A true suburban housing scandal | A battle to the death in the auditor’s race | Losing big and still raking it in | About Contrarian Boston |
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The real winner of the Mass. governor’s race? Trump henchman Corey Lewandowski
Lewandowski, Trump’s one-time campaign manager, continues to clean up at the bank thanks to his stint as a “strategic advisor” to Republican Geoff Diehl’s stumbling campaign.
With Diehl down roughly 30 points in the polls, Lewandowski’s firm collected five different payments of $9,375 each in October totaling $46,875, state campaign finance records show. That comes atop tens of thousands in payments the Diehl campaign has made since the start of the year to the Trump operative.
And, based on a cryptic note the campaign finance records, Diehl’s campaign appears to still owe Lewandowski’s firm an additional $28,000. Who knew leading the MassGOP to an historic wipeout at the polls could be so profitable?
Still, while we don’t want to make excuses for Lewandowski, the man has clearly has a lot on his mind these days, having reportedly agreed to a plea deal on a misdemeanor battery charge. Lewandowski is alleged to have touched a wealthy Trump donor on her buttocks and thigh, among other places, at an event last year at a Benihana restaurant in Las Vegas.
“Corey told [redacted] that he can ‘destroy anyone,’ that he can get anyone into office, and that he can get anyone out of office,” according to a statement given to police.
Clearly that hasn’t been the case at all here in Massachusetts for the Lowell native.
A failure of basic oversight: “Hundreds” of subsidized apartments likely sit vacant in the suburbs, but no one is keeping track
That’s the verdict from Katherine Levine Einstein, an associate professor of political science at Boston University and one of the authors of a big new Boston Foundation report on the region’s housing woes.
The estimate comes from the vacancies in subsidized rentals the BU professor found when examining 11 suburban housing projects as part of her research for the Greater Boston Housing Report Card 2022.
But Levine Einstein and Maxwell Palmer, a fellow BU associate professor, were foiled in their efforts to build a more detailed picture of the subsidized housing market in the suburbs, one that could help explain why so many units appear to be empty or underused.
While one developer was cooperative, others were not inclined to open their books, even if they had built new apartment buildings with help from various state affordable housing initiatives.
There is no single agency or office in state government that tracks the development of all subsidized apartments and condos in the state, and there appears to be no centralized tracking of what apartments are available and how long they have been vacant for, she said.
“What was more shocking is that the state doesn’t keep track of some of the information we thought was really valuable,” Levine Einstein said.
The revelation of significant numbers of subsidized apartments sitting vacant in the suburbs comes as waiting lists for affordable units in Boston and other urban areas number in the thousands and even tens of thousands.
Mad? Concerned? Read on.
Not so affordable apartments
However, all those empty subsidized apartments in the suburbs can’t just be blamed on bad marketing.
Many are simply too expensive for renters struggling to get by on modest paychecks.
Under the affordability guidelines under which many subsidized units are built in the ‘burbs, one-bedroom units can easily rent in the $2,000 a month range. Add a bedroom or two, and it goes up from there, experts say.
One local housing director noted town leaders, when reviewing project proposals, don’t ask enough questions about what the rents on the affordable apartments actually will be.
And for developers, the ability to dig deeper and offer even lower rents is limited by the time-consuming slog needed to get through the local approval process and the sky-high price of buildable sites.
Meanwhile, many towns are insisting that new rental and condo developments be filled with smaller units restricted to people 55 and older, which excludes families with children.
“To some extent, the towns in some places may be getting exactly what they want,” said Levine Einstein, the BU professor. “They don’t want to build housing for people who recently experienced homelessness.”
Campaign hijinks: Rowdy union protest at Amore event points to close race for state auditor
We guess when local trade unions said they were going all in for Diana DiZoglio they really meant it!
Local trade union members blasted a siren, waved signs and exchanged choice words with supporters of Anthony Amore outside a Swampscott restaurant where the Republican candidate for state auditor was holding an event the other night.
The Amore campaign managed to hustle Gov. Charlie Baker and Lt. Gov. Kayrn Polito into the event, while someone wound up calling the police after pleas to the overeager union member with the wailing siren went unheeded.
Some of it was caught on video and posted to Twitter, but while we’ve lost that link, there there is this photo of the protestors.
Polls have had Amore, security chief at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, lagging DiZoglio, a Democratic state senator, by as much as 15 points.
But the protests - and the opposition research dumps in the local media of dirt on both candidates - point to a much tighter race than the polls may be letting on.
A recent UMass Lowell poll erred in oversampling Democrats. When that is corrected for, DiZoglio’s lead shrinks to just a little over a percentage point, to 36.3-35.2 percent, with a hefty 28.5 percent undecided, an Amore spokesperson noted in an email.
Well, we’ll find out the truth soon enough.
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.