The wastewater doesn’t lie| Goodbye Hynes, hello affordable housing cash?| Saying all the right things | Never too early for 2024 speculation | About Contrarian Boston |
Excluding critics? Wu’s leans heavily on advocates for advice on contentious real estate issues
Just call it a progressive feedback loop.
It’s no secret that Boston Mayor Michelle Wu wants to hike the number of subsidized, below-market-rate apartments and condos developers are required to build in the city.
But if you are going to go to the trouble of forming an advisory panel on the hot-button issue, as Wu did on Wednesday, it might be worth including a few actual big-name developers. After all, it’s the large real estate firms that will end up building or paying the tab for most of the affordable units.
Instead, there’s just one executive from a major, market-rate developer on the mayor’s 11-member panel, which will work with a pair of consulting firms and also look at linkage fees as well. To be fair, there’s also a pair of reps from small firms, and the CEO of a large commercial real estate trade group.
But apparently left off the invitation list was the Greater Boston Real Estate Board, any representatives from local construction unions, or major developers like Avalon Bay and HYM Investment Group.
All of the above sat on a panel that former Mayor Marty Walsh appointed a few years back to look at the same issue.
By contrast, six of the 11 members of Wu’s advisory panel hail from housing advocacy groups and nonprofit builders that are, at the very least, highly amenable to mayor’s push to require developers to sell or rent 20 percent of condos and apartments in new projects at below-market rates. Rounding things out, there’s also an MIT prof as well.
The lopsided panel comes on the heels of Wu’s rollout of a 23-member rent control panel also dominated by housing advocates. Just six had private sector real estate backgrounds.
There are legitimate concerns that ramping up both affordability requirements and capping rents could backfire, leading to a drop in new construction in a housing starved city.
The mayor’s advisory panels could provide a real service in hashing things out, but not if they are too heavily skewed in one direction.
P.S. – Here’s a statement we got back from a city spokesperson: “The committees include several developers. The City brought diverse voices to both committees that represent a variety of perspectives, including those directly involved in housing creation."
Amid changes, soothing words from Boston’s new planning chief
Speaking of the mayor, Wu definitely wants to shake things up when it comes to development.
But by her appointment of James Arthur Jemison II as the city’s first ever planning chief, Wu is also signaling she’s not planning any sort of overnight revolution, but rather a more measured, methodical approach.
Wu announced on Tuesday her pick of Jemison, a top HUD official with track record of significant planning experience in local state and city government, to be Boston’s first-ever planning chief.
And Jemison, in an interview with Banker & Tradesman’s Steve Adams, did his best to reassure jittery developers the rules of the game won’t be changing immediately, noting that real estate firms have spent “significant capital on the acquisition of land and plans.”
“We want to create a situation where things in the pipeline today have a chance to be heard under the existing rules,” Jemison told B&T. “As new things come along, they’ll have a new path and set of rules.”
Well, Boston’s new planning chief has a tough balancing act ahead.
Pandemic truth and fiction side by side in the Herald
Unlike one well-known columnist, the wastewater doesn’t lie.
Covid-19 levels in Boston-area wastewater are off the charts again, surging 109 percent, the Boston Herald reports.
As a result, health officials in Boston are urging residents to mask up indoors and take extra precautions.
Kudos to the Herald. Boston’s shrunken tabloid has been doggedly following the Covid wastewater data, which has emerged as an early warning system for the seemingly never-ending pandemic.
It’s especially impressive given that Howie Carr has spent a couple of years ridiculing the pandemic - which has claimed nearly a million lives, surely including some working-class Herald readers - as a fraudulent moonbat health panic.
To give you a taste, here’s his latest column: “Howie Carr: Cult of the Mask ripped away, hallelujah!”
Gutting local news: Study tracks downward spiral
The big investor-owned chains that have been buying up papers across the country can say that they are in the local news business all they want.
But the findings of a new study published in New Media & Society, an academic journal, suggest otherwise.
The study looked at 130,000 articles in 31 corporate-owned papers that were bought by big chains.
There were “staffing changes” – as in job cuts – and a drop in local news content “almost immediately” after these papers changed hands, Benjamin LeBrun, the first author of the paper, told the Nieman Lab.
Sounds about right given what we have seen locally with Gannett and Alden Capital, which have been gutting and shutting local papers across Massachusetts.
Too early to rank presidential candidates? Think again!
The Washington Post clearly doesn’t think so, having ranked the top 10 potential Democratic candidates for 2024.
Of course, President Biden is No. 1, but whether he really will throw his hat in the ring for another term is far from a definitively settled matter.
If Biden decides he’s had enough – and who could blame the guy – there’s Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg ready to take up the mantle, with the Post putting him at No. 2.
Vice President Kamala Harris, despite having a rough time of it, is right behind Buttigieg, which should make her newfound pal from Boston, Secretary of Labor Marty Walsh, quite happy. Our state’s senior senator, Elizabeth Warren, comes in at No. 3.
Baker’s pitch: Sell Hynes, get affordable housing windfall
That’s one piece, anyway, of a $3.5 billion economic development bill that Gov. Charlie Baker filed on Thursday.
Money from the sale of the Back Bay convention center – which, in theory, could fetch hundreds of millions of dollars – would then go towards affordable housing initiatives.
Of course, exactly how much the old convention center would go for is an open question, with a huge plus being a 5.8-acre downtown building site, set against the potential minus of having to demolish the aging and dated structure.
The governor’s proposal would also funnel hundreds of millions to local cities and towns to revitalize half empty downtowns ravaged by the pandemic, among other projects.
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 Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. 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.