A not so rosy look at Jack Welch’s legacy | Race to build over the Turnpike | Dems stick to script | Northeastern students need new cause | About Contrarian Boston
Missing the big picture on rents: Students, city councilors protest Northeastern plan to add hundreds of dorm rooms
Completely one-sided and more than a little disingenuous as well. That sums up the growing debate – and what little media coverage there has been of this - over a proposal to convert one of the Sheraton Boston’s towers into a dorm for Northeastern students.
Fearing the loss of jobs, the local hotel workers union has come out swinging against the move by the Back Bay hotel’s new owners, Värde Partners and Hawkins Way Capital, which shelled out $233 million earlier this year for the property.
They’ve been joined by Boston city councilors and Northeastern students. And the latter, while no doubt an idealistic bunch, are also clearly not thrilled with their prospective accommodations at the upscale Hub hotel.
Apparently, the mile-long walk would be a bit much for some students, who would be less inclined to roll out of bed and get to class in the morning. That, anyway, is what a member of Huskies Organizing With Labor, or HOWL, told The Huntington News, a Northeastern University student newspaper.
“It’s not ridiculously far from campus but it’s far enough to the point where the commute from Northeastern’s campus to the Sheraton is kind of long. It makes motivation to go to classes [go] down and lowers the student experience a lot,” said Benjamin Brown, a first-year chemical engineering major, of the university’s plan to lease as many as 427 rooms at the hotel.
Ok, college kids will be college kids. But those Northeastern student activists might want to take another look at their stance and their aversion to walking a few blocks across the beautiful Back Bay.
The pandemic laid bare the role Boston’s more than 150,000 college student have played now for decades in driving rents in the city to insane heights.
As Covid-19 emptied out campuses, rents plunging by double digits in Boston, Cambridge and Somerville, with Apartment List pegging the drop at an astonishing 17 percent.
By throwing a fit over the Sheraton dorm plan, those students are hurting renters across Boston and its environs struggling to survive in one of the most brutal apartment markets on the planet.
That said, none of this is an argument for abandoning the Sheraton workers.
If Northeastern wants those dorm rooms, the university should be forced to dig a little deeper and do what it takes to do right by the 100 or so Sheraton workers who stand to lose their jobs, ensuring they can find equivalent or better jobs, either on campus or at another hotel.
And if those students want to help, they can hold the university’s feet to the fire to make sure that happens.
Tyrant or visionary? New bio delves into the life and times of Jack Welch
Ok, with a title like “The Man Who Broke Capitalism,” it’s clear right off the bat which side New York Times correspondent David Gelles comes down on in his new bio of the late GE chief.
In his first few years at the top of GE, Welch laid off 100,000 workers, shipping their jobs to far cheaper labor markets overseas, Gelles told NPR’s Dave Davies on Fresh Air.
"Up until this point, people who had a job at a company like GE or IBM basically figured that they had a job for life. But he explicitly said that this notion was going to be a thing of the past under his watch," Gelles says.
Gelles is more than on to something here. It is high time for a reappraisal of Welch and the radical transformation of American capitalism that began in the 1970s and 80s and left us with today’s sour, neo-Dickensian economy.
With their mass layoffs and factory closings, Welch and his generation of rock star CEOs effectively ripped to shreds the post-World War II social contract that ensured some modest degree of wealth sharing and a basic societal safety net.
That wreckage, in turn, helped fuel the rise of Trump, the most dangerous demagogue in our history.
That said, Welch and the other CEOs of that not so golden era were also responding to larger, global pressures, with the resurgent German and Japanese economies cutting deeply into U.S. economic dominance starting in the 1970s.
With the passage of time, the pendulum will swing again, and there surely will be another reassessment of Welch and dramatic changes that took place in late 20th century and early 21st American capitalism.
But we suspect that’s going to take a few years.
No drama Dems: Healey wins handily in mostly histrionics-free state party convention
Sure, there was a dustup over initial plans to let ride-sharing companies have a table at the state party convention this past weekend in Worcester from which to promote their controversial fall ballot campaign.
After a strong pushback from party progressives, convention planners scrapped that idea.
But other than that, things went relatively smoothly, especially compared to the seething, dysfunctional and whacked out mess on display at the recent MassGOP convention in Springfield.
Attorney General Maura Healey won 71 percent of the votes in her campaign for governor, followed by state Sen. Sonia Chang-Diaz of Jamaica Plain, at 29 percent, ensuring both will be on the ballot when voters go to the polls in the September primary.
There are also some really interesting races further down on the ballot, with several candidates getting the required 15 percent or more of delegate votes to qualify.
In the race for state auditor, former state transportation official Chris Dempsey, who led the No Boston Olympics campaign, edged state Sen. Diana DiZoglio in the delegate count.
But with the narrow 53-47 margin, and DiZoglio holding the edge in fundraising, the battle to become the next state government watchdog is definitely not over.
Tanisha Sullivan, president of the Boston NAACP, won the nod from 68 percent of convention delegates in her quest to unseat Bill Galvin, who has served as secretary of state for seven terms. Still, even with the convention’s blessing, unseating the very well-entrenched Galvin will be a tall order.
And in the AG’s race, Quentin Palfrey edged former Boston City Councilor Andrea Campbell 54-46, after a first, inconclusive round of voting.
That race is far from settled, either.
On your mark, get set, go! Developers race to build atop Turnpike
For four decades, a long succession of developers tried and failed to get various and sundry air-rights projects off the ground to deck over the ugly highway canyon in Boston better known as the Massachusetts Turnpike.
But suddenly we have two air-rights projects moving forward, with other would-be Turnpike developers waiting in the wings.
Taking the lead, Samuels & Associates, best known for transforming the once dingy neighborhood around Fenway Park with a series of condo and apartment towers, is now making some very highly visible progress on its $700 million air-rights project over the Turnpike in the Back Bay.
On Tuesday morning, developer Steve Samuels and city, state, and local civic and business leaders will gather at the construction site, with the 520-ton steel air-rights deck just about complete.
Plans call for a pair of towers, one office, the other hotel, on either side the newly built highway deck at the intersection of Boylston Street and Massachusetts Avenue, also known as Parcel 12. The deck itself will feature a plaza and 50,000 square feet of retail space.
It marks the first air-rights deck to be built over the Turnpike since the Copley Plaza Mall way back in 1984.
Developer and anti-gun-violence activists John Rosenthal and life sciences developer IQHQ have inked a deal to build a lab complex over the Turnpike near Fenway Park, but the deck has yet to go up, with preliminary work still underway.
Stay tuned.
Quick hits:
Can they get it done? “Senators say gun deal is within reach, but without Biden’s wish list” Washington Post
Nixon bad, but Trump worse, say Watergate sleuths: “Woodward and Bernstein thought Nixon defined corruption. Then came Trump.” Washington Post
Hmm, something about this makes us queasy: “Crypto lobbying hits fever pitch as Bitcoin's favorite senator finishes bill” Politico
Won’t be seeing him on Top Chef anytime soon: “Andre Echevarria sentenced to prison after receiving ‘cooking class’ where officials say he learned to ‘convert cocaine into crack’ MassLive
What is Contrarian Boston?
I have fielded emails over the past couple of months 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;
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