Backlash grows against Baker housing plan | Last piece of Ink Block falls into place | Starbucks chief strikes back | About Contrarian Boston |
A rich Diehl: One-time Trump campaign chief hits jackpot with MassGOP candidate
Republican gubernatorial candidate Geoff Diehl and his long-shot campaign must be scrounging for change and holding yard sales in order to pay the tab for this sweet consulting gig.
Corey Lewandowski pocketed $25,000 in March from the Diehl campaign, or just over a quarter of the campaign’s entire expenditures last month.
The former state lawmaker from Whitman brought Lewandowski on board in February in the wake of his endorsement by Trump, a major asset in the state Republican primary but the kiss of death come fall in deep blue Massachusetts.
South Dakota Gov. Kristi L. Noem had just given Lowell native the broom after allegations Lewandowski sexually harassed a wealthy donor at a dinner last fall in Las Vegas.
Diehl’s camp justified the move by touting Lewandowski’s ability to help ramp up fundraising. But so far, most of the money has been flowing one way - out the door.
Expenditures have doubled since Lewandowski came on board more than two months ago, to more than $97,000 in March, state campaign finance records show.
And while there have been there have been a trickle of contributions from wealthy donors in Florida, the campaign took in just $70,000 in contributions last month, a drop of roughly 20 percent from January.
Not the greatest look for a candidate vying for the chance to run that $50-billion-a-year operation otherwise known as state government.
Last building in landmark South End project set to open
That would be 7INK, the last piece of National Development’s transformation of a grim, industrial section of the neighborhood that was once home to the old Boston Herald building.
The 14-story apartment mid-rise will officially open its doors to its first tenants on Friday, marking the completion of the nearly decade-long buildout of the Ink Block, a multi-building, mixed-use project that includes a hotel, a Whole Foods, and hundreds of apartments and condos.
National Development is making a big wager on where the rental market is headed with 7INK, offering a new twist on city living designed to capitalize on growing interest in “co-living” by young professionals and other urban dwellers.
The new mid-rise offers a mix of smaller, traditional studio and one-and-two bedroom units, and larger three- and four-bedroom apartments designed for what National Development is calling “inclusive living,” a phrase the firm has trademarked, Ted Tye, the firm’s managing partner and co-founder, told Contrarian Boston.
Those bigger units are designed to be shared by a group of roommates. While each roomie would pay something under $2,000 a month, everything is included, from the furniture and pots and pans to the cable and electric bill.
“You can move into an apartment and it is fully furnished – you don’t have to do a thing,” said Tye, noting the project is 20 percent preleased. “We even clean your apartment.”
Concord, Lincoln the latest to speak out against Baker housing drive
Here’s something else that’s not a good look: Posh suburbs with median home prices well over $1 million complaining about opening their doors to new apartments and condos.
The two pricey west-of-Boston suburbs are raising a whole host of issues with the new MBTA Communities law. A key part of Gov. Charlie Baker’s plan to boost housing construction after decades of stagnation, the new law requires communities with T commuter rail, subway or bus stops to roll out the welcome mat to at least 750 new apartments and condos.
But suburbs across the Boston area have been pushing back, arguing they’d rather lose the relatively small amounts of grant money the state is threatening to pull for noncompliance than to heed the new law, and Concord and Lincoln are no exception.
Lincoln, a popular bedroom community where the median price of a home is $1.5 million and climbing, contends a development of that size is “extremely burdensome given Lincoln’s circumstances.”
Oh my, and what might those circumstances be? Well, Lincoln is just a small town without the infrastructure for such big city development, town officials contend, skipping over the part about also being one of one the wealthiest communities in the country.
Henry Dane, a Select Board member in Concord, where the median price is nearly $1.4 million, didn’t mince words, either, at one recent meeting.
“Requiring us to build 750 units of multifamily housing, we would have to lose an awful lot of state funding to make it worthwhile to do this,” he said.
Bad economy ahead? Wall Street tycoon battening down the hatches
Maybe Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase CEO, knows something we don’t.
Dimon is salting away $900 million as a buffer to shield the banking giant against future economic turmoil, The Wall Street Journal reports.
While the chance of an immediate recession is thin, the money is designed to protect the banking behemoth against loan defaults should the Ukraine war and surging inflation trigger a contraction, the Journal notes.
“Those are very powerful forces, and those things are going to collide at one point,” Dimon said. “No one knows what’s going to turn out.”
Empire strikes back: Starbucks chief threatens to freeze out unionized coffee shops
Well, that was fast.
Baristas at a pair of Starbucks in Allston and Brookline’s Coolidge Corner were still celebrating their successful unionization vote when Starbucks founder Howard Schultz dropped a big old stink bomb.
Schultz, who recently came back as CEO amid a wave of labor unrest that has seen workers at 200 Starbucks across the country move to form unions, told store managers he is drafting plans for an expanded and more generous benefits package for employees, The Wall Street Journal reports.
However, here’s the catch: Those new benefits, which Schultz has indicated could cost billions, would not be extended to unionized coffee shops.
While Schultz cited a legal technicality as the reason, experts apparently aren’t buying it.
“It’s a union avoidance technique,” said Cathy Creighton, director of the Cornell University ILR Buffalo Co-Lab and a past attorney for the NLRB, told the Journal.
Starbucks in Newton and Worcester are among those next in line for union votes.
Stay tuned.
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.