By By Claire O’Callahan Stephanie Zollshan — The Berkshire Eagle The Berkshire Eagle
PITTSFIELD — On some mornings, Steven Valenti arrives to open his store on North Street and discovers signs that someone slept on his doorstep the previous night.
As he or his staff clean up the food wrappers, empty water bottles or debris from drug use, Valenti, who owns Steven Valenti Clothing for Men, often thinks about the city he wants Pittsfield to be.
A beacon for investment. A haven for tourists and second-home owners. A competitor with Great Barrington, Williamstown, Stockbridge and Lenox. It’s a vision that has no room for people sleeping in the doorways of North Street, Valenti said.
“If I saw people sleeping in the park and I got panhandled on the way, I would definitely think about not wanting to invest in downtown,” Valenti said.
Some other North Street business owners share Valenti’s frustration. They have taken their concerns to Mayor Peter Marchetti, and said they are pleased with what appears to be an outcome of those conversations — a proposed ordinance that would ban people from sleeping or creating temporary shelters on all public property in the city.
But other downtown store owners, along with housing advocates and community leaders, said homeless people aren’t holding Pittsfield back from becoming the city Valenti envisions — they’re just a convenient, and visible, population to blame. Those store owners and advocates also envision a future where no one is sleeping on the streets. But they caution that the ordinance, if passed as is, would worsen rather than solve the city’s homelessness problem — especially as housing costs continue to rise.
“Downtown has the most amazing potential,” said Danielle Munn, owner of Witch Slapped, another downtown business. “But it starts with the actual community, not store owners who don’t like to see poverty. We have to accept the fact that this is our community; the good, the bad, the ugly, the perfect.”
Over the past five years, Valenti said he’s seen an uptick in the number of people panhandling on North Street, and sleeping in the doorways of his store and neighboring businesses.
That time frame lines up with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which research has shown worsened the housing shortage nationally and here in the Berkshires.
People moved up to the Berkshires, permanently or to purchase second homes, and investment companies bought houses and apartments to flip for a profit. Local housing costs skyrocketed, and subsidized housing and shelter capacity couldn’t keep up with the growing number of people priced out of their long-term homes.
In January 2020, at least 182 people in the Berkshires were experiencing homelessness on a single night, according to the Three County Continuum of Care, an organization that combats homelessness in Western Massachusetts. Last year, that number peaked at 397 people, before falling slightly to 308 people this January. But shelter workers said those are undercounts.
When people don’t have a bed at the shelter or a friend or family member with whom to couch surf, some will seek shelter in the doorways of downtown Pittsfield. Sleeping downtown offers people visibility and greater safety, Cheryl Callahan, a lieutenant with the Pittsfield Police Department, told the City Council’s Public Health and Safety Committee earlier this month.
“They’re less likely to be abused, attacked, their items stolen,” Callahan said. “At least to them, they know that we see them. That’s their survival mechanism.”
Valenti and his son and business partner, Evan Valenti, said they are not unsympathetic to the people who seek shelter in their doorway at night.
“It seems to me that the people that need help aren’t getting the help that they really need,” Evan Valenti said. “And that’s upsetting because everybody in life needs help with something, whether it’s a substance abuse thing, a mental health thing or a housing shortage thing.”
But they are also frustrated, and they’re not the only ones.
“We as store owners have to come up every morning and deal with their dinner wrappings and their use sometimes of the doorways as a bathroom facility or as a facility for the taking of drugs,” Steven Valenti said.
Bart Raser, who owns Carr Hardware on North Street, said the number of people shoplifting from the store, panhandling outside and sleeping behind the shop at night has grown, and created a serious problem for his business.
“We have six locations, five of which are in the Berkshires. The other five are busy and footsteps continue to go up and business continues to go up. In downtown Pittsfield, footsteps continue to drop,” Raser said.
Customers have begun to frequent other locations, and employees have expressed fear about walking to their cars alone in the evening, Raser said. In an effort to address those concerns, Raser has started to regularly ban customers who shoplift and “harass” other customers from returning to the store.
Raser and Valenti are just two store owners who have taken their concerns to the mayor and pushed for a solution.
“I’ve talked to Peter about this many times. My son has talked to him. Bart Raser has talked to him. The Tierneys have talked to him. We’ve all talked to him,” Valenti said. “He listens and he’s trying very hard to come up with a solution.”
Two years ago, Laurie and David Tierney, who own Hotel on North, convened an invite-only forum where she and other downtown business owners discussed the same concerns with then-mayoral candidates Peter Marchetti and John Krol.
At the time, Marchetti told the business owners he believed those issues to be part of the national mental health and substance use crisis. He said he would convene a task force to bring together social services agencies, while adding police foot patrols and outreach by social workers.
Marchetti also said he would crack down on panhandling by banning people from standing in median strips and elsewhere in the city for more than 10 minutes.
As mayor, Marchetti has proposed an ordinance that would regulate pedestrian usage of public ways and make it illegal for pedestrians to get within 5 feet of a car — essentially criminalizing panhandling — at certain intersections.
Shortly after the city’s Ordinance and Rules Committee moved to shelve that proposal, Marchetti unveiled a camping ordinance that would ban homeless people from sleeping or creating temporary shelter on any public land in the city.
In a meeting with The Eagle editorial board Friday morning, Marchetti said the owners of Carr Hardware, Hotel on North, Paul Rich & Sons, and Steven Valenti Clothing for Men have threatened to close their businesses on North Street if he does not address the people sleeping in their doorways, panhandling on the sidewalk and shoplifting from their stores.
“Doing nothing doesn’t save our downtown,” Marchetti said. “If you lose the four or five stores in our downtown, raise the white flag. Because our commercial tax base is really what is propelling us to exist.”
He acknowledged that homelessness is a complicated issue, and said he was open to other ideas. And he emphasized that the city is working with a local service provider in an effort to expand its hours in hopes that would help alleviate some of the problems downtown.
The owners of Hotel on North and Paul Rich & Sons did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Raser and the Valentis said they are pleased to see the mayor taking action to address their concerns. As it stands now, they believe the visible homelessness on North Street is turning away customers, tourists and investors — leaving Pittsfield lagging behind other towns in the county.
“North Adams has Mass MoCA and all these great things. Williamstown has Williams College. Stockbridge has the Red Lion [Inn],” Evan Valenti said. “We just want to be a player, as my father said, in that particular group.”
They see Marchetti’s proposed ordinance as one tool to draw financial investment into Pittsfield and catch up with other local economies.
“I think there’s a lot of things that need to be done, but I think this is a step in the right direction,” Raser said. “I don’t want to be interpreted as someone without compassion. I think we are all sensitive to the fact that these folks need support, and I don’t think these things are mutually exclusive.”
Housing advocates and community leaders said business owners are using homeless people as a scapegoat for the host of economic problems behind the empty storefronts, lack of investment and limited foot traffic on North Street.
“The three most invested in cities in America have the three largest homeless populations,” said Michael Hitchcock, referring to New York City, Los Angeles and Seattle.
Hitchcock, who co-founded Roots & Dreams and Mustard Seeds, and Fernando Leon, an organizer for Berkshire Interfaith Organizing, said it’s also unfair to compare Pittsfield with towns like Great Barrington and Lenox, which are far smaller and have differently structured economies.
“What we’re seeing in Great Barrington is that people that belong to that community cannot afford rent there anymore. We’re talking about people who are being displaced because of gentrification,” Leon said. “[Aspiring] to that is not sustainable.”
Housing advocates and some downtown business owners said it is possible for shop owners to address their concerns without relying on the camping ordinance, which housing advocates have said would criminalize homelessness and exacerbate existing cycles of housing instability and incarceration. In their eyes, it all comes down to relationship building.
Noah Berge, who owns Pampered Pup Dog Day Spa, said he talks with the people who sometimes panhandle outside of his business on North Street and asks them not to disrupt customers during his busy hours.
“I have a lot of sympathy for people in that situation. I wish the city, state and federal government would do more to solve it,” Berge said. “I think criminalization of homelessness is a real problem.”
When those conversations happen, everyone benefits, said Kamaar Taliaferro, chair of the political action committee for the Berkshire branch of the NAACP. Homeless people feel safe, seen and respected. Business owners know who is sleeping on their doorsteps, and can work with people to determine how they can respect those spaces.
“We need political leadership that says, ‘All right, this might be an issue, but I think there’s a community-based solution to this. I think there’s a relationship-based solution to this,'” Taliaferro said. “And while we’re trying this community relationship-based solution, we’re going to recognize the systemic forces. Because that is really where the solution to homelessness is.”