October 6, 2024

Tuesday’s Lowell City Council meeting took just under two hours to complete. No single issue dominated. In keeping with the civil engineering focus of this city council, motions and reports on traffic, parking, and related matters came up repeatedly.

Nothing seems to delight this council more than a discussion on speed humps, an experimental traffic-calming measure that has been deployed around the city. Alas, City Manager Tom Golden took away the punch bowl from the speed hump party when he revealed they would soon go into hibernation for the winter to facilitate snow plowing. At least that’s what I think he said.

Enthusiasm for speed humps is not unique to Lowell. The Boston Globe recently reported that Boston is deploying speed humps as quickly as they can be installed with good results. However, Boston has taken the risky approach of doing the installations based on a quantitative analysis of traffic and crash data rather than in response to motions by city councilors. This leaves residents (and their councilors) who want speed humps installed but have yet to receive them peeved about the process.

In response, the city’s “chief of streets” told the Globe that “rather than prioritize the neighborhoods with the most access to City Hall, or the ones where people are most organized . . . we want to say, ‘Let’s put our resources where the risk is the highest first.’” Put another way, he said he works for a mayor who is directly elected by the voters, not a city manager who is answerable to eleven city councilors. Or something like that. (See “Cars have flipped over: Some Boston residents want more input on city’s speed hump program” Boston Globe, September 30, 2024).

I’m all for traffic calming measures so I’m pleased the city of Lowell is utilizing this tool. Hopefully they will be placed where they are most needed.

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Homelessness and the city’s response to it made a brief appearance with a motion by Councilor Erik Gitschier asking the city manager “to have the proper department draft an ordinance prohibiting sleeping, tenting, and camping of any kind within 1000 feet of a school.” Presumably this motion flows from the June 28, 2024, US Supreme Court decision in City of Grants Pass v Johnson which held that a local ordinance that criminalized camping on public property did not violate the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The decision was seen by some as providing municipalities with an essential tool to uphold public safety and limit public nuisances. Others saw it as an inhumane disregard for the needs of the most vulnerable in our society.

I’ll wait until the proposed ordinance comes back before the city council before writing more on this important issue.

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A daily email newsletter from the Lowell Sun this week caught the attention of many Lowell readers with the headline, “ADUs are coming to Lowell.” The story by Melanie Gilbert reported on a motion response presented to the council at its September 24, 2024, meeting that analyzed the impact of the state’s newly enacted Affordable Homes Law on Lowell. The report, from the city’s Department of Planning and Development, noted that the law authorizes Accessory Dwelling Units (ADUs) by-right in single-family zoning districts and prohibits owner occupancy requirements and parking mandates for properties within a half mile of transit facilities. The new law takes effect on February 2, 2025. It also gives the city the opportunity to voluntarily amend its zoning to impose what the law calls “reasonable regulation” on ADUs, but such limits must be “reasonable” and not a pretense to prohibit ADUs altogether.

For most of 2023, Lowell was on the path to adopting its own ADU-allowing zoning regulations but then the election calendar and the active opposition of a critical mass of Belvidere residents caused the council to do an about-face and retreat from ADUs. But now it seems the reprieve won by the anti-ADU coalition may be short-lived.

Like the issue of camping on public spaces, this will be back before the city council at some point, so we’ll revisit it then.

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A recent Boston Globe article on possible criminal liability of out-of-state gun owners who visit Massachusetts has interesting implications for gun laws in Massachusetts. (See “NH gun owners can carry firearms without a license. What happens when they bring their guns to Mass?” by Anjali Huynh on October 1, 2024.) The article told the story of a 24-year-old Manchester, New Hampshire resident who rear-ended another vehicle while driving in Massachusetts. Her car was totaled and when police at the scene asked if she had any valuables in the car, she replied that her loaded 9mm pistol was in the center console.

According to the article, “In New Hampshire, qualified gun owners can carry firearms openly or concealed without a license.” Massachusetts, on the other hand, has strict licensing requirements. Under traditional rules of legal construction, the law of the place where you are physically located controls your behavior. Consequently, the New Hampshire driver in this case was charged with illegal possession of a firearm which carries a mandatory minimum jail sentence. The story also recounts two similar instances, one when a New Hampshire driver’s gun was discovered when they were arrested in Massachusetts for drunk driving; the other when a New Hampshire resident’s gun was discovered after having an accident in Massachusetts on their way to work.

In at least one of these cases, a judge in the Lowell District Court dismissed the charges on the grounds that charging the person in these circumstances violated their rights under the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. The prosecution appealed the dismissal, and the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court has already heard arguments and is deliberating. Once the SJC issues its decision, I’ll return to it here.

My guess is that the SJC will reinstate the charges and allow the trial to go forward. That’s the result that 250 years of precedent would lead to. But if that is what occurs, the defendant will undoubtedly petition the US Supreme Court for further review. As that court has shown repeatedly in recent years, it will ignore precedent to reach an outcome that advances the political ideology of its conservative majority, and since that ideology shuns reasonable restrictions on gun ownership and possession, it’s likely that those of us who would prefer tighter controls on guns will be disappointed by the result.

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Since we are making a deep dive into legal matters today, I’ll add one more to this edition. On Thursday, the Lowell Sun had an editorial about a “home title theft” in Concord, Massachusetts, which also urged everyone to get a Declaration of Homestead. While the editorial clearly stated that the homestead does not provide protection against title theft, not everyone comprehended that.

Massachusetts law allows the owner of a home to declare a homestead on their primary residence. Doing this protects up to $1 million on the value of the home from creditors. You obtain a homestead by filling out the proper form and recording it at the registry of deeds.

Many people already have homesteads. To check if you do, go to the registry’s website and search your name. (Up until 2011, married couples who declared a homestead could only do it in the name of one spouse, so if you can’t find the homestead by searching your name, do a second search in the name of your spouse. Even if the homestead was only filed in one name, if it was done before 2011, it is still valid now).

If you don’t have a homestead but want to file one, the Secretary of State’s website has links to the forms that are needed and information about how to complete them.

As for what the homestead does, it protects your primary residence from creditors. For most of us, our most valuable asset is our home, so if we find ourselves in debt, our creditor will seek to seize and force the sale of our most valuable asset – our home – to satisfy the debt. By having a homestead, your primary residence is removed from the pool of assets that can be seized to satisfy that debt.

The homestead doesn’t protect against all debts. Your mortgage, property taxes, other taxes, and child support payments aren’t protected by the homestead, and a homestead cannot be declared on a vacation home or rental property – it only is for your residence.

Still, with a one-time recording fee of just $35 and no downside, the homestead is, as the Sun editorial stated, something every homeowner should have.

The homestead also does not protect against so-called “title theft” which is when someone forges your name on a deed and illegally transfers your property to themselves or a co-conspirator. The wrong doer then tries to quickly “flip” the house to an innocent third party and disappear with the purchase money before the original owner discovers what’s going on.

The good news is that under Massachusetts law, a forged deed does not convey title, so the original homeowner is not dispossessed of the property by the forgery. However, the original homeowner does bear the burden of clearing the paperwork mess which means hiring a lawyer and filing a lawsuit. If you have title insurance coverage, some policies will pay the legal fees and costs of litigation but more often the original homeowner must bear that cost themselves.

“Title theft” was exceedingly rare in Massachusetts. Then about five years ago a national company began heavily advertising its “title monitoring” service with dire commercials about the risk of losing your home to “title theft.” Unless you were born during the Eisenhower Administration or earlier, you may not have seen these commercials since they are targeted at the elderly, many of whom are left unnecessarily distraught after seeing such advertisements.

Unfortunately, it seems that criminals are consuming the same media as the elderly because the incidence of title theft has, in the past two years, gone from “it never happened” to “we’re starting to see some instances of it.”

If you become a target of a forger, there’s really nothing you can do to pre-empt the effort. Your best defense is to discover it promptly and take action immediately. To give you “early warning” of an unexpected document that affects your property being recorded, Secretary of State Bill Galvin offers a free “Consumer Notification Service” that allows you to create an account that tracks your name and property address. Then anytime a document is recorded for that property at the registry of deeds, you get an automatic email with a link to the document so you can check it out.

To obtain this monitoring service, go to the Consumer Notification Service webpage and click the “Create a new account” button near the bottom of the page, then follow the instructions.

Because forgery in land records has always been so rare, over time our recording system (and more importantly, the system of finance that dominates the American economy) evolved for the speed of processing transactions rather than heightened security. Perhaps that will change but that will take action by the legislature and, in most cases, the harm and inconvenience that would result for everyone would likely outweigh any benefits. I think a better approach would be for the legislature or regulators to mandate that all title insurance policies cover the expense of clearing a forged deed and then people can purchase title insurance to protect themselves.

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Thanks to the 122 people and 2 dogs who joined yesterday’s Lowell Cemetery tour. If you’re reading this early on Sunday, I’m doing the same tour again today at 10am. It begins at the Knapp Avenue entrance of the cemetery, is free, and just requires you to show up.

Then there are some other upcoming events that I’ve mentioned in the last few newsletters:

For those interested in Jack Kerouac, this year’s Lowell Celebrates Kerouac Fall Festival runs from October 10 through October 14, 2024. There are many great events but two already on my calendar are a Kerouac-themed tour of St. Joseph’s Cemetery led by Kerouac-scholar Kurt Phaneuf on Friday, October 11, 2024, at 11 am; and another event on Saturday, October 12, 2024, at 11 am at the Pollard Memorial Library Community Room, when another Kerouac expert, Paul Marion, will discuss his new book Portraits Along the Way.

The following weekend, October 19-20, 2024, will feature what I believe is the first-ever Poe in Lowell Festival which will celebrate the three visits the famed poet, Edgar Allan Poe made to Lowell in 1848 and 1849. More information about the Poe Festival is available here.