| Former Mass. transportation chief angers McConnell | Explosive biotech manufacturing growth | Going local with BPS superintendent search? | Sinking downtown condo prices | Quick hits | About Contrarian Boston
Mass. biotech manufacturing poised for explosive growth
How explosive? Well, maybe enough to bring back several thousand manufacturing jobs to a state where the nation’s Industrial Revolution began.
If you add up all the plans for new vaccine and drug producing plants being kicked around in Greater Boston, we could be looking at a nearly ten-fold increase in biotech manufacturing.
More than 8.4 million square feet of new biotech manufacturing plants are under consideration in the Boston area, ranging from projects already under construction to those just in the early discussion phase, says Brendan Carroll, research chief at Cushman & Wakefield.
That’s compared to the 870,000 square feet in biotech manufacturing plants currently spread across the state, with the old Genzyme plant in Allston perhaps the most visible.
You can find more details here in my weekly Banker & Tradesman column.
Ruffling GOP feathers: Pollack, ex-state transportation czar, stars in D.C. policy spat
Looks like Stephanie Pollack, the former tough as nails Mass DOT chief, is managing to stir things up in her new job as a top federal highway official.
Pollack, who got her start as a young environmental lawyer battling Boston’s Fan Pier project, has managed to raise the hackles of some GOP governors. Sixteen governors to be exact, plus Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Pollack, now deputy administrator of the Federal Highway Administration, has found herself on the receiving end of an irate letter by Republican governors from Alaska to Georgia, over a controversial move to limit how states can use money from the $1 trillion federal infrastructure bill.
Once a star lawyer for the Conservation Law Foundation, Pollack fired off a missive to state officials saying the infra money shouldn’t be used to add lanes to highways “serving single occupancy vehicles,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
The GOP governors responded with a letter to President Joe Biden, calling the attempt to attach strings to the infrastructure money “federal overreach” and “biased against rural states and states with growing populations.”
McConnell and a Republican senator from West Virginia have offered up some sage advice to those GOP governors, saying they should simply ignore the guidance issued by Pollack and federal highway officials.
File under: Powerful enemies.
What’s going on with downtown Boston condo prices?
Condo prices in downtown neighborhoods like Back Bay, Beacon Hill and the South End have been on the rise for years now. So, the 2021 numbers, which show a significant drop in prices, were surprising, to say the least.
The median price of a downtown Boston condo plunged by more than 10 percent in 2021, falling to $864,000, down from $961,000 in 2020, according to The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman.
The year-over-year drop in December was even deeper – an 18 percent decline to $800,000.
But lower prices don’t seem to have hurt sales, quite the contrary.
Condo sales rose 38.6 percent, to 2,053 units, though it’s not clear how much of that is due to new projects hitting the market,
BPS superintendent search: Wu drops clues
The city’s next superintendent should be “someone who can hit the ground running,” Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said Monday in an interview on GBH’s “Morning Edition.”
“We don't have the luxury of being able to waste any time and getting right to work for Boston Public Schools and our school communities,” Wu said.’
The new mayor’s remarks were quite interesting in the context of the Brenda Cassellius debacle, with the outgoing BPS chief and former Minnesota education chief the product of a year-long ‘nationwide search’ under Wu’s predecessor, Marty Walsh.
Wu stopped short of saying the city would be focusing its search on homegrown talent within the district, but she noted the next schools’ chief would “ideally” be someone “familiar with the district.”
More signs of trouble at the Washington Post
Just call it a tale of two stories.
The Washington Post and The New York Times both did big pieces on Sunday looking at the GOP’s major push to recapture Congress in this fall’s mid-term elections.
The Post did a long, meandering piece on the intraparty battles within the GOP over often loopy candidates Trump is pushing for Congress. The story’s premise is one we’ve read a million times now, that a “weakened Trump” is somehow losing his grip on the party “he once ran.”
By contrast, the Times story actually broke some news, detailing Mitch McConnell’s behind the scenes campaign to recruit candidates who can defeat Trump-inspired “goofballs” in various party primaries.
It was the kind of piece the WP used to excel at (and beat the NYT at) and which made the Post’s national and global reputation. But now it’s shooting for more features and local stories and so …
The Beatles: The Harvard angle
Did you know there’s an academic ‘Journal of Beatles Studies’? Yes there is. And that celebrated Harvard Law professor Cass Sunstein has written for it? Yes, he has, according to NYT columnist David Brooks.
It’s actually an interesting topic of study by Sunstein, i.e., how certain things, such as music, become popular due to social influence. The Beatles owe a lot, it seems, to their early fanatical fan base in Liverpool. It’s a good column by Brooks.
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.
An online newsletter, Contrarian Boston publishes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. In Contrarian Boston you’ll find analysis of the day’s news, and original reporting as well.
Our focus is:
· Politics and all levels of governance, good and bad, with an emphasis on state and local, with some national mixed in;
· Economic growth and business, especially real estate, housing and new development projects;
· The media and why it does what it does;
· Education, from school board spats to the doings of multibillion-dollar university endowments;
· And whatever else catches our fancy.