The Lowell City Council met on Tuesday night and completed a lengthy agenda that covered many topics. In today’s newsletter, I’ll focus on two of them.

One of the council’s first votes was to cancel the next council meeting which was scheduled for August 26, 2025. This will create a substantial gap in meetings due to the council’s summer schedule, which has regular meetings on just the second and fourth Tuesdays of the month from the start of June to the end of September.

Still, the council should not be criticized for this action since a majority of its members will be in Geneva, Switzerland, on city business that day. As reported by the Lowell Sun, Mayor Dan Rourke, some city councilors, City Manager Tom Golden, and other members of the city administration will leave the US on Saturday, August 23, bound for the United Nations Office at Geneva to make a formal presentation to the UN and the Urban Economy Forum on Lowell’s designation as the first Frontrunner City in the United States. The official city delegation will consist of 11 people according to a funding vote approved by the council. Approximately $33,000 in city funds will be spent on airfare and lodging.

Before commenting on the substance of this trip, a few general observations about travel to Europe: Because Geneva is six hours ahead of Lowell, flights from here to there typically leave in the evening, take about seven hours in the air, and, because the traveler has lost six hours and land in Switzerland first thing the next morning local time. I doubt there are direct flights from Boston to Geneva, so the group will have to land somewhere in Europe and catch a connecting flight. If everything goes right, they should reach their hotel in Geneva in time for an evening meal on Sunday. As for the return to Lowell on Wednesday, August 27, that likely will involve an early morning flight to some European airline hub like Zurich or Amsterdam then a seven-hour flight back to Boston, landing early in the afternoon local time due to the time difference.

At Tuesday’s meeting, Assistant City Manager Yovanni Baez-Rose explained that the delegation will attend meetings all day Monday and Tuesday, so there doesn’t appear to be any wasted time in the itinerary. (Members of the delegation can extend the trip if they choose, but they would be responsible for paying any additional costs.)

This being Lowell, I expect that a buzz about “boondoggles” and “wasting city money” is in the air, but that would be unfair and short-sighted. In Post Industrial America, mid-sized cities like Lowell face immense challenges that are incredibly complex to solve. Developing a strategy that allows Lowell to thrive in ways that benefit all its residents must be the goal. Well-paved streets and top-flight Little League fields are nice to have, but things like that are not nearly enough. Nor is there a standardized strategy to be followed that ensures success. Instead, cities must aggressively innovate and experiment, something that is impossible if city leaders simply remain in the Lowell bubble. Discovering what others have tried, what has worked, what lessons have been learned, is crucial to moving the city forward. Admittedly, much of that information can be found in the library, but when a unique opportunity arises – and being designated the first Frontrunner City in the entire country is certainly unique – then paying travel costs seems a wise investment.

Beyond just searching for new ideas in urban planning, an opportunity like the Frontrunner designation and traveling to Switzerland to brief the UN boosts the perception of the city and the morale of those who live here. That is not something to be dismissed. Paul Tsongas understood it. In the 1980s, he led efforts to install sculptures in public places in downtown Lowell because great places are known for great public art, and he was determined to make Lowell a great place.

Napolean Bonaparte said, “In war, the moral is to the physical as three to one” by which he meant that the morale and spirit of an army is far more important than its physical strength or material resources. The same can be said for a city. If people feel proud of the place they live and if outsiders form a positive perception, real world benefits will follow.

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Speaking of challenges faced by mid-sized cities in Post Industrial America, homelessness and vagrancy are high on that list and with the predictability of the changing of the seasons, the issue arose at Tuesday’s council meeting on a joint motion by Councilors Erik Gitschier and Corey Robinson requesting a report from the Lowell Housing Authority on what steps have been taken by the LHA to prevent vagrancy and drug use in common areas at the LHA apartments on Gorham Street, formerly known as the Bishop Markham housing project.

We can all agree that no one, especially tenants in Housing Authority apartments, should find human waste and used needles in elevators and public spaces. Nor should they have to deal with random individuals who are under the influence of illegal drugs, mentally ill, and potentially dangerous. The challenge is how to effectively address those very real problems. Consequently, requesting an update from the Housing Authority on conditions of its facilities is a reasonable area of inquiry for the council since those facilities are inhabited by Lowell residents. But “reasonable inquiry” is not what happened on Tuesday night. Instead, the discussion was more about Councilors Gitschier and Robinson making the Lowell Housing Authority a scapegoat for a city-wide and society-wide problem. Rather than wait for a factual response from the Housing Authority, both councilors launched an immediate rhetorical attack on the agency.

In public policy, it’s important to differentiate homelessness from the behavior plaguing the Housing Authority which, for lack of a better term, I’ll call vagrancy. Homelessness is a lack of a permanent, safe, and adequate place to live. It is caused by a variety of factors, but a lack of affordable housing, poverty, and unemployment are usually involved. Most people who become homeless find space in a shelter and actively seek assistance and try to acquire stable housing.

People experiencing vagrancy also lack permanent housing but have layered on top of that drug addiction, mental illness, or both. Vagrants often are barred from shelters because of an inability to comply with the rules of behavior demanded by shelter operators such as failing to refrain from active drug use or committing violence towards other residents.

With traditional homeless shelters unavailable due to their own choices or, more likely, factors like mental illness or drug abuse that distort free will, vagrants must find other places to live. For many months, that was the South Common which had evolved into a dystopian campground. When it got bad enough, the city and its partners clamped down and those who were camping on the Common were prevented from doing so. However, that tactical victory, if you want to call it that, did not solve the problem and may have made it worse. The vagrants from the South Common didn’t magically disappear; they just went elsewhere and not very far away.

Assuming that the Housing Authority does submit a response to this motion – something that would be completely voluntary since as far as I know the city council has no legal authority over the Lowell Housing Authority – it will be interesting to see if the volume of incidents at the Housing Authority’s complex adjacent to the South Common substantially increased after the city began its crackdown on the South Common. I suspect it did, given the proximity of the two places and the desperation with which vagrants seek to find shelter and to survive.

It is that same desperation that makes it more difficult to keep such people out of any space, including Housing Authority properties. The essence of physical security is that no place can be made impenetrable if someone wants to get inside badly enough, and here we are dealing with desperate individuals made irrational by mental illness or drug usage. Doors to a residential complex cannot be bolted shut. Residents and their legitimate guests must be able to come and go as they please. That creates vulnerabilities that permit determined trespassers to find their way in.

Similarly, Housing Authority staff members and even private security guards have no power of arrest and potentially put themselves in jeopardy by confronting dangerous and irrational individuals. Paying for round-the-clock police details might increase the security threshold, but that is an extremely expensive proposition. I’m not privy to the budget of the Housing Authority but I believe most of its funding comes from the federal government. Like every other entity (other than those dealing with immigration enforcement or national defense), I suspect the Housing Authority’s budget is flat or has been cut. Should diminishing financial resources be used to hire more police details or to make much-needed repairs to the apartments of residents? That’s the kind of complex calculation that is often ignored on the floor of the council chamber.

And even if police were deployed to the Housing Authority properties, how much would that accomplish? The state’s criminal justice system made a cameo appearance Tuesday night with Councilor Corey Belanger amending the Gitschier/Robinson motion to request a meeting with District Attorney Marian Ryan.

A career prosecutor who we are fortunate to have as our District Attorney, Ryan has always cooperated with city agencies while balancing the rights of individuals and the interests of justice. I’m sure she will meet with councilors, but I am less certain of what more she can do to help.

Back in 2018, Ryan was the keynote speaker at the Greater Lowell Community Foundation’s Annual Meeting. That seemed to be the peak of the opioid crisis and Ryan was widely recognized for her leadership in creating innovative programs that addressed all aspects of abuse and addiction, from prosecution to prevention and treatment. That night, Ryan talked mostly about the very successful (and since discontinued, I think), Lowell “drug court” and the infrastructure needed to make it work.

In this context, a “drug court” was a specialized session within the District Court designed to address the underlying issues of substance abuse and mental illness that contribute to criminal behavior. Operated by a team consisting of a judge, a probation officer, clinicians, and attorneys, the drug court included intensive, supervised probation; mandatory substance abuse treatment; frequent and random drug testing; frequent appearances before the same judge for accountability and support; and access to related services like housing and employment.

Ryan explained that the key to success in substance abuse treatment was to do it somewhere distant from the place where the person lived. If the treatment was in the same community, the temptation and opportunity to revert to the problematic behavior that paved the way to criminal charges would be too great to resist. Consequently, a defendant from Lowell under the drug court’s supervision might be placed in a treatment facility in a place like Brockton.

However, that same defendant was unlikely to have their own vehicle and public transportation between Brockton and Lowell would be unfeasible, so how would the defendant get back to Lowell for their frequent court appearances and probation check-ins? That’s where the Community Foundation came in. It and its partners awarded a grant for transportation for such individuals so they would be reliably conveyed from their place of treatment to the Lowell District Court and then back to the treatment center.

I believe the drug court concept and the supporting structure were successful, but they were also expensive to operate and in the competition for scant resources, I think it was discontinued. The existing court structure tries to help, but as you can see from the Ryan story, the best chance of success requires complex and costly systems that society is unwilling to pay for.

At least one councilor on Tuesday seemed to long for the good old days when troublesome individuals could be locked away in secure state-run mental institutions. That nostalgia forgets the inhumane and often abusive conditions that characterized many such facilities which were also understaffed, overcrowded, and offered no effective treatment.

In the 1980s in the United States and especially in Massachusetts, there was a major shift in mental health treatment policy that emphasized “deinstitutionalization” which involved moving mentally ill individuals from secure residential facilities into community-based programs. The plan was to create a network of community mental health centers that would provide emergency psychiatric care, outpatient therapy and counseling, medication management, and job and housing support. As is so often the case, a lack of funding and commitment left whatever community-based resources that existed inadequate to fill the void created when the big institutions closed, making the criminal justice system a stand in for effective mental health treatment.

But the criminal justice system isn’t designed to treat mental health or substance abuse. That’s one of the reasons we hear the believable anecdotes that when a police officer arrests a vagrant for trespassing or some equivalent crime, the offender is often brought to court, arraigned and released from custody before the arresting officer has completed their shift. That’s not a flaw in the courts or a function of lenient judges; it’s further evidence that you can’t incarcerate someone for being poor, homeless, mentally ill, or drug addicted. It’s also another example of why we find it easier to search for scapegoats than to acknowledge -and pay for – the great challenge of effectively addressing pervasive social disorder.

City leaders should never ignore the collateral harm to innocent and helpless residents that flows from vagrancy in Lowell but ranting about simple solutions that won’t work only gives people false hope that these problems are easy to solve when they most definitely are not. It’s only by acknowledging how complicated these challenges are and addressing them persistently rather than on random Tuesday nights that we can have any hope of making the situation better for all involved.

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Since there is no council meeting this Tuesday night, I’ll save the rest of the news from last Tuesday’s meeting for next Sunday’s newsletter.

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This week on richardhowe.com

Leo Racicot wrote about experiencing the North Common as a kid in the early 1960s.

Paul Marion announced the publication of the late Tom Sexton’s most recent and final book of poems.

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This coming Wednesday, August 20, 2025, at 6pm, I’ll give a talk at the Pollard Memorial Library’s ground floor community room on the founding of Lowell in honor of the city’s upcoming bicentennial. The event is free and does not require advance registration.