Just about everyone priced out now | Can insiders fix BPS? | A few pennies may decide Biden’s fate | About Contrarian Boston
Housing trouble ahead? Growing signs point to a market slowdown
We are not in potential housing crash territory, at least at this point.
But the indicators on the housing market dashboard are starting to flash red amid declining sales, rising interest rates, crazily inflated prices, and an uncertain economy.
One of the potentially more serious signs of forthcoming housing trouble – and one that typically gets short shrift in the local and national media - is the decline in home sales.
Bay State home sales are down 10 percent through the first five months of 2022, even as the median price statewide reaches new and increasingly unsustainable heights, approaching the $600,000 mark in May, according to The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman.
Here’s the thing: The last time we saw this combo of falling sales and rising prices was back in 2005 and 2006, as the air started to leak out of the real estate bubble.
And we all know what happened in 2007 and 2008, when the crash finally came.
Looking to buy inside 495? Better be making more than $200,000
And probably a lot more than that. That’s one big takeaway from the annual report on the state of the nation’s housing market by Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies.
Just to buy a home in Eastern Massachusetts/Southern New Hampshire, where the median price of a home is $659,161, you will need to be pulling down more than $181,000, the report finds.
Intrigued, we decided to take a look at Greater Boston - basically everything inside 495, from Boston to Marlborough - where the median price of a house hit a whopping $875,000 in May, according to the Greater Boston Association of Realtors.
Using the metrics laid out in the Harvard report, we came up with an income of $207,000 needed to buy the median home in the Boston area, and even that’s likely a bit low.
And we suspect if we further narrowed our study area, so to speak, to communities inside the 128 corridor like Concord, Belmont and Newton, the family income needed to buy the median-priced home would rise to the $300,000 to $400,000 range.
Meanwhile, median family income in Massachusetts is a little over $81,000.
No wonder home sales are falling.
Inside job: Finalists for BPS chief all have deep roots in district
Bringing in a hot-shot outsider to reform Boston’s struggling schools hasn’t worked out all that well, as the short-lived reigns of Brenda Cassellius and Tommy Chang attest.
Cassellius, who will be leaving at the end of the year, hailed from Minnesota, while Chang, despite experience turning around schools in L.A., failed to gain traction here.
Now Mayor Michelle Wu appears to be moving in a very different direction, with the two finalists for the BPS superintendent job, Mary Skipper and Tommy Welch, both boasting deep roots in the district.
The attempts to bring in a big-name outsider to overhaul the city’s schools always seemed misguided given the treacherous political currents any new superintendent must navigate in Boston.
Here’s a good bet that Skipper, who has two decades of experience in the Boston system, and Welch, who currently oversees 15 schools in Boston, have a far better understanding of what they are getting into than Chang or Cassellius ever had.
Gannett reporter out after fabricating sources
The national chain which has been slashing and trashing local dailies and weeklies across Massachusetts now has a sizable journalism scandal on its hands as well.
Gannett’s flagship paper USA Today has taken down 23 news stories written by one of the paper’s now former “breaking news” reporters. Gabriela Miranda “misattributed quotes and in some cases may have fabricated interviews and sources,” the Washington Post reports.
One thing that is striking about Miranda – and for that matter other notorious journalists gone bad, such as serial fabricator Stephen Glass and one-time New York Times reporter Jayson Blair - is her combination of youth and professional inexperience.
All three landed at well-respected, national publications with little if any other experience, all in a field where many reporters toil for years or even decades before getting such an opportunity, if ever.
In the case of Miranda, who resigned from USA Today, she had just graduated from college in 2021 and worked a short time at the Gainesville Times before landing a job at one of the nation’s largest newspapers.
Miranda was likely a cheap hire given her relative inexperience – no small factor at penny pinching Gannett - though we are speculating here.
Well, you get what you pay for.
Stubborn or just deluded? MassGOP gubernatorial candidates refuse to embrace the only winning strategy left
And that would be to “tie themselves” to Gov. Charlie Baker, a fellow Republican and one of the most popular governors in the country, and hope for the best, says the professor behind a newly- released statewide poll out of UMass Lowell.
If the election were held today, both candidates would get trounced by Attorney General Maura Healey. Fresh off a successful state Democratic convention, Healey beats Geoff Diehl 61 percent to 30 percent, and also bests Chris Doughty by a slightly narrower margin, 58 to 30 percent, according to the university’s Center for Public Opinion.
“This election isn’t over, but Democrats have the high ground,” said Associate Professor John Cluverius, associate director of the center, in a press release. “If they’re going to try it, Republicans seeking the corner office on Beacon Hill need to tie themselves to [retiring] Gov. Charlie Baker.”
The thing is, there’s no way in you-know-what that Diehl, the former state lawmaker and radical Trumpie who hired Corey Lewandowski to help guide his campaign, is going to do that.
And while Wrentham businessman Chris Doughty has struck a more moderate tone, he has also resisted tying himself too closely to Baker as he competes for voters in the Republican primary, dominated by hardline Trumpies.
Asked by Contrarian Boston a few months back whether he is a “Baker Republican,” Doughty replied he is a “Chris Doughty Republican.”
All of which is nice and fine. But when 60 percent of voters have never heard of you - also per the UMass Lowell poll - that’s a recipe for defeat.
Can 18 cents save Biden’s presidency?
By David Van Voorhis/aka Stat Man
That is the cents per gallon the federal gas tax consists of. President Biden has proposed a gas tax holiday to reduce the cost of gas for consumers as prices soar. However, Congress, including some Democrats, are deeply skeptical, and Biden’s plan is not expected to make it through both chambers. Rightfully or not, Biden has been blamed by many voters for increased gas prices, and many analysts see his push to suspend the gas tax as an attempt to win back disaffected voters and show how he's addressing this issue. The timing might also be linked to the upcoming 2022 midterm elections, where Democrats are facing an unfavorable national environment and are currently favored to lose their holds on both chambers.
Quick hits:
You have to be pretty extreme to view political moderates as mortal enemies. From the NYT: “In Ad, Shotgun-Toting Greitens Asks Voters to Go ‘RINO Hunting.’”
Just when you didn’t think it could get any worse, it does: “Rail experts say Orange Line battery ‘failure’ was likely a battery explosion; no answer from T” Boston Globe
State Senate staffers get big win in unionization drive. From MA State House Employee Union, via Twitter: “When we organize, we win. Today, the @MA_Senate (Sen. President Karen Spilka) finally announced the rollout of livable wages for all Senate staff. However, the fight for recognition and a seat at the table in our workplace continues. State House Employees deserve a union.”
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.