“It’s an exercise in futility,” Cayer said. “We have people calling or applying from the Cape or from Boston. They can’t reasonably live here.” (The largest town on Cape Cod, Barnstable, is 150 miles from Agawam.)
The state revamped the applicant form in December, adding a map of the 14 counties in Massachusetts in hopes of dissuading people from signing up for housing in communities they have no intention of living in. So far, Cayer said, the map has not been effective in deterring far-flung people from applying to Agawam.
And since people often apply to multiple towns, it’s common for them to be contacted by many housing authorities at once. As a result, multiple agencies simultaneously hold units open for the same applicant, who can choose only one place. Meanwhile, Cayer said, some waitlisted families are stuck in shelters or sleeping in their cars.
“I think it’s criminal,” Cayer said. “Criminal.”
Public records show that local housing authorities have regularly told the state they need more time to fill vacancies because of problems with the CHAMP waitlist, as well as a lack of staff to comb through applications.
A page from the application for state public housing in Massachusetts. The state’s online system for selecting tenants has been plagued by problems. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)The state has received so many complaints about the CHAMP system that it has hired a Boston marketing firm, Archipelago Strategies Group, to take over some of the screening of public housing applicants, starting this month. Archipelago referred questions to state officials.
A state housing official said Archipelago will be paid $3.3 million to go through the backlog of applicants requesting priority status for housing assistance. But local housing authorities will still be responsible for some of the vetting, such as background checks. The secretary of housing said he expects improvements soon but doesn’t know when the problems will be fully resolved.
“This is an iterative process,” Augustus said. “We’ll continue to make changes as necessary.”
The state also significantly reduced the size of the waitlist for state-funded public housing this spring — but not by placing people in apartments. Instead, it dropped tens of thousands of people who did not respond to a letter in the mail asking them to confirm that they were still interested in housing.
The waitlist is a mystery to people who are desperate for housing. They don’t know where they stand in the line of applicants or when they will find an apartment.
After applying for state-subsidized housing in January, Konstantinia Gountana, 41, of Arlington, and her family are living with these unknowns.
During the pandemic, Gountana’s husband lost his job as a barber in Harvard Square and three of her family members died, including her only relative in Massachusetts.
“Anything that could go wrong went wrong,” she said. “It was a disaster.”
To make ends meet, she and her husband started to drive for Uber on alternating shifts, with Gountana looking after their infant and 5-year-old during the day, and her husband handling child care in the evening. But their Toyota Prius broke down and they had to quit.
The Gountanas are facing steep odds. They limited their application to one town: Arlington, where more than 25,000 families are on the waitlist. They didn’t want to uproot their older son, who has symptoms of autism and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. His therapist had recommended against changing his school and schedule. The family also applied for housing vouchers, but there’s a long wait for those, too.
The Gountanas were evicted in June. They were forced to toss most of their belongings and squeeze into a friend’s spare room with their two kids. But they aren’t sure how long they can stay.
“Everything got destroyed,” Gountana said, bouncing her now 21-month-old son on her knee to keep him quiet. “I’m embarrassed. I’m sad. All these feelings.”
The executive director of the Arlington Housing Authority, Jack Nagle, said that filling vacancies is a challenge because of the state’s online waitlist system. Twenty of Arlington’s 700 state-funded units sat empty as of the end of July.
Gountana is still hoping to move into a state-funded apartment. “Honestly, I did not expect it to be so, so long,” she said.
The waitlist woes are one of several reasons for the glut of vacancies. Hundreds of apartments across Massachusetts can’t be filled because they’re undergoing renovation, or because local housing authorities lack the staff or funding for vital repairs.
Why State Public Housing Units Sit Vacant in MassachusettsLocal housing authorities submit a waiver and an explanation to the state if they expect that a unit will need to be vacant for longer than 60 days. For apartments that were vacant as of July 31, 2023, the following reasons were given.
Note: This data excludes any units that stand vacant but that housing authorities had not requested a waiver for. To simplify this chart, similar reasons were combined into a few groups. Source: Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities (Data analysis by Todd Wallack/WBUR, chart by Jason Kao/ProPublica)Units in the town of Adams, in the Berkshires near the New York state border, have been condemned as the problems piled up. And housing officials have razed other dilapidated apartments in cities such as Lowell, northwest of Boston, and Fall River, near the Rhode Island line. About 70 apartments across Massachusetts have been demolished or sold in the last dozen years, according to the state housing agency.
“We need a long-term plan,” said Rachel Heller, of the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association. “We can’t lose these homes.”
For decades, advocates have warned that the state public housing system needs billions of dollars in funding for additional staff and renovations, including new roofs, plumbing and heating systems. A 2006 audit called the situation a “state of emergency.”
But those alarms weren’t heeded. In 2018, the Legislature allocated $600 million over five years for capital expenditures for public housing — not enough to catch up with all needed repairs. Today, local authorities have a $3.2 billion backlog for renovations, by the state’s estimate. Augustus, the state housing secretary, said the state is working on a new bond bill, but it was too early to provide details.
Advocates pushed for $184 million this year for operating and maintaining the units day to day, but Healey’s proposed budget allowed for only half that amount.The Legislature ultimately allocated$107 million, an increase of 16% from last year. Healey, House Speaker Ron Mariano and Senate President Karen Spilka declined to be interviewed.
In the meantime, the state public housing stock is suffering. Take the housing authority in Watertown, a Boston suburb, which has six maintenance workers. Patrick Breen, the maintenance supervisor, said that’s not enough to care for the agency’s 589 units, many of which were built 60 to 70 years ago.
Breen said his crew must focus on emergencies, like broken cast-iron pipes and electrical outages. Often, no one is available to prep empty units for new families. Some longtime tenants just abandon the apartments, forcing the maintenance crew to haul out their belongings and repair walls, floors and counters. The units sit for months before they are ready to lease.
“It’s a nightmare,” Breen said. “There’s not much more you can do really, when you don’t have enough staff.”
The kitchen of a unit that needs renovation in the Lexington Gardens public housing complex in Watertown. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)Some apartments across the state stay in limbo even longer while housing authorities plan major renovations or redevelopment projects. That’s what happened in the city of Somerville, where units in the Clarendon Hill complex sat empty for as long as six and a half years before work began in March on a new $200 million private development of affordable and market-rate housing at the site. During that time, the state continued to pay Somerville to manage the vacant units.
Somerville Housing Authority interim director Joe Macaluso explained that the agency hadn’t wanted to spend money maintaining aging buildings that it planned to demolish, even though they were still livable. “We would have had to inject capital — good money after bad money — just to get them ready,” he said.
The state’s executive housing office rarely questions these long vacancies, approving 92% of requests to keep units empty past the 60-day deadline. But advocates for homeless people say they wish agencies would let someone live in the empty apartments — even if it’s only temporary.
“If you were to ask me or ask our clients, they would say, that’s four or five years I’m not in a shelter or out in the street,” said Mike Libby, executive director of the Somerville Homeless Coalition. He’s not related to Deb Libby, who’s seeking housing.
Across the state, housing authorities have also converted at least 121 state-subsidized apartments for uses including office spaces, storage areas and laundry rooms — further shrinking the pool of units available for families and seniors.
The Boston Housing Authority converted 11 units to offices for employees and tenant organizations and set aside another for a children’s program. Nearby, the Somerville Housing Authority repurposed 10 apartments, including a two-bedroom unit that was turned into office space for the agency’s police department.
A public housing unit at the Green Acres development in Fitchburg (first image) is used for an after-school program, while another in Somerville (second image) provides space for the local housing authority’s police department. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)Beverly, Fall River and Quincy turned units into laundry rooms. And the housing authority in Salem took four apartments in a downtown tower for seniors and converted them into offices, including a break room and space for file storage. After the president of the tenants’ association stumbled onto two of the repurposed units last year in the building he lives in, the housing authority launched eviction proceedings against him. The agency said he was trespassing. He said there was no indication that the offices were off limits. The case is pending.
One social services executive was astonished to hear about all the apartments converted to offices and storage.
Housing “seems like a bigger priority than a break room or storage facility,” said Laura Meisenhelter, executive director of North Shore Community Action Programs, which runs a family shelter. “You know, you can get sheds at Home Depot.”
Augustus, the state housing secretary, said there are often good reasons to repurpose units, such as to provide a library or a laundry room in a complex for seniors. He said the state has to sign off on the conversions, but it generally defers to local officials. “There’s always going to be unique circumstances,” Augustus said.
At least one agency hopes to switch its converted units back soon. The Fitchburg Housing Authority plans to build a $12 million community center with plenty of office space, enabling it to convert seven offices back to their original purpose: housing.
Fitchburg Housing Authority Executive Director Doug Bushman in an office that was converted from an apartment. (Jesse Costa/WBUR)Deb Libby, the Worcester woman facing eviction at the end of the month, never worried about becoming homeless. She’s worked at Lowe’s for two years, doing everything from fielding questions to moving supplies in the garden section. But it’s been harder to work a full schedule since she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer five years ago. Her job is physically demanding — she walks six to eight miles a day — and the disease has weakened her immune system, forcing her to take frequent days off without pay.
She said surgery removed the cancerous tissue in November 2018 and after that she’d been in remission. But an MRI recently found the cancer has spread to the liver. “We’re still trying to figure out what to do with that.”
Libby has struggled to keep up with the $1,450 monthly rent for her one-bedroom apartment near the College of the Holy Cross.
For a while, pandemic relief funds helped her pay the rent. Then a friend pitched in. But the building was sold, and she didn’t have a long-term lease.
Last October, after her landlord began the formal eviction process, Libby signed up for state public housing in Worcester. Libby managed to stave off the eviction in housing court for a year with help from an attorney from a legal aid nonprofit. As part of an agreement to settle the case, the landlord acknowledged Libby was not at fault, promised to provide a good recommendation, and cited “economic reasons” for the eviction. The building’s owner did not respond to an email asking for more specificity.
Libby prefers to remain in central Massachusetts, close to her mother, three children and three grandchildren. Her family doesn’t have room for her, she said, and she’s willing to move anywhere in the state to find an affordable apartment. Early this year, she expanded her search for public housing to 30 additional communities — from Chicopee in western Massachusetts to Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod.
In June, she applied for priority status for state housing on the grounds that she is losing her housing through no fault of her own. But Libby said she hasn’t received any response. When she called some housing authorities, she said, they wouldn’t tell her where she stands on the waitlist.
“I just really need something,” she said. “I really need help.”
Libby said she has no idea where she will live — maybe in her truck or a friend’s garage. She was surprised to hear about all the units sitting vacant across the state.
“It’s frustrating,” she said. “It’s maddening.”
Beth Healy and Paula Moura of WBUR contributed reporting.
The Riverboats at the Gateway Arch award guests one of the best views of St. Louis’ working riverfront, the Gateway Arch and the city skyline. Narrated by the captain […]
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