A bitter New York/Boston academic feud | Delayed price drop | GE mostly done with Boston | Housing haters | Quick Hits | About Contrarian Boston |
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NIMBY backlash: Opponents eyeing extreme measures to thwart Baker administration’s suburban apartment push
In Rockport, a group of residents has hired an attorney and gone to court in a bid to derail the governor’s MBTA Communities law, which would require the Cape Ann town to open its doors to new apartments and condos.
God forbid that new people might move to the picturesque seaside town, which is graying rapidly amid a double-digit decline in school enrollment.
If the legal challenge is successful, it could spell big trouble for Baker’s housing push, which aims to spur construction over the next decade or two of as many as 200,000 apartments and condos near T stations and stops across the Boston area.
But the Rockport lawsuit is child’s play compared to the what the “No to Rail” campaign has in mind in Fall River.
The group is pushing city residents to vote against plans to have Fall River join the MBTA service area, with a new train station having been built as part of the state’s $1 billion expansion of commuter rail to the South Coast.
The net result could be an empty train station with no service. But that would apparently be worth the price in order to prevent state officials from enforcing the new MBTA Communities housing law, Nelson Vasquez, a member of the No to Rail Group, told the The Herald News in Fall River.
His beef? Well, Vasquez doesn’t want any new market rate housing built in Fall River, worried that it will drive up prices.
The opposition comes as Fall River faces a surge in its homeless population and a dearth of affordable housing.
Scuttling a rail station in order to block new housing, as opposed to leveraging new apartment development to help meet Fall River’s needs, hardly seems like a winner.
Bitter feud: BU’s Ibram X. Kendi clashes with pair of NYT columnists
Kendi, head of BU’s Center for Antiracist Research, editor of The Emancipator, and a leading exponent of critical race theory, now appears to have a running feud with not one, but two prominent Times columnists.
As we reported Sunday, John McWhorter, who writes a bi-weekly column at the Times, issued an apology after the Columbia University linguist, who is also Black, used some loaded terms to mock Kendi and accuse him of being an academic lightweight.
“You must consider arguing your points, rather than thinking you have made them by using buzzwords, skin tone, and your hair,” wrote McWhorter, author of “Woke Racism: How a New Religion Has Betrayed Black America.”
Kendi, for this part, has called McWhorter, who has made a name for himself as a critic of woke culture, “embarrassing.”
But there’s also clearly no love lost either between Kendi and David Brooks.
Kendi took aim at Brooks, one of the Times star columnists and its leading conservative/moderate voice, in a pair of weekend tweets.
Kendi’s ire was triggered over Brooks column on Oct. 13 that attempts to tie in the LA City Council scandal over racist comments made by its now former chair, Nury Martinez, to the effects of CRT-style thinking.
David Brooks, one of the two NYT columnists Ibram X. Kendi is feuding with. (Photo by Library of Congress Life)
Martinez made headlines with her crude racist talk during a meeting with her political cronies in which she used vile terms to disparage the Black child of a fellow city council member, among other things.
Brooks, in particular, zeroed in on some of the lesser-known comments made during the now infamous chat - such as “he’s with the Blacks - to suggest Martinez and her allies were expressing a worldview in which you are “either with one racial army or you’re with another.”
He then credits Kendi with being the leading apostle of those who “see American society as a conflict between oppressor and oppressed groups. They center race and race consciousness when talking about a person’s identity.”
Kendi took to Twitter on Saturday to blast Brooks. While failing to spell out exactly where he thinks the NYT columnist and weekly fixture on the PBS NewsHour went astray, he accused Brooks of using the furor over the racist remarks “to falsely characterize a Black scholar.”
“My scholarship is there if Brooks reads books instead of talking points,” Kendi tweeted.
Given Brooks reputation as a thoughtful conservative columnist and author of multiple books, that last comment just seems silly.
The thing is, neither Brooks or McWhorter can simply be waved off as Trumpie cranks. They are well-reasoned writers and thinkers.
They are expressing deep concerns many people have about uber progressive politics as they are now practiced, and yes, concerns as well about CRT, which has become a lightning rod and stand-in phrase for a whole host of anxieties and concerns.
Here’s our question for Kendi: Why not address those concerns head on, instead of simply crying foul?
GE makes it official and pulls plug on once grand Boston office
No shocker here. This has been a long time in the coming. In fact, given the turbulent times at the industrial conglomerate over the past few years, GE’s plans to build a shiny new headquarters in Boston’s Fort Point neighborhood began to unravel not long after the company announced it would be moving from Connecticut in 2016.
GE has told employees it plans to vacate the 100,000 square feet it currently occupies in two brick Fort Point buildings early next year and will be hunting for smaller digs in the city.
Count us as skeptical about the idea the once mighty company has any plans at this point to truly stick around the city.
That just sounds like another cover story by GE to avoid admitting they are done with Boston.
Jon Chesto at the Globe has all the details here.
Wait until next year: Home prices may not fall until 2023
That’s the verdict from housing market analysts at Wells Fargo.
Analysts at the big bank see a 5.8 percent drop in home prices, but they don’t expect it will kick in until next year.
In the meantime, home sales and new residential construction starts as well are expected to continue to plunge.
The bank’s forecast, which was for the U.S. housing market as a whole, dovetails nicely with the latest local housing numbers.
While home sales plunged by double digits across Massachusetts in September, prices jumped 7.8 percent to $550,000 compared to the same month a year ago, The Warren Group reports.
Quick Hits:
Maybe not the way to go: “Providence proposal could ban more than 3 college students living together. Critics say it could worsen the city’s housing crisis.” Boston Globe
You think? “MBTA should tell riders when Orange Line will be faster, Charlie Baker says” Boston Herald
We’re all ears: “MBTA: What went wrong and how to fix it” CommonWealth Magazine
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;
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· Education, from school board spats to the doings of multibillion-dollar university endowments;
· And whatever else catches our fancy.