Time to get honest on fixing the T | Firm footing for massive Turnpike air-rights project| Convention center expansion doesn’t add up | About Contrarian Boston
Bad math? Something’s not adding up in latest push to expand Boston meeting hall
At a time when hotels are half full and the meetings business is a shadow of its pre-Covid self, it seems like a truly head-scratching time to embark on a $400 million expansion of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center.
Alas, the Massachusetts Convention Center Authority and hotel industry officials appear more intent on pushing the big expansion through than getting to the bottom of whether it truly makes any rational economic sense.
In fact, the MCCA appears to be relying on Populous, a firm that has been pitching and designing convention center expansions across the country, as the prime contractor on the expansion.
Populous has assembled a team of subs, which, among other things, has come up with a key estimate used to justify the project, a projected increase of 140,000 room nights a year. At 33 percent, that is a huge jump in a cutthroat national meetings and convention market and a number that should raise red flags.
Populous is a fine design and architectural firm, but new projects are its lifeblood, as Bloomberg reports in this insightful piece.
“Let’s make clear that Populous has an enormous vested interest in getting a stream of new and expanded convention center projects,” said Heywood Sanders, a public administration professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and a long-time expert on the nation’s convention industry.
Amazingly, this basic conflict has escaped attention in the local media, which has given just a cursory nod to questions raised by a couple of long-time skeptics of the convention business in Boston and beyond.
Is there no one in Boston, home to one of the world’s greatest concentrations of brainpower, who can do a legitimate study of the convention business in Boston and determine whether an expansion of the BECC makes any sense?
Just asking.
Amid economic uncertainty, developer building massive Fenway air-rights project remains bullish
Why? Well, among other things, IQHQ, Inc. is eyeing deals with a couple of tenants in the nearby Longwood Medical area for its highway-topping life sciences campus, slowly taking shape across from Fenway Park.
That’s the word from David Surette, a senior vice president at the national developer of lab and research space, which has teamed up with local developer and gun-rights activist John Rosenthal on the $1 billion project.
Construction crews are moving ahead with foundation and pilings work, with the deck expected to be put into place next year. When complete, a centerpiece tower will rise 350 feet above a two-acre deck over the Turnpike.
Yes, there is growing media chatter about sudden softness in the life sciences and biotech market, which has been in the midst of an epic boom that has seen developers scope out tens of millions of square feet in new projects across the Boston area.
But Surette touts the California-based IQHQ’s battle-tested approach of developing new projects specifically designed for the needs of the life sciences sector, with a significant degree of venting and other infrastructure in place.
And he sees Fenway Center, which is following this blueprint, holding up well against the flood of proposals by developers scrambling to convert anything and everything into lab space, from a department store at the Natick Mall to office buildings.
Plus, you can’t beat the location, with Fenway’s location next door to Longwood a major plus.
“Fenway is a really hot market,” Surette said.
You can say that again.
Another shocker at the disaster formerly known as the MBTA
That would be the sudden, forced shift to a Saturday schedule starting this week across the Red, Orange and Blue lines following what amounts to an emergency order by federal regulators.
The edict from the Federal Transit Administration, which is investigating the growing record of hair-raising accidents at the MBTA, comes after the federal agency found a ridiculously understaffed central dispatch center in which some workers were pulling 20 hour shifts.
It’s not a good look for Gov. Charlie Baker. That said, some in the local media write as if the current mess - and by that we mean the many and sundry woes besetting the T - can be laid squarely at Baker’s feet.
Rather, the roots of the MBTA’s chronic maintenance, performance and safety issues stretch back decades through the tenure of several Republican and one Democratic governor, and a reliably Democratic-controlled state Legislature.
Baker’s main fault has been trying to finesse an increasingly untenable situation. At some point, someone needs to take the lead and come clean on what it will actually take – in terms of dollars and maybe even an entirely new government structure – to at least get the T back to where it was in the 1980s and 90s.
And that’s before tallying the cost of transforming the T into a true, 21st century urban/suburban transit service.
Quick hits:
Great look at growing disgruntlement among police chiefs, at least, with the Republican embrace of the radical gun-rights agenda. Apparently rank and file officers are a different matter. “Some red state police want gun safety. Will Republicans listen?” Boston Globe
This is cool. The off-field pageantry is as big a draw as the game itself. From the BBJ: “Army-Navy game to make its Gillette Stadium debut in 2023.”
Good idea? “Boston ‘city-wide warrant sweep’ called for by politicians as Mass and Cass drug problems flare outward” Boston Herald
Not so good news: “Americans are starting to pull back on travel and restaurants” Washington Post
Code red? Percentage of economists predicting a slump higher than in 2007: “Recession Probability Soars as Inflation Worsens” Wall Street Journal
From elite British university program to Starbucks union organizer: “Why a Rhodes Scholar’s Ambition Led Her to a Job at Starbucks” New York Times
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;
· 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.