Gateway Cities speculators | Marty’s next job? | Bye-bye malls | MSM malpractice | Quick Hits
Trouble ahead? Cash buyers dominate the rental-housing markets in Gateway Cities
Cash home buyers, a red flag when it comes to speculators and investors, appear to be running amuck when it comes to the state’s older mill towns and industrial cities.
Two-thirds of all sales of small rental properties in 15 of the state’s Gateway Cities involved cash buyers of one sort or another, according to stats compiled by a local activist, who looked at a year’s worth of transactions.
In another red flag, roughly 10 percent of these smaller rental properties, which ranged from four to 20 apartments, had changed hands within the previous three years, often for big gains, according to Mathew Thall, a community development expert with the TOPA Coalition. The group is pushing state legislation that would give tenants and potentially nonprofits a first crack at buying rental properties when they hit the market.
About half the sales were off-market deals involving no broker.
“It’s an alarmingly high percentage of cash sales,” Thall told Contrarian Boston.
New Bedford and Taunton led the way, with over 90 percent of the sales of smaller rental properties involving cash buyers.
Fall River and Gardner/Leominster/Fitchburg were not far behind, with both markets at over 80 percent, followed by Lowell, Holyoke and Chicopee at over 70 percent.
Mining real estate records, Thall looked at sales over a 12-month period ending in March 2020, on the eve of the pandemic.
File under: Cash is king.
Marty Walsh’s consolation prize: AFL-CIO post?
Now that he won’t be running for governor, what’s next for the former-Boston-mayor-turned-federal-labor-chief? (Confused? See Maura Healey’s big announcement.)
One possibility: Running for the presidency of the AFL-CIO. For a tried-and-true labor guy like Walsh, who got his start as a union construction worker in Boston, that would be kind of like competing in the Super Bowl.
Liz Shuler, previously CFO and treasurer, was elected to serve out the term of Richard L. Trumka, who died in August.
Shuler and two other top executives at the union will serve until June, when the AFL-CIO Convention in Philadelphia will elect a new president, a new CFO/secretary treasurer, and a new executive vice president to four-year terms.
It would seem like there could be an opening there for Walsh, if not with the presidency, then in one of those top jobs.
File under: Heard on the street.
Goodbye mall and hello labs
As the booming life sciences sector looks for space to grow, the nation’s flagging brick-and-mortar retail sector is offering a tempting target.
Alexandria Real Estate Equities on Friday took the wraps off its plans for the struggling Watertown Mall, Banker & Tradesman reports.
Alexandria, which shelled out $130 million last year to buy the 18-acre shopping complex, plans to roll out 500,000 square feet of life sciences space in three buildings, while keeping Target in place at its current location, the paper reports.
Another developer, Bulfinch Cos., recently snapped up the Nieman Marcus story at the Natick Mall in an apparent retail-to-lab-space play.
Who’s failing? Well, it’s not Biden
Rather, it’s the national press corps that is falling down on the job, says Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin.
And it’s not just the increasingly clownish right-wing media – think Fox and Newsmax – that’s at fault here, writes Rubin, after watching Biden’s press conference on Wednesday.
The MSM cynically treats political reporting as a big game, and yes, while politics definitely have a strong competitive element, at heart it is – or at least should be – treated as serious business.
Here’s Rubin:
“The press corps, by contrast, revealed once more that they put more emphasis on sounding tough, asking unanswerable questions and creating conflict than they do on exploring some of the gravest problems our country has ever faced. Our democracy deserves better.”
Funny as it may seem, but Rubin is the true contrarian here, with mindless criticism and an inability to even entertain the bigger picture the norm of the day for the political press.
Shocker: Sheriffs raking in questionable campaign cash
Or so says a new report by good government activists, who looked at $6 million in campaign cash raked in by sheriffs in 11 states, including Massachusetts.
The upshot: 40 percent of the contributions to the sheriffs were deemed “ethically conflicted,” having come from construction, health care, telecommunications and other firms doing business with their jails, according to Globe columnist Marcela García.
Plymouth County ranked No. 1 in the state when it came to the questionable campaign cash, with $738,000.
Ok, it reminds us: Why do we still have county government?
Quick hits:
As a reader suggests, maybe Maura Healey can hire Theo Epstein as her campaign manager: “Healey running for governor; can she break the Curse of the Attorney General?” (Universal Hub).
Extra-exclusive living: “Apartments Replace Hotel in Harvard Club Development” (B&T – sub.)
Two long-time critics of left-wing authoritarianism uncork on right-wing authoritarianism in the U.S. (NYT).
Along the same lines, frustrated independent voters uncork on both parties (NYT).
What is Contrarian Boston?
I have fielded emails over the past couple weeks asking what Contrarian Boston is about.
Here’s a link to our mission statement – you can find it in the “about” section.
For a more prosaic, nuts-and-bolts description, read on.
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