06.05.2024

Local scientist’s damning case that Covid started in Chinese lab | NIMBY state lawmakers target granny flats | Boston tax plan faces biz group backlash | Stormy financial weather ahead for the Hub | “Schleppie” awards doled out for wretched T service | Hub Blog is back |

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Denial city: Confronted with wrenching decisions about Boston’s finances and future, Mayor Michelle Wu responds with a report full of political happy talk

Everyone aboard the S.S. Boston with a smidgen of common sense can see the financial hurricane that looms on the horizon.

That is everyone except the captain, who, as she plunges full steam ahead into the tempest, points to the few scraps of blue sky remaining as evidence that nothing could possibly go wrong.

As Boston braces for a potential $1 billion-plus revenue hit from the collapse of the downtown office market, Mayor Michelle Wu is touting a new city report with a rosy economic message tailor-made for her budding reelection campaign.

A monument to political happy talk, the nearly 50-page report focuses on feel-good measures like the uptick in tourism and the post-Covid jobs rebound, while soft pedaling the plunge in office building values and the sharp drop in new home, apartment and condo construction.

The Boston Planning & Development Agency report lowballs the office vacancy rate at 12 percent, which prompted even the Globe, which generally treats Wu with kid gloves, to note that other commercial real estate firms were reporting much higher numbers in the 17 to 20 percent range.

Photo by NASA on Unsplash

Even that is understating the problem. The occupancy rate - the amount of office space with actual human beings in it - still hovers at 50 percent nationally. And there’s every indication that office occupancy is likely the same or even lower in Boston, a market packed with high tech and professional services jobs that have been at the forefront of the work-from-home revolution.

Companies are still renting a lot of office space they aren’t using, stuck in long-term leases they’ll jettison or shrink at the first opportunity.

So why care? Well, when that happens, it will put further downward pressure on office building values and city tax revenues, already projected to take a major hit.

And that’s not the only thing the report glosses over. There is nary a mention of the mayor’s counterproductive plan to deal with the looming revenue shortfall.

That proposal, which cleared the City Council on Wednesday, seeks to squeeze more money out of already struggling downtown office buildings by boosting commercial tax rates.

Meanwhile, the mayor’s happy talk/BPDA report also buries another inconvenient fact: the big drop in the construction of new apartments, condos and homes in Boston.

You have to put in some work to find that number, despite the fact that it is likely one of the most important stats right now for a city where home and condo prices and rents continue to escalate unabated.

Hub Blog is back

After a decade or so hiatus, journalist Jay Fitzgerald’s Hub Blog, one of the pioneer local blogs dating back to the early 2000s, is up and running again. A former Boston Herald business reporter and Boston Globe business correspondent, Fitzgerald announced the “Hub Blog 2:0” revival earlier this week – and already has some posts on the recent turmoil at the Washington Post and on Gov. Maura Healey. 

Fitzgerald, the former editor of the Boston Business Journal and MassterList.com newsletter, is a long-time reporting friend and former colleague of ours who helped with some early editorial ideas for Contrarian Boston.

We look forward to reading lots more from Jay as Hub Blog takes flight again.

Down to the wire: As Healey’s multibillion-dollar housing bill nears passage, supporters scramble to prevent NIMBY sabotage to a key piece

Is Massachusetts the most hostile state in the country when it comes to building new housing? Stuff like this makes you wonder.

On Wednesday night, House lawmakers were busy voting on hundreds of amendments to Gov. Maura Healey’s $6 billion housing bond bill.

And those last minute additions included a number of “poison pills” that, if passed, would effectively wreck a key feature of the housing bill, Jesse Kanson-Benanav, executive director of Abundant Housing Massachusetts, tells Contrarian Boston.