Jimmy Keno published a piece in the Greenfield Squealer this week called "Greenfield Was My Place to Start Over. Now I'm Afraid to Enjoy It," and it landed in the Everything Greenfield group on Facebook, where it did what such pieces do. Within a few hours the comments had sorted themselves into camps. One camp said the town has gone to hell. Another said it was worse during the heroin years and asked for evidence. A third said capitalism causes homelessness and the nonprofits are starved, and somebody announced he hadn't read it and got into a fight with the author about video games. I read all of it. I live a few towns west, in Shelburne Falls, where I've been for eighteen years, and I'm in Greenfield regularly on business, so I'm an outsider with a decent view. What struck me was how little of the argument was about money, and I mean the plain kind: what a shop takes in, what a lease demands, what an apartment costs, what a job pays. I think most of this starts there, and this is my attempt to say so at more length than a comment box allows.
The shooting, and the question nobody answered
The shooting comes first, since that's what set the piece off. On Wednesday afternoon, November 11, a man was shot twice in the arm on Water Street and flown to Baystate with injuries the police described as not life-threatening. Chief Todd Dodge said there was no threat to the public, and the next day he told the Recorder that the shooting may be "very narrowly related" to the one on Conway Street in September. That sounds like people who know each other settling something. I could guess at what, but a guess is all it would be, and nobody on that thread knows either. It is a bad thing to have happen down the street, and I take Jimmy at his word about what it did to his sense of safety on Chapman Street. Needles in your planters and cruiser lights at one in the morning are his daily life, and no statistic argues with that. But two connected shootings don't put the average person walking to the library in the line of fire.
The most useful exchange in the comments was a short one. A woman who has lived downtown for fifty years said the place is nothing like it was ten years ago. A man asked her what had gotten worse. She said all of it. He answered that the worst stretch he remembered was the heroin years around 2012 to 2016, that there is no longer an encampment on the common, and that people aren't dying in gas station bathrooms every week, and he asked again for specifics. None came. I believe her that it feels worse, but he asked the right question and it deserved an answer. I'll hold myself to the same standard. When I'm in town I see people gathered in the little park in the middle of downtown and on a couple of the side streets, and I catch myself assuming I know what they're doing there. I don't. What I have seen with my own eyes is people sleeping on the sidewalk in front of shops, and I've read the posts from the owners of those shops. I feel for somebody with nowhere to sleep. I feel for the shopkeeper too, who is paying rent on that doorway and needs customers to walk through it.
Thirty-seven years of the next big thing
I came to Massachusetts in 1989 for graduate school at UMass and stayed on in the Amherst and Northampton area doing landscape design and construction. For that whole stretch, Greenfield and Turners Falls were the next big thing. Everybody said so. The rents were cheap, the buildings were handsome, and the artists were about to arrive. Thirty-seven years later they are still the next big thing, which is to say eternally up-and-coming without much up-and-coming.
When people want a symbol for downtown Greenfield they reach for Wilson's, and I did too, so let me get the facts right, because I had them wrong in my head. Wilson's did not die of COVID. Kevin O'Neil announced the closing in November 2019, after 137 years, because he was retiring and nobody in the family wanted to take it on, and he told public radio it was not a financial decision. The doors closed in January 2020, weeks before anyone had heard the word lockdown. The store had 35 employees at the end, down from nearly 200 when O'Neil started there in 1981. That is forty years of a downtown anchor slowly letting go of people, long before any virus. And look at what came after. The state's development agency bought the building in 2022 with a plan to move the Green Fields Market co-op into the ground floor and put apartments upstairs. Demolition on the back of the building began this past July. The most recent target I've seen for the co-op to open is January 2028. That is eight years from the last sale at Wilson's to the first bag of groceries, in the most prominent building on Main Street, with the city, the state, and a large nonprofit developer all pulling on the same rope.
I'm not knocking the project. A grocery store and sixty-some apartments beat an empty building. But I've shopped at the co-op, and the food there is expensive. It is priced for someone who can afford a $2,000 apartment. The store that used to be in that building sold everything to everybody. What's going into the middle of town is nicer and narrower than what left, and I think that describes a lot of what gets called revitalization around here: a slow gentrification that hasn't brought the incomes with it. The apartments are planned as mixed-income, to be fair, and I hope they fill up with people who work downtown.
Three months with no income
On the pandemic I can speak from experience and not from the car window. I had a shop in Shelburne Falls when the shutdown orders came in the spring of 2020. You cannot take three months of no income, with the rent and the insurance and the utilities still due, and then unlock the door and pick up where you left off. Meanwhile the big-box stores stayed open the whole time, selling many of the same things the closed shops sold. A lot of small operators never came back from that, and the ones who did came back with debt where their savings used to be. Greenfield has this on paper. A downtown assessment done for the city in January 2021 found that 71 percent of downtown businesses had seen revenue rise in the three years before COVID, and that 81 percent then reported a drop in sales and 18 percent had laid off staff. It compounds, too. The owner who is behind stops hiring, the clerk who got laid off stops eating lunch out, and the lunch place cuts a shift. I watched that spiral in my own village and I doubt Greenfield's was any different.
Then the rents went up. I see studio apartments listed at $1,000, $1,200, sometimes $1,500, and two- and three-bedrooms over $2,000. Run the arithmetic the way a rental application does, with rent at no more than 30 percent of gross income. A $1,200 studio takes $48,000 a year. A $1,500 one takes $60,000. A $2,000 apartment takes $80,000. The Census Bureau puts the median household income in Greenfield at about $55,600, which means half the households in the city make less than that, and at that income the 30 percent line falls at about $1,390 a month. The census median rent, about $1,100, is lower than what I see advertised because it counts everybody, including people who have been in the same apartment for fifteen years and people in subsidized units. The person looking today pays today's price. I understand that a landlord's taxes and insurance and fuel have gone up. I don't believe they have gone up by enough to account for what's being asked.
That leaves a question I can't answer and would like someone in Greenfield to answer for me: where are the jobs that pay for those apartments? I drive around the city and I can't work out where enough people are earning $50,000 or $60,000 to fill them. Addiction and mental illness put people on the street, and Jimmy knows far more about that than I do, having lived it. But a town where an ordinary full-time job no longer covers an ordinary apartment has taken away the margin for everybody. The person who used to get through a bad year in a cheap room now has no cheap room to get through it in. I can't look at the people on the sidewalk and the price of a studio and call them two separate subjects.
The lease
The same squeeze reaches the shops through the lease. Out by the rotary there are two shopping plazas, the one with Big Y and Staples and the one across the road with Home Depot, and both have storefronts that have sat dark for years, some of them for something like a decade by my reckoning. A friend of mine looked into renting one. What he found was a triple-net lease, the kind where the tenant pays the taxes, the insurance, and the upkeep on top of the rent, and under the terms he was shown, the furnace, the air conditioning, and the roof would all have been his problem. One $10,000 furnace would have finished him, so he walked. Not every triple-net lease reads that way, and the details live in the fine print, but a person opening a first business doesn't have a lawyer on retainer to read the fine print. I know of a woman with a shop on Main Street, slightly, through friends, who signed a lease like that without understanding what she was taking on. The big unit on the roof died and the bill was hers. She ran a GoFundMe to keep her doors open. The customers of a small shop passed the hat to repair a building she doesn't own.
A landlord with enough property can let a storefront sit empty for ten years waiting for a tenant who will sign those terms. I'm a free-market person and I know how it sounds for one to complain about landlords. But a market only works when the people in it can afford to take a chance, and these leases are written so that only a chain can.
The hotel
There's a hotel in this story too. Coming down 91 you used to see the sign for the Days Inn on Colrain Road, behind the Ninety Nine by the rotary. In the spring of 2023 the state contracted with the hotel to shelter homeless families, most of them Haitian immigrants and refugees, and the city was told with very little notice. About 45 families were there at a time, and 66 had passed through before the state closed the shelter on February 28, 2025. People have strong opinions about the governor's shelter policy and they're entitled to them. It was a trade-off made in Boston, and none of it is a failing of the families who were placed there. My point is narrower and it's about the building. The hotel did not go back to being a hotel. This May the owner announced it will be renovated into a Marriott-branded property, with a hoped-for opening at the end of 2027. If that holds, a 59-room hotel at the city's highway exit will have been out of the travel business for about four and a half years. I don't know what became of the people who worked the desk and cleaned the rooms, and I couldn't find that anyone has reported it. The travelers who would have slept there and eaten dinner in Greenfield slept and ate somewhere else.
The town where it happened
Now compare Easthampton. Twenty years ago I did landscape work near there and it was a dead town, an old mill city with the mills shut. I went back this summer and sat in traffic. The sidewalks were full. Easthampton had exactly the reputation Greenfield has, the next place, and in its case the next place showed up. I don't know for certain why, and I distrust anyone who says they do. What I can see is that the big mill buildings got filled with small tenants, studios and shops and little manufacturers, at Eastworks and the others; that the city built a boardwalk on Nashawannuck Pond right at the edge of downtown; and that the Manhan Rail Trail brings people through on bicycles. The census figures show the gap. Median household income is about $71,700 in Easthampton against $55,600 in Greenfield. Median rent is higher there, about $1,290 against $1,110, but the poverty rate is 8 percent against Greenfield's 15. Easthampton has its own affordability trouble now, the kind success brings. Greenfield has the rents rising without the success.
Plans
Greenfield doesn't lack plans. There was the downtown assessment I just quoted, and a state-funded Rapid Recovery Plan the same year, and more since. A consultant is hired, meetings are held, and a handsome document comes out full of words like vibrant and walkable. Then nothing in the document has a name next to it, or a date, or a dollar, and the market goes on doing what it was going to do. No plan ever written can make a landlord rewrite a lease or make a business appear in a storefront. I'll be blunt about who writes them, too. In my experience the committees and boards are staffed by people with the time and the money to sit on committees and boards, which means people who aren't worried about this month's rent. They mean well. They are also the last people in town to feel it when the plan doesn't work.
I can give a clean example from my own village. In March of 1999 a set of historic design guidelines was written for Shelburne Falls. It is good work. It is posted on the town's own website. In eighteen years I have not seen it used as a reference, let alone enforced, when someone redoes a storefront. I thought enough of it that I produced an updated 2026 edition, which is on my site. The reason nobody has to follow either one is a legal distinction most people have never heard of. The village is on the National Register of Historic Places, and that listing is an honor. By itself it restricts nothing a private owner does. Only a local historic district, adopted by a town under Chapter 40C of the state's General Laws with a commission to review changes, has teeth. Guidelines without one are a suggestion.
Even so, you would think a town would consult its own guidelines when it spends its own money. At the corner of Bridge Street and Deerfield Avenue, in the middle of the business district, stood the old Singley Furniture building. It was bought at auction in 2014 for $140,000. The new owners meant to renovate it, found it had too many structural problems, and proposed replacing it with shops and five apartments. That plan ran into zoning trouble over parking and a state loan that was turned down, and in April 2018 the building came down. That left an empty lot in private hands. In 2022, with Town Meeting's authorization, the Selectboard signed a seven-year lease on the lot with its owners, Ancient Glacier LLC, a partnership of Josh Simpson, Cady Coleman, and Susan and Jon Stark, to use it as a pocket park. Under the draft the Recorder described that spring, the town would pay rent of at least $1,014 a year, with a floor set to cover the taxes on the property, and would carry the liability insurance and the upkeep. By the Recorder's account, an $8,000 recovery grant paid for grading and four picnic tables made of recycled plastic, and then about $12,169 from the town's beautification fund, money left behind by film companies that shot here, went into a pavilion built by Franklin Tech carpentry students. That is roughly $20,000 of the town's money on a lot the town does not own and holds for seven years. I call it the plastic pavilion, and I think it is the ugliest structure in the village. The irony is hard to miss. The film companies came to Shelburne Falls because it is beautiful, and the money they left behind, in a fund with beautification in its name, paid for its uglification. That is no knock on the students, who built what they were handed. My complaint is with the decision. Town money went onto private land in a National Register district, and as far as I can tell nobody opened the design guidelines sitting on the town's own website. If the guidelines can't shape a project the town itself is paying for, they are never going to shape anything.
Who to blame
The Facebook thread wanted a villain, and the two on offer were capitalism and the nonprofits. I don't buy either. One commenter wrote that capitalism creates and maintains homelessness. Capitalism is how goods get bought and sold, and it has no policy on shelters one way or the other. Government is a different thing, and people in that thread kept using the two as if they were one. My own view is that government exists to set the law and the rules, and that it isn't obliged to build and run everything a community needs. But everything I've described sits where the two meet. A lease is a private contract. A shutdown order is a government act. A hotel shelter is a state contract with a private owner. A pavilion is town money on private land. A revitalization plan is a public wish about private behavior. Blaming an ism skips all of that. As for the nonprofits, Jimmy asks what results the shelter system can show for the money, and that's a fair question to put to anyone spending public funds. It's the same one I'm putting to my own town about $20,000.
I am not proposing another plan. The things I'd ask for are small, and anyone could check them. When a town or city puts public money into private property, publish the terms: what was paid, for how long, and what the public gets. When a town has design guidelines, require a written paragraph for any project the town funds, saying how the project meets them or why it doesn't. When a plan is adopted, put a name and a date next to each item and report back in a year on which ones happened. And somebody, whether the city or the business association or the chamber, could do new shopkeepers a real favor by offering a plain-language review of a commercial lease before they sign it.
I'd like Greenfield to do well. I spend money there and I like the place, and Jimmy's piece, whatever one thinks of its politics, was written by a man who obviously loves his street. But I've been hearing that Greenfield is about to arrive since 1989. The Wilson's building has been empty since January 2020. The guidelines for my own village have been sitting on the town website for twenty-seven years. I'll believe in the next plan when the co-op is open, the lights are on in the plazas by the rotary, and somebody at town hall has opened that document.
Sources
- Police investigate Water Street shooting in Greenfield (Greenfield Recorder, Nov. 11, 2026)
- Water Street shooting may be "narrowly related" to September incident (Greenfield Recorder, Nov. 12, 2026)
- Wilson's closing: full story (Greenfield Recorder, Nov. 25, 2019)
- Wilson's closing sale is like a reunion, and a wake (New England Public Media, Dec. 9, 2019)
- New life for Wilson's (MassDevelopment, Nov. 16, 2022)
- Demolition begins on back portion of former Wilson's (Greenfield Recorder, July 13, 2026)
- The Putnam, 258 Main Street, former Wilson's: status and expected occupancy (Greening Greenfield)
- Greenfield Downtown Business District Assessment and Market Analysis (FinePoint Associates, January 2021)
- Greenfield Rapid Recovery Plan, 2021 (mass.gov)
- Greenfield Days Inn emergency shelter to close Feb. 28 (Greenfield Recorder, Dec. 20, 2024)
- Former Days Inn in Greenfield to become City Express by Marriott (Greenfield Recorder, May 26, 2026)
- U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: Greenfield and Easthampton
- 19th-century Singley's building comes down (Greenfield Recorder, April 3, 2018)
- Former Singley site may be leased to Shelburne as park for al fresco dining (Greenfield Recorder, April 29, 2022)
- Shelburne partners with Franklin Tech for construction of pocket park pavilion (Greenfield Recorder, Dec. 8, 2023)
- Town of Shelburne newsletter, December 2022: pocket park lease
- Shelburne Selectboard minutes, March 27, 2023 (Town of Shelburne)