Editorial: Main Street deserves better
When construction crews arrive at the YMCA expansion and renovation job site on Main Street early in the morning, they watch the nearby Albion rooming house at 765 Main St. empty out.
Workers describe pimps coming to pick up the night's take and addicts stumbling out into Main Street, queasily fighting with their co-dependents and wandering off to find someone to sell them the next hit.
Given that daily display, it's surprising Worcester's leaders were so keen to transfer the Albion's lodging license to the building's new owner, no matter how good his intentions for the old hotel may be.
But the daybreak scenes at the Albion aren't all that could've clued in the city license commission or the city manager's executive office of economic development to the fact that the Albion may never be anything but an acrid, two-bit flophouse. Did no one in the city ask new owner Ediberto Santiago how much he planned to spend on improving the building?
It's $200,000 in the immediate future, maybe $400,000 over the next three years.
That is nothing. The Albion could absorb $1 million in improvements and renovations before anyone noticed that work was progressing. For now, the work that is being done there amounts to new windows, making sure the porches don't fall off the back of the building, making the common bathrooms usable and painting over the decades-old faux-wood paneling in the lobby.
That's what the city's license commission calls a "marked improvement."
The city's economic development department and license commission say there's a need in Worcester for the type of housing the Albion supplies. We're certain there is, especially in the Main South neighborhood, which in recent years has been a veritable refugee camp for the city's homeless. But the city missed an opportunity to deny Santiago's license transfer and require the Albion to become something other than a rooming house.
This is Main Street, 765 Main St., an easy five-minute walk from the future City Square redevelopment project downtown and not far from Clark University. Even if Main South needs a rooming house, Main Street doesn't.
If the Albion is truly in better hands, and Main Street is truly in need of the $400-per-month "service" it provides, where were the grand pronouncements from the city council? When the city managed to lease space at Union Station in the spring, every single city councilor got time at a podium to say things like, "Let's get down to brass tacks; I'm bullish on Worcester."
Buildings like the Albion are the brass tacks of any city's so-called renaissance. In other New England cities, mayors have stepped in to stop the development of rooming houses on the outskirts of downtown, let alone on Main Street.
But in Worcester, Santiago's good name is enough for the city to give the Albion a pass, no matter how modest his plans. It shows that for all the administration's "bullish" talk about Worcester, it couldn't care less about buildings like the Albion or what happens to the people in them.
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