Knocking Doors With Etel Haxhiaj, Worcester D5 Council Candidate

WORCESTER, MA — It's 6:16 p.m. on a stormy Tuesday night on Worcester's far west side. The sun is setting, and cars are absolutely ripping toward the Paxton line along Pleasant Street.

Etel Haxhiaj, one of two candidates vying for the open District 5 City Council seat, is preparing to cross the freeway-like road to knock on the door of a home, part of her nightly canvassing effort that she believes will give her an edge over her competitor: retired state trooper Gregory Stratman.

"There's nothing sexy about this," she says, almost drowned out from the cars roaring by. "You get home and you're sweaty, you're tired."

At one of the first homes of the night, a UMass Memorial nurse answers. The woman says she'll vote for Haxhiaj on Nov. 2 and has two problems for councilors to solve: Tenet Healthcare, the for-profit company that owns St. Vincent Hospital, where nurses have been on strike for seven months; and the dangerousness of Pleasant Street.

The woman talks about the June incident in which a 12-year-old was hit along Pleasant near the Paxton line while getting off a school bus. The woman told Haxhiaj she would always make her kids take the long way to the bus stop to avoid Pleasant Street. There's a nearly 1-mile gap between crosswalks in the area.

Haxhiaj allowed a reporter to tag along during the night's canvassing activities, intentionally picking the neighborhoods near the west end of Pleasant/Route 122 to highlight an issue she's been hearing about for months: transportation, which includes everything from fixing sidewalks to bus reliability and traffic.

Near the UMass worker's home, Haxhiaj stops along Mower Street to note a Worcester Regional Transit Authority bus stop sign suspended about 10 feet off the ground on a telephone pole. The sign is curled up, likely after getting hit by a vehicle. There's also nowhere to stand but the road for anyone wanting to use the stop.

At another home, Haxhiaj meets a Ghanaian man who immediately asks her party affiliation (Democrat). The man says he straddles the line between Republican and Democrat, but they quickly move away from politics and strike up a conversation about their immigration experience. It turns out they came to Worcester at almost the same time about 20 years ago.

Haxhiaj was raised in Vlorë, Albania, until her high school years, when her father decided to move the family to Greece to get his children away from human trafficking problems in their home nation. The family then moved to Texas after getting visas through the U.S. State Department lottery.

After becoming a citizen, she came to Worcester for school at Clark University. While living in Greece, Haxhiaj met an Albanian-American woman who worked for Clark, and it became her dream to attend the college. Haxhiaj's entire family came along, and they still live here — her mother, in fact, was watching her two young sons while she was out canvassing.

In 2019, Haxhiaj, the public education and advocacy director for the Central Massachusetts Housing Alliance, ran for an at-large seat on council but came up short in the 13-way race. She's running again this year, she says, in part to set an example for her sons.

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She performed very well in the Sept. 14 primary, earning 54.7 percent of the vote — the highest in a Worcester municipal district primary going back at least two decades. (District 2 Councilor Candy Mero-Carlson had the second-highest, 53.2 percent in 2015, according to results.)

Haxhiaj ended the canvassing session around 6:45 p.m. She had crisscrossed Pleasant Street several times, and it was only getting more dangerous. Cars and trucks were just a foot or so away as she walked along the shoulder — there was no sidewalk — back to where she had parked.

She estimates she's personally knocked on some 1,300 doors including before the primary, and said she has learned it's not just traffic and transportation on the minds of District 5 residents. It's the vacant lots along Park Avenue, the shuttered Price Chopper along Mill Street, climate change, federal stimulus spending and even gas leaks (she joined the group Mothers Out Front for a daylong event searching for natural gas leaks around Beaver Brook Park last month). If she wins in November, she plans to focus heavily on constituent services and learning the ropes from her colleagues.

"People just want to know if their corner of the world is going to be taken care of," she said.

The Worcester election is on Nov. 2, and the last day to register to vote is Oct. 13. Patch has reached out to Stratman with a request to tag along while he campaigns for the council seat.