Down here on Boston Common we have K2, created to avoid research on marijuana, and crystal methamphetamine addicts sniffing the ground in search of crystal meth. Up there, Primark tower and the other towers, $4,000 a month rents. Greed can be an addiction.

I am grateful that the Department of Justice is suing Real Page for rent price-fixing. Real Page uses AI, artificial intelligence. Real Page executors, ahem, executives on video say that humans had to be gotten out of renting as too much EMPATHY, that real estate could only get the extreme rents if humans out. One young person in Chelsea renting a 1 BR for $2,000 was told that if she leased, rent would be $2700; if she doesn’t lease, $3,000 a month for a 1 BR in Chelsea.

Half of Boston rentals are corporate. As I go through newspapers over the years, I hope that I am wrong as it seems the legislature has been “bought.” Gateway Cities has built 4,000 units that rent for $4,000 and wants $57 million dollars from the annual state budget and $30 million each year thereafter! My friend whose grandparents built this triple decker and who is a longtime resident wondered why all the realtors were at State Senator Collins’ gathering. I was at a Greater Boston Interfaith Organization meeting in the 1990’s when the governor stated housing would be handled by the real estate market. My rent has gone from 30% of my income to 50% and now 100%. When weather closed the roads, workers who had been forced out by the rent could not get into the city: patients and nursing home residents suffered. Oliver and Hardy – one accuses the other of causing “a fine mess.” I am voting Yes on Question 1 for the State Auditor to audit the Massachusetts Legislature. Assabi-George had 2 powerful unions and also a spouse in real estate; Wu won.

I hope to live next along the Mattapan-Ashmont trolley, the only one in the country to go through a cemetery, as rent increases push us out further but we are retired. I see why many elders are working at jobs. Years ago a Mic Mac indigenous, descendant of those who went after whales in canoes, and I were talking, realizing that shelters had to make room for another economic group.

 

James Van Looy has been a fixture in Boston’s poetry venues since the 1970s. He is a member of Cosmic Spelunker Theater and has run poetry workshops for Boston area homeless people at Pine Street Inn and St. Francis House since 1992. Van Looy leads the Labyrinth Creative Movement Workshop, which his Labyrinth titled poems are based on. His work appears weekly in Oddball Magazine.