Greenfield, MA (Worcester, Springfield, Holyoke: low income, violent crime, selling a house)

[kensho9]

Living in Greenfield, MA--
I've come and gone many times in the past 20 years.
Honestly, the place sucks.
It has an ugly little town center with no access to the Green River for which it's named.
The town play ground is a complete antiquated dump; there is no place for children of any age accept the local Skate Park that's closed most of the year and only seems to attract boys.
There is no where to shop except the local thrift store or over priced main street. Local business' are harassed with unfair taxes and zoning plus no parking downtown without fear of getting tickets that are completely inconvenient to pay.
The school system is completely ridiculous with the WORST school lunches for our children in Western MA.
It's no wonder the population of Greenfield is on the decrease.
The weather is horrible; cold most of the year with no place to swim but the river which didn't get warm enough this year to even enjoy.
The local low income housing management breeds drugs dealers and violent offenders without proper screening to keep the trash out of income eligible housing where hard working struggling families are trying to get off the system.
Honestly, I've never seen so many scary, sickly people walking down the street in my life. And TOOTHLESS. I've never seen so many toothless people before.

This is my experience of Greenfield Massachusetts.
If my family weren't here helping me with my child I would go back to the mid-Atlantic.
If you're looking to locate to western Massachusetts move to Turners Falls. Don't bother with Greenfield.

[willdufauve]

Greenfield is Number One in the state in education (number one from the bottom, not the top). At least they're number one at something...Greenfield - ignorant and proud of it.

[VlyRoadKid]

I'm not sure what your motivation was to slam Greenfield, especially when you advocate TURNERS (HAW!) as an alternative! Are you serious?

Most of the things you say about it are true of many small cities throughout Massachusetts! Such as:

"It has an ugly little town center with no access to the Green River for which it's named."

Ever been to North Adams or Fitchburg? Yeesh! How about Southbridge? You want to talk crime: the last town is one of the biggest distribution centers of heroin!

The town play ground is a complete antiquated dump; there is no place for children of any age accept the local Skate Park that's closed most of the year and only seems to attract boys.

True, the Skate Park is awful, but you've never seen Beacon field, or the area near the Town Recreation area?

"There is no where to shop except the local thrift store or over priced main street. Local business' are harassed with unfair taxes and zoning plus no parking downtown without fear of getting tickets that are completely inconvenient to pay."

The same is true of Northampton & Amherst, except you DO have places to shop, fighting your way through crowds of snotty college kids and yuppies so you can pay quadruple the price it's worth for some trendy piece of junk! And face it: meter maids are everwhere.


"The school system is completely ridiculous with the WORST school lunches for our children in Western MA."

Well, you've got no argument THERE! The budget was horribly mismanaged by the town and of course, they blamed it on the SPED students' needs! Lame.

"The weather is horrible; cold most of the year with no place to swim but the river which didn't get warm enough this year to even enjoy."

Er...I DON'T think you can blame the town of Greenfield for THE WEATHER!!! It was lousy everywhere!

"The local low income housing management breeds drugs dealers and violent offenders without proper screening to keep the trash out of income eligible housing where hard working struggling families are trying to get off the system.
Honestly, I've never seen so many scary, sickly people walking down the street in my life. And TOOTHLESS. I've never seen so many toothless people before."

Again, you could say the same thing about most of the towns around here, especially after they closed the State hospitals. This includes trendy Northampton!

"This is my experience of Greenfield Massachusetts.
If my family weren't here helping me with my child I would go back to the mid-Atlantic."

Yeah, I'd just LOVE to live in the suburban sprawl of say, a huge development in Woodbridge (aka "ShoppingMall"), NJ, where I can inhale pollutants from the oil refineries all day and have an orange sky at night, due to the smog! And oh, the TOTAL lack of crime there! Cripes...


"If you're looking to locate to western Massachusetts move to Turners Falls"

What??? Turners is a backwater DUMP!

You need to either leave or just deal with it. Remember, you COULD be in Calcutta...or worse, New Jersey!

[willdufauve]

Greenfield has a serious hard drug problem and a history of sordid murders. A few years ago a family held a retarded man captive, tortured and killed him, wrapped the body in a rug and dumped it in a quarry area.

Last winter a local gentleman allegedly killed two people over by Hope St. and disassembled their bodies. The previous year someone killed a guy and dumped the body behind Hope St. by the railroad tracks.

Beacon Field is okay for what it is. My yard is bigger and better maintained.

The Greenfield Public Schools are abysmal, the worst school system in the Commonwealth. Worse than Chelsea, Springfield, or Holyoke, which are much larger cities.

Last spring, just before the school year ended, every single administrator left the system for better jobs in other districts. The Superintendent, and the Chair of the School Committee (who choiced his kids out to another district rather than have them attend GPS) also had recently left Greenfield's school system. The interim Superintendent's last act, before she left, was to pink slip every teacher except a core SPED staff. Try selling a house in this market with such a failed school system...you can't even get out of the place.

Then there's the $2.25 million budget shortfall in the school system; the Mayor's penchant for lawsuits, back stabbings and divisiveness; the firefighter who was harassed into suicide by two fellow firefighters and the resulting lawsuits, SLAPP suit, and eventual act of the Mass. legislature to get survivor benefits for the widow; the incompetence and favoritism in the Assessor's Office; the numerous racist and anti-semitic incidents in the press....do you want me to keep going?

Greenfield is a unique place, not in any good way. It's an isolated backwater, mostly ignored by the state, and totally out of the mainstream of Massachusetts. One controversy and drama after another almost non-stop; it practically takes my breathe away so much B>S> happens there. Greenfield is what happens when rednecks and hillbillies get control of a whole town.

[VlyRoadKid]

If you see a crowd of them, can you take a picture for me? What I usually see are old Hippies, walking an endless parade of dogs who crap on my lawn!

As for the rest of your post, I LIVE HERE, so
once again, you’re NOT telling me anything new, in large part. The murders, while quite disturbing, are NOT unique to Greenfield! Remember the woman who was shot by her husband right outside the N’ton courthouse, after getting a restraining order? Or how about the guy in Sunderland who killed his girlfriend by stabbing her, then burning down the house? Or the guy in N’ton who stabbed his wife and baby girl to death, to name a few? Greenfield has NO monopoly on violent crime, even in this area.
Yes, it sucks, but if you judge the town on that, so do most American towns!

And I sure won’t argue with you about the schools. They stink! I took my kid out right after a disastrous stint in the Middle School, put him in the local CharterSchool, which was just as bad. You had a bunch of inept, crunchy-granola teachers with “high standards” who couldn’t help most kids reach them, nor explain why. The kids spent more time hugging trees and playing ultimate Frisbee than learning anything! Combine that with a tyrannical bunch of "administrators" and it was just a smaller version of GMS.

And yes, there IS a “good ol’ boy” network in the town. I found that out when dealing with the schools and the Superintendent at the time. But then again, you could say the SAME about most other towns. Amherst is practically a hegemony, run by “old, Swamp Yankees”, as my dad used to call ‘em, elitist professors and Polish-American families who practically OWN the DPW! (I worked in the town hall and while looking through their files, saw that one whole family, consisting of dozens of brothers, nephews, uncles, etc., was employed by the town!).

As for Northampton, I worked in the planning Dept. during one of the biggest payoff scandals involving the Mayor, a local business and several officials who got off scott-free after violating so many DEP and EPA laws, they should have been locked up. Like the teachers in Gfld. only the underlings got canned! Corruption is innate to our form of government, as well as other types.

You want a REALLY corrupt, violent city? Try Worcester! I taught there for 4 yrs. The schools there are breeding grounds for gang violence and drug wars, not to mention alcoholism and date rape, all swept under the rug by the rabidly conservative School Committee and the “Quadrant managers” and principals, one of whom at least, sent their kids to a private school!

I used to hang out there as a teenager, with my cousin in the “old days”, but wouldn’t even walk down the main street at noon now!

Not only that, but the denizens are JUST as ignorant, prejudiced and violent as anyone in Greenfield…no, MORESO! They’re incredibly racist on both sides and have no use for Liberals. At least Greenfield is pretty tolerant of other lifestyles, like the rest of the Valley.

Northampton and Amherst USED to be nice, until they were taken over by too many posers and elitist wannabes. The traffic is terrible and the housing prices prohibitive.

While we’re laying blame, did you stop to think that many of Greenfield’s woes are Mitt Romney’s fault, for gutting state programs (especially school ones) and ruining Mass. in general, as did his predecessor, Weld? You can’t bankrupt entire towns and school systems and expect no repercussions!

Most of the people here are alright, but, like every other town, there is going to be a bad element. You just don’t like it, much like Austin Dickinson’s wife (Emily’s brother), who grew up here & hated it (not sure if that’s YOUR reason for your hatred, but since your family’s here, it makes sense).

I hate the town I grew up in (Sturbridge—filled with small-minded, ignorant snobs) and after leaving to go to UMass, I never looked back! If I have to live in a kind of “backwater” town in order to be in an area I love, since I can’t afford N’ton or Amherst, then so be it. You compromise wherever you go.

[teachertype]

Greenfield is a blighted and hostile community with a corrupt old boy network who control everything. Housing prices are depressed and so will you be if you move there.

[VlyRoadKid]

It's obvious this person has made up his/her mind. The user name is quite telling, since almost ALL the teachers were laid off last spring! Being a teacher myself, I can see both sides, or try to. Here's the post:

Originally Posted by teachertype

Greenfield is a blighted and hostile community with a corrupt old boy network who control everything. Housing prices are depressed and so will you be if you move there.

It's tempting for anyone who is fired or laid off, whether en masse or individually, to blame the employer. However, I must say that my IN-DEPTH experience with the Greenfield teachers (through my child and his friends) does warrant the drastic step above! Most teachers were either too young and untested, out of their depth or old and completely out of touch if not senile! I am NOT exaggerating at all.

I wish I had $20 for every time some teacher "lost" my kid's homework, couldn't explain a complicated, or even simple rubric (those things should be banned!), or refused outright to answer parents' basic questions about WHAT was going on on the classroom! The principal himself was booted out, no doubt for backing up these slackers.

If the schools are no good, then people with kids stop buying houses in that school system. This is largely what happened in Greenfield, with, as the person above says, along with much corruption in other areas of town administration.

Much like the current administration in the country overall, it is high time to clean house! I doubt that the current powers that be will be up to it in Greenfield! Let's hope the citizens see to it that they are rousted out and new blood brought in, just as is happening in the current presidential election!



A teacher for over 17 years...and sick of incompetence and CYA tactics!

[Jeremy01506]

If Greenfield is sooo bad, then don't live there! If you can't get out from whatever rock that you are stuck under, for whatever reason, then suck it up until you can. I'm sure Greenfield has it's issues (and not in a small way, I'm sure). But coming from someone who sounds "stuck there", it sure sounds like a one-sided opinion. Even Southbridge, with all it's faults, it slowly getting better and has a number of things going for it, along with some really nice areas to live.

This board really doesn't need people starting hate-rants about communities they can't be bothered to leave. Don't bring problems, bring solutions.

[VlyRoadKid]

To Jeremy - If your post was to me, just remember that I was sticking UP for Greenfield at the beginning, but did concede that the schools stink! I never said it was a bad place altogether, as some did. It's okay to criticize certain aspects of your town--that's how it gets better. And I DID leave Sturbridge, for the very reason you cited above. I'm pretty happy in Greenfield, though I wish I'd sent my kid to another school system like Frontier Regional.

As for Southbridge...you're joking, right?

As for "hate rants", some people don't have the money, esp. now, to move.
if people can only come here & post nice things, what's the point? The 1st Amendment exists for a reason!

[globalView]

We cannot allow the scapegoat to be our educators. They give their lives to teach our children. There are some bad eggs in any office, place of business or school system. The bottom line is that if we blame anyone other than the administration or public system, it is allowing the teachers to be labeled responsible. They may be in part but every one has only a small part of the overall picture to answer for. The teachers being over stressed may not be able to actively perform due to schedules. It is very difficult to evaluate learning in children. The bottom line is that the systems are failing all over the country. The teachers that I find show up in assessments as radical or non functional, are half the time the only ones getting anything done. The system is plagued by teachers who consider it a salary and one working with children who don't have the ability to report their incompetence. It is imperative that we as people look at the teachers for who they are and not the overall failing school. the best captains go down with their ships at the expense of career damage. The best teachers stick with their students in the same way.