10.05.2022
MTA chief slams “capitalist” education system | State’s new pot watchdog already under fire | Hope for long-deferred Roxbury development plan | The inspector is here | About Contrarian Boston |
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Bad timing? Boston launches apartment inspection blitz as tensions with landlords rise
The Wu administration is ramping up apartment inspections after a big drop during the pandemic.
Rental inspections have jumped 28 percent this year through September, compared to the same period the year before, according to stats from Boston’s Inspectional Services Department.
So far this year, City Hall’s apartment watchdog has inspected 9,186 rental units.
And even more apartment checks are in the pipeline, with IDS accelerating the pace of inspections by more than half compared to the first six months of the year.
Some inspectors who handle incoming complaints from tenants are being shifted onto the new effort as well, Paul Williams, the city’s assistant housing commissioner, told Contrarian Boston.
The increase is a “response to the reduced number of inspections that took place in 2020 and 2021,” Lisa Timberlake, a ISD spokesperson, told CB. “For a number of Covid-related reasons which impacted the department's ability to conduct proactive housing inspections, fewer inspections were scheduled and completed.”
A tense relationship? Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and city landlords aren’t seeing eye to eye on some key issues/photo by ElizabethForMA
Still, the current system of inspections, which costs landlords at least $50 per unit, has long been criticized by real estate groups as a mainly a way for city officials to raise revenue.
And the increase comes with city landlords at odds with the Wu administration as it weighs plans to bring back some form of rent control.
Allison Drescher, president of the Small Property Owners Association, told Contrarian Boston her landlords feel targeted by the new mayoral administration as they struggle with tenants who can’t or won’t pay their rent, as well as surging inflation.
“Now she's raising more revenue off our backs,” Drescher said.
Timberlake, the ISD spokesperson, countered that such accusations are “not accurate.”
Rather, the increase in inspections is aimed at meeting long-standing regulatory requirements that every rental unit in the city be inspected every five years, she said.
Ok, an increase in inspections was bound to come. And even with the ramp up over at ISD, it’s not clear that the number of apartments checked out by inspectors will equal or surpass 2019 levels.
But as for the timing? Let’s just say that it’s awkward.
Political malpractice: State teachers’ union chief stirs hornet’s nest after channeling Karl Marx
Teachers deserve every penny they earn. They also deserve a union chief that doesn’t sound like a cross between Karl Marx and Abbie Hoffman, circa 1969.
That would be Max Page, the new president of the Massachusetts Teachers Association.
Page, in remarks that are just now starting to circulate in the local media, called for the complete demolition of the educational system as we know it at an August meeting of the state education board.
The actual topic was a proposal to raise MCAS standards – the teachers’ union despises the test – but Page had a much broader target in mind as he unloaded on members of the state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education in a sarcasm-laden diatribe.
After comparing the board’s support for MCAS to his fascination as a child with things he has since outgrown, like mood rings and REO Speedwagon, Page, a UMass Amherst professor of architecture, got down to business.
“We have a fundamental difference of views on what schools are for,” Page said. “The focus on income, on college and career readiness speaks to a system … tied to the capitalist class and its needs for profits," Page said. “The purpose of schools must be to nurture thinking, caring, active and committed adults, parents, community members, activists, citizens.”
In between references to the sage wisdom of his apparently famous PhD advisor, Page culminated with a call for uprooting the entire educational system – starting with the MCAS test, of course.
Since the American public school system was built on the rotten foundations of the “fear of social dynamite” and the “imperatives of economic growth, we have no model to truly reform, so we must conceive and build anew,” Page informed state education board members, who clearly seemed delighted to be lectured hectored by the MTA chief.
“It will not happen with many of the people in front of me,” Page said to members of the state education board, chaired by Katherine Craven, chief administrative officer of of Babson College.
Channeling Marx at the MTA? Ok, just having some fun. (Photo by Maximilian Scheffler on Unsplash)
The MTA, he vowed, will continue its MCAS crusade “as long as it takes to tear down the system you are perpetuating.”
Page’s remarks were picked up by CommonWealth Magazine, with the Charles River Regional Chamber running an item in its newsletter with a helpful link to the video of the meeting.
What kind of labor leader is this guy? I mean, really? Can you imagine former Boston mayor and now U.S. Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, one of the most effective leaders to come out of the union movement in recent years, lecturing construction company owners on the evils of capitalism and the coming revolution?
New momentum for building out promising, but long vacant Roxbury lot
Score another big win for Tom O’Brien, a former City Hall development chief who went on to become a city-building real estate investor.
O’Brien’s HYM Investment Group has just won the nod from a key community panel to redevelop a long-dormant Roxbury development site across from Boston Police Department headquarters.
O’Brien, who has teamed up with Rev. Jeffrey Brown of the nonprofit My City at Peace, has proposed building 700,000 square feet of lab and life sciences space on the 7.7 acre lot at Tremont and Whittier streets.
Tom O’Brien’s HYM Investment Group has big plans for a long-vacant Roxbury site
The vote by the Roxbury Strategic Masterplan Oversight Committee is a crucial endorsement for O’Brien and HYM, which is also behind the $1.5 billion redevelopment of the old Government Center garage into a pair of towers and soon other buildings as well.
We’re crossing our fingers that O’Brien can succeed where many others have failed, with previous attempts over the decades to redevelop the P-3 site having gone nowhere.
Steve Adams at Banker & Tradesman has all the details.
Hazy start for new Bay State cannabis czar Shannon O’Brien
And that’s mainly due to the Boston Herald, which has run a series of stories and columns on the former state treasurer and one-time Democratic candidate for governor, casting a critical eye on her dealings in the pot industry in the not so distant past.
Herald columnist Joe Battenfeld has called upon O’Brien to step down from her new perch as chair of the state Cannabis Control Commission, attacking her lack of public candor about her industry ties.
O’Brien now acknowledges she was CEO of Greenfield Greenery and helped hammer out a vital host community agreement, special permit and provisional license, according to a statement she gave to the Cannabis Business Times.
But O’Brien contends that in December 2021, she “signed an attestation giving up all equity, ownership and control” of the company. She also says she helped Charlemont Farmworks nail down its community agreement, but as a consultant.
In addition, O’Brien told the Cannabis news outlet, in a statement, that she disclosed these relationships to the state cannabis board when applying for the top job there.
That may be, but the public was definitely not clued in when it came to this fairly pertinent background info.
State Treasurer Deb Goldberg made not even a passing reference to O’Brien’s previous cannabis business relationships when she appointed her to be the state’s top pot watchdog in August, the Herald’s Battenfeld points out.
The Herald’s coverage of this mess, in turn, has been head and shoulders above the Globe’s.
The Globe story on O’Brien’s appointment made no mention of her work in the cannabis industry.
In fact, the Globe devoted significant space to O’Brien’s lack of experience in the cannabis sector. The piece cited critics who said they had hoped “at least one seat on the five-member board would go to someone with cannabis advocacy or industry experience.”
Well, little did they know!
About 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.