Saving those affordable triple-deckers | Pols find new way to hit up contributors | Booze fueled economic development | Twitter and bad journalism | About Contrarian Boston |
Wooing Wu: Construction firm led by Walsh backers comes up big for new mayor
Rise Construction emerged as one of hottest new players on Boston’s development scene over the past few years, with mixed-use projects in neighborhoods across the city.
And at least when it came to getting along with City Hall, it probably didn’t hurt that two of the founders met while working on former Boston Mayor Marty Walsh’s first campaign.
Now Rise executives, as they gear up for the biggest project yet in Charlestown, are apparently looking to build some bridges to the city’s new mayor with a flurry of campaign contributions.
Nine different Rise executives and family members dropped $1,000 each into Mayor Michelle Wu’s campaign coffers in February, state records show. Executives giving the maximum possible contribution include two of the company’s founders, Jim Grossman, a former Suffolk Construction executive, and Brian Anderson.
As Wu makes her presence and priorities known on the city’s development scene, there is a lot at stake for Rise and other big players.
Rise Together, the firm’s sister company, is pushing plans for a nearly 1 million square foot project in Charlestown’s Sullivan Square that would feature a mix of labs, retail, offices and apartments.
Rise is also looking at developing two other nearby sites in Sullivan Square that would include hundreds of thousands of additional square feet of lab and office space and hundreds more residential units.
The project is currently under review by the Boston Planning and Development Authority, with the developer having first filed plans last fall.
Battling the speculators: Housing groups want $250 million to take older rental properties off the market
The number of cash-toting ‘investors’ snapping up triple-deckers and smaller rental properties has surged, not just in Boston, but in older industrial cities across the state, as we reported here.
Housing advocates now want in on the action, not to buy and flip small apartment buildings and two- and three-families for eye-popping profits, but to convert them into rentals and condos that lower-income buyers and families could actually afford to rent or buy.
To that end, the Chinatown CLT (Community Land Trust), the Boston Neighborhood CLT, and the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative unveiled their new quarter-of-a-billion-dollar housing ask at a Thursday morning press conference. The event took place outside 6 Humphreys Place in Dorchester, a rental building housing advocates recently bought to preserve as an affordable rental property.
The groups are calling for $250 million federal relief money to be made available to housing groups to buy as many as 1,000 rental units in Boston and in older cities and towns across the state.
The bulk of the money - $200 million – would come from federal ARPA relief funds sent to the state, along with another $50 million in federal money that went to the city.
The event comes at a crucial juncture here, with Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and Governor Charlie Baker preparing to unveil their proposed budgets next week.
File under: Good timing.
Forget the appetizers: State auditor candidate goes remote with fundraising appeal
Why waste time and money renting out a restaurant or hotel ballroom when you can just hit up potential contributors on Zoom?
State auditor candidate Chris Dempsey will make his pitch Thursday night to deep-pocketed donors at a “Women for Dempsey” fundraiser to be held over Zoom.
The host committee features Newton Mayor Ruthanne Fuller, as well as several current and former state representatives and local party activists. Other prominent members taking part in the virtual fundraiser for the Brookline Democrat include Shannon O’Brien, the former state treasurer who was the Dems candidate for governor in 2002, Easthampton Mayor Nicole LaChapelle, and Heather Hamilton, chair of the Brookline Select Board.
Ready to dig deep? For $1,000, you can be a “sponsor.” But don’t despair, $100 will get you “friend” status, while for just $50 you too can be an “activist.”
A former state transportation official, Dempsey helped torpedo the half-baked push to bring sports’ costliest extravaganza to Boston with his No Boston Olympics campaign in 2015.
We asked Dempsey’s opponent, state Sen. Diana DiZoglio, who is a crusader in her own right, calling for an audit of the troubled RMZ, among other things, for a list of backers, and it’s an impressive group as well.
U.S. Rep. Lori Trahan and state Sen. Lydia Edwards top the list, which also includes, city councilors and select board and school committee members in Boston, Somerville, Brockton, Melrose, Peabody, Lawrence and Rockland.
Let the drinks flow: Liquor licenses key to spurring development long-neglected neighborhoods
City councilors in Boston, as they push for 200 additional liquor licenses in Roxbury, Dorchester, Mattapan and Hyde Park, are framing the issue as one of equity, and there’s certainly a strong case there.
Mattapan has just 10 – that’s right, 10 – of Boston’s 1,400 liquor licenses, the Globe reports.
But there is also a powerful economic development argument to be made for boosting the number of liquor licenses.
And it is a particularly pressing one as big downtown real estate firms like HYM and Tishman Speyer start to seriously explore opportunities in traditionally disadvantaged neighborhoods like Roxbury.
Basically, if you want economic development these days, you need to let the booze flow.
Take a look at Legacy Place in Dedham or any of the big new ‘life-style’ developments that have taken shape in the suburbs over the past few years and you will see a common thread.
All have been anchored by a collection of trendy restaurants that generate crucial buzz and foot traffic in the way big department stores might have done in the old days. And yes, they all have liquor licenses.
Times to reporters: Stop spending so much time on Twitter
That’s the word from Dean Baquet, the top editor at the Times, to reporters at the paper, the Hill reports, citing an internal memo.
It will now be optional for reporters to post on Twitter and other social media platforms.
“If you do choose to stay on, we encourage you to meaningfully reduce how much time you’re spending on the platform, tweeting or scrolling, in relation to other parts of your job,” Baquet wrote.
There is another issue here of course, with a number of journalists having expressed concern about being harassed and targeted on Twitter.
But contrary to whatever official spin the Times is putting on it, that’s likely not driving the shift here.
Rather, there is clearly an “echo-chamber effect” with Twitter – and let’s be honest, it’s a fairly left leaning one at that – that generates lots of tedious reaction/outrage stories that don’t in the end yield a whole lot of useful information or analysis about the complex world around us.
According to Baquet, Times reporters can rely too much on Twitter as a “reporting and feedback tool” and that “our feeds become echo chambers.”
Probably not a popular decision among some reporters, but a good call by the editor.
Quick Hits:
Ok, but how about buses that actually get kids to school on time? “Boston to spend $7M to electrify 20 school buses as city heads toward fleet electrification” Boston Herald
Return of a legend – Marty Baron to give annual Karl Edward Compton Lecture at MIT on April 21.
Beacon Hill hypocrisy? “Republican accuses Dems of flipflopping on staff unionization” CommonWealth Magazine
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.