Five days a week, Manny Marval drives his black Ford Escape to an Applebee’s restaurant outside Worcester. He works his shift as a prep cook, chopping vegetables and seasoning meat.
Eight hours later, Marval walks out of the Applebee’s and steps into the car to head to his second job as a cook at another restaurant. By the end of the night, he returns to the Ford Escape, curls up in the backseat, covers himself with a blue blanket and tries to close his eyes.
“My car is my bathroom, my eating place, my sleeping place, everything,” he said. “I cry myself to sleep all the time.”
Marval previously lived in an apartment in Worcester for nearly a decade. But since receiving an eviction notice last year because the landlord wanted to renovate the unit and bring it up to code, he hasn’t been able to find another apartment in Worcester within his budget — about $1,200 a month. So Marval spends a lot of nights sleeping in his car, if he’s not crashing at his father’s small apartment.
He recently started working a second job to boost his income. Still, now he’s resigned to moving somewhere outside Worcester where housing is cheaper. Maybe, he says, he’ll finally be able to move out of the black Ford Escape.
Marval is one of 10 people GBH News spoke with who’ve left Worcester in the past two years or are planning to leave for cheaper housing in other communities. Although state and local officials say there’s no data showing how often families move from one locality to another in search of an affordable apartment, renters and housing advocates say it is becoming increasingly common as housing costs rise. Typical monthly rents in Worcester are up nearly $700 over the past six years, according to Zillow.
Housing advocates say this migration out of the city is contributing to the erosion of Worcester’s longtime identity as a welcoming and affordable place to live. And it’s putting increasing pressure on small towns and cities around Central Massachusetts to accommodate the housing needs of people moving in.
“It’s just super frustrating,” said Andrea Park, a housing attorney for the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. “We need more investment in lower-income housing.”
'It’s not fair’
The move out of Worcester is especially disruptive for people who work around the city, have children in its public school system or rely on its hospitals and local doctors for medical care.
Lisa Lamarre and her husband lived in the same triple-decker around Grafton Hill for 25 years, part of a 41-year stint in Worcester. But that ended soon after a new landlord bought the building and told her the monthly rent was more than doubling — from $750 to $1,850.
“I just looked at my husband and said, ‘Here we go. It’s happening,’” Lamarre said. “I was just another person with the same problem that’s happening everywhere.”
Lamarre is disabled with a bad back and hip, and her husband has dementia. They wanted to stay in Worcester because their family, friends and doctors are in the area. But despite scouring through Worcester apartment listings hours a day for months, Lamarre, 59, couldn’t secure anything affordable. Any apartments she encountered that fit her budget had two- to three-year waitlists.
Finally, as the deadline to move out of her triple-decker quickly approached, she and her husband had to settle with a one-bedroom apartment in Gardner, almost an hour’s drive north of Worcester.
“I miss it. I missed it before I left. I walked around my house and cried,” Lamarre said. “I raised my family in that city. … It’s not fair.”
"I miss [Worcester]. ... I raised my family in that city."Lisa Lamarre
Ryan Mongeau had no better luck with his housing search.
Mongeau lived in the same two-bedroom apartment in Worcester for four years. It was convenient because his job with a Central Massachusetts company that makes life safety equipment requires he travel around the region, and he spends much of his time meeting with customers in Worcester. But when his landlord told him earlier this year rent was increasing to $2,200 a month, Mongeau decided he couldn’t afford to renew his lease.
After months of unsuccessfully searching for a new place in Worcester, he found an apartment a half-hour away in the small town of Clinton. He’s had to spend the last two months staying with his brother and sister-in-law in Sterling until the lease on the new apartment begins in November.
“When you come from that level of independence to having to kind of hold your pride out in your hands and be like, ‘Hey, I don’t have a place to live. Can I stay with you guys for a little while?’ It was tough,” Mongeau, 30, said.
Once he moves into the apartment in Clinton, Mongeau suspects he’ll have a lengthy adjustment period.
“It’s a more rural area,” he said. “There’s not much of anything around [the apartment].”
The domino effect
With rents increasing nationwide, it’s becoming more common for people to flee cities or even entire states where they cannot find affordable housing. According to a recent Redfin.com report, a record number of the website’s users looked to move from one metro area to another in July and August. San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Washington and Boston were most likely to see residents leaving.
In Central Massachusetts, officials in small cities and towns say they’re also noticing this migration.
“There’s definitely more people traveling on the roads, more people at the grocery store,” said Paula Mayville, executive director of the housing authority in the town of Webster, about a 20-minute drive south of Worcester.
Mayville said she welcomes the families moving in, but she’s concerned Webster, with a population of about 12,000 people, doesn’t have the housing capacity to keep absorbing them. Already, Mayville’s waitlist for public housing grows by the hundreds every month, and she said the rising demand for apartments in the town is pushing up prices for longtime Webster families.
“It’s a domino chain reaction … and it just knocks everyone back,” Mayville said. “When we see the elderly people, especially — that have lived in the community their whole life and worked in Webster their whole life and retired — not be able to afford to stay, that’s really tough.”
There are a few factors combining to fuel the surge in housing prices in Worcester. In recent years, the city has become an attractive place for investors to build new housing or buy up old units and renovate them. The new landlords are charging more expensive rents tailored to higher-earning people in Worcester as well as MetroWest and Boston. While those rents are unaffordable for many Worcester renters, they’re attractive for people who currently work and live in Boston, where rents are even steeper.
The result is an upward rent spiral, according to Brian Allen, a landlord and realtor in Worcester. By some estimates, Worcester’s vacancy rate is below 3% — about half the rate housing experts say is healthy for a city. With demand for housing so high, Allen said, some landlords believe they can keep raising rents to maximize their profits.
“So you have a company that comes in and renovates a house in a neighborhood, and then everybody looks around and says, ‘Well, if he’s getting $1,500 [in rent] and I’m getting $1,000, well, I need to raise my rents,’” Allen said.
Developers and landlords are less likely to offer housing affordable for low- to moderate-income households because those apartments are usually not as profitable as more expensive units, Allen said.
Efforts to create more affordable housing
Worcester city officials acknowledge that too much housing is too expensive for residents. So they’re considering mandating that all new housing complexes include a certain percentage of units affordable for lower-income households. Other city plans to make Worcester more affordable include a new trust fund that will finance housing construction and incentivize developers to build less expensive apartments.
“We’re talking about some of the most progressive and biggest steps the city has ever taken to address the affordable housing situation,” said Peter Dunn, Worcester’s chief development officer. “We want to do everything we can to support our residents and those that have lived here for generations.”
Still, Leah Bradley, CEO of the nonprofit Central Massachusetts Housing Alliance, isn’t convinced those efforts will be enough to resolve the Worcester region’s growing affordability problem. Citing the domino effect of people moving to localities in search of less expensive housing, she said local and state leaders should start collaborating on approaches to expand the supply of affordable housing across regions, not just individual localities.
“Doing it just in the cities, it’s not including the input from the towns,” Bradley said. “How do we create more of that forum so that folks can talk about this as a region?”
For people who’ve already left Worcester or are about to, all of these potential solutions could be too late. Manny Marval, the man who’s homeless, is now focusing his housing search on towns like Spencer and Webster.
He’s under pressure to move out of his black Ford Escape soon — the nights are getting colder.
“Winter’s around the corner. I don’t know what I’m going to do if it gets really cold, because I’m not going to freeze inside my car,” Marval said.
