Crazed suburban bidding wars | MassGOP candidate’s $12,000 a month ‘endorsement’ | Wu’s bold BPS move | Local newspapers without local news | About Contrarian Boston |
Muddle on the harbor: Seaport planning panned by critics amid latest development shift
How did Boston’s Seaport, a neighborhood that had such promise when it was being planned two decades ago, wind up such a dull place?
That perennial question is making the rounds again in the wake of WS Development’s plans to nix several hundred units of market-rate housing at Seaport Square, and a hotel and some retail as well, in order to add more lucrative lab and office space.
It may be hard to imagine now, but Seaport Square at one point was seen as a potential crown jewel in what would be the city’s newest and brightest neighborhood.
While a proposal for a full-scale school ran afoul of the late Mayor Thomas M. Menino, plans for a truly impressive, 200,000-square-foot performing arts center made it into the final plans approved by City Hall in 2010. A neighborhood supermarket was pledged as well, as was a Boston Public Library branch.
Fast forward to 2022 and the grand performance hall has been broken down into much smaller venues, while the supermarket and library branch are still nowhere to be found. Ditto for some planned senior and workforce housing, which has also gone missing.
A retail partner alongside the original ownership group, WS Development bought out the remaining, undeveloped portion of the project – roughly 12.5 acres – for $359 million in 2015.
Since then, there has been a steady shift towards commercial and lab development at the project by WS Development, with the changes all blessed by the Boston Planning and Development Agency, contends Steve Hollinger, a neighborhood advocate who has doggedly tracked the march towards mediocrity at Seaport Square.
“The district has been intensely commercialized,” Hollinger said.
The latest move to boost the amount of lab space in the project could be the nail in the coffin for any hope of making the Seaport a real neighborhood, not a collection of windswept office and research buildings, ala Kendall Square.
Axing plans for as many as 700 residential units means 1,200 fewer residents, while mixing lab and condo and apartment towers is, let’s just say, a novel concept.
Meanwhile, WS Development’s decision to scale back on new market-rate residential could very well put an end to any hopes of a supermarket, Hollinger said.
“With this kind of change in residential density, unless you have free parking or a lot of residences, you are not going to get a supermarket,” he said.
Gannett’s grand experiment: Local newspapers without local news
Now what idiot would think this is a good idea?
Well, apparently Mizell Stewart III, vice president of news performance, talent and partnerships for Gannett and the USA Today Network, that’s who. At a webinar put on by the Shorenstein Center at the Harvard Kennedy School, Stewart defended the move to replace local news with regional trend stories at the chain’s steadily dwindling stable of local papers in Massachusetts.
"Covering local news continues to be very labor intensive and very expensive," Stewart said, per Media Nation’s Dan Kennedy. “The idea is to take "a more regional approach" and focus on "commonalities and trends.”
Gannett’s half-baked approach to covering local news comes on the heels of the chain’s decision to close several venerable local weeklies, while combining others into the newspaper version of the island of misfit toys.
Kennedy offers some interesting and amusing insights into one of these new Frankenpapers, The Transcript & Journal, “a mash-up of Gannett’s Medford Transcript and Somerville Journal,” and, as Kennedy puts it, as welcome as “COVID or an overdue tax bill.”
Market trends: Suburban homes fetching insane numbers
Interest rates may be rising, but there’s no letup in buyer demand in Boston’s pricey western suburbs.
In fact, rising mortgage rates may even be spurring some buyers to strike now before they go higher. Combine that with a chronic, ongoing shortage of homes for sale, and you start to get some extreme numbers.
Just ask David Bates. A broker associate at William Raveis Real Estate and a stats guy, Bates took a look at 106 homes that sold during the month prior to April 26.
Roughly a third closed at least $200,000 above asking. Of these, 10 buyers shelled out more than $300,000 extra, while four more anted up $400,000 or more above the asking price.
That’s compared to just six homes that sold for more than $200,000 above asking during the same month in 2021.
Wellesley alone had six homes that sold for over $200,000 above asking, with a seventh netting an additional $150,000.
Yikes!
Wu goes big on long-delayed repairs to aging Boston schools
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu wants to spend $2 billion fixing up city schools plagued by water leaks, hissing radiators, and all other manner of ills.
That’s double the $1 billion plan rolled out by her predecessor, former Mayor Marty Walsh, who managed to only make modest progress on the issue.
Announcing the plan, though, was the easy part. Managing to carry it off will be tougher, with Wu just the latest mayor to try and tackle the issue.
But Wu is off to a good start, with a snappy name - “Green New Deal for Boston Public Schools” – and plans to hire project managers to oversee the work, which will initially focus on a subset of 14 schools.
It also appears to be a shrewd way to back into what has been a highly contentious issue, the need to consolidate some underused schools amid a steady decline in enrollment.
MassGOP gubernatorial candidate touts ‘endorsement’ from Corey Lewandowski
Well, for $12,000 a month, you had better have his endorsement.
That’s how much Geoff Diehl is forking over to the former Trump campaign manager and political henchman for his services as senior strategist on his long-shot campaign for governor, campaign finance records show.
But Diehl clearly wants to get as much mileage as he can out of Lewandowski with hard-right Republican voters, and why not, given the money he is paying the guy?
Diehl has plunked Lewandowski practically at the top of his list of endorsements, below only Donald Trump, who, in a jab at Gov. Charlie Baker, endorsed the former state rep from Whitman last fall.
Diehl has also netted the endorsements of a couple of aging lions on the MassGOP’s right wing, James Rappaport and Joe Malone, while rounding out the list with a scattering of state party committee members, obscure local officials, and the owner of a gun shop on Cape Cod.
Conspicuously missing are current members of the Republican Party’s small but vocal delegation on Beacon Hill.
By contrast, Chris Doughty, the Wrentham business owner who has pitched himself as a more moderate alternative to Diehl, has won endorsements from nine Republican state representatives, including two who previously had backed Diehl.
That said, Doughty isn’t listing the endorsement of his campaign manager, but we’ll let you know if this changes.
Quit hits:
Really? Guess we can’t say we’re surprised: “Rand Paul stalls quick Senate OK of $40 billion Ukraine package” Boston Globe, via AP
Each family would get at least $400,000: “State to pay $56 million to settle lawsuit brought by families of veterans who got COVID-19 at Holyoke Soldiers’ Home” Boston Globe
Something is really wrong here: “Boston schools student threw ‘boiling hot’ water on teacher’s face — but school didn’t call 911, cops say” Boston Herald
Hitting the dreaded milestone: “After 1 million deaths, covid leaves millions more forever changed” Washington Post
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.