Teeing up a new T boss | Inept campaign, big bills to pay | Mass. exodus | Another big loss for local journalism | Central Mass. racetrack/sports betting parlor back on | Quick Hits | About Contrarian Boston |
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Goodbye Massachusetts middle class? Sky-high home prices, rents push some to leave for greener pastures
That’s the word from Clark Ziegler, who has seen the Commonwealth’s real estate market go haywire over the past two decades from his perch atop a key quasi-public housing agency.
Home prices in the state have jumped ten-fold since 1980, an increase that has outpaced any other state in the union, including California, notes Ziegler, executive director of the Massachusetts Housing Partnership, citing a federal home price index. Boston area rents are near the top nationally as well.
Amid a prohibitively expensive real estate market, more than 52,000 residents bailed on the Bay State last year, the sharpest outflow in at least a decade, said Ziegler, the moderator for a panel discussion Wednesday on the state of the housing market put on by NAIOP Massachusetts, which represents the state’s commercial real estate industry.
Head of the Massachusetts Housing Partnership, Clark Ziegler has been on the front lines of the state’s housing crisis for more than two decades.
Home prices and rents have reached a point where a growing segment of the state’s middle class can’t afford market rate housing while low-income families are priced out altogether. Overall, the Massachusetts middle class is now smaller, percentagewise, than in other parts of the country, Ziegler said.
“It is extraordinary what has happened around home prices in Massachusetts,” Ziegler said. “This is really just not a sustainable pattern.”
Strong resistance by many suburbs and towns to new housing, in turn, has helped fuel runaway growth in both home prices and rents, according to Ziegler.
Also weighing in were three panelists at the NAIOP event: Kenan Bigby, managing director of Trinity Financial, Gina Martinez, senior development director, Beacon Communities, and Tim Reardon, data services director the Massachusetts Area Planning Council.
Kenan Bigby is managing director of Trinity Financial, a top developer of affordable housing.
While many of the state’s older, industrial Gateway Cities are interested in new housing and growth, in other communities it can be different story, said Bigby of affordable housing developer Trinity Financial.
“It is resist and delay and do anything possible to prevent new housing coming in,” Bigby said. “No one wants to be in a fight for one or two years to do these projects. We want to (build) in places that agree with us.”
Earth to Diehl: Stop fundraising - the governor’s race is over
Just days after his shellacking by Gov.-elect Maura Healey, Geoff Diehl is hitting up potential supporters for cash.
The now-former Republican candidate for governor, who went all in with Donald Trump and lost big time, sent out an email Thursday morning seeking contributions to pay for “all of our last-minute efforts to get out the vote.”
However, along with last-minute ads, the Diehl campaign faces another upcoming debt, that, needless to say, went unmentioned in its fundraising appeal.
In particular, Diehl’s campaign likely still owes $28,000 to the consulting firm of one-time Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, who served as a senior advisor to the MassGOP candidate, according to a cryptic note in records filed last month with the state campaign finance office.
That’s apparently just the cherry on top for Lewandowski, whose firm has already collected tens of thousands of dollars from Diehl’s campaign for the Trump henchman’s services as a “strategic advisor.”
There was the $46,875 that Diehl’s campaign shelled out to Lewandowski’s firm in October, money that went out the door even as the struggling MassGOP gubernatorial candidate was pleading for cash with which to pay for ads.
And there were tens of thousands in additional payments earlier in the year as well to Lewandowski Strategic Advisors, money Diehl’s campaign could ill afford to part with amid anemic fundraising efforts.
What a waste.
Name game: Speculation mounts on who will get tapped to overhaul the disaster formerly known as the MBTA
So who has the inside track for the T job? Who knows, but there is definitely a lot of buzz right now around Monica Tibbits-Nutt, head of the 128 Business Council.
Tibbits-Nutt knows her way around when it comes to the treacherous politics surrounding state’s failing transit system, having served as vice chair of the control board that won plaudits for its oversight of the MBTA from 2015 to 2021.
And she knows transportation, overseeing an extensive shuttle bus system connecting the suburbs with the Alewife Red Line station as executive director of the 128 Business Council.
Other contenders whose names are in circulation include Jim Rooney, head of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce and a top T official some years back; Andy Byford, whose credentials include having run both the New York and London transit systems; Dorval Carter, President of the Chicago Transit Authority; and Dion Stubbs, general manager of Valley Metro Light Rail in Phoenix and a top former T official.
Chris Dempsey’s name is another one that comes up frequently. The former state transportation official and leader of the No Boston Olympics campaign is coming off a hard-fought campaign for state auditor, having lost in the Democratic primary to state Sen. Diana DiZoglio.
That said, Dempsey might be a better candidate for secretary of transportation, with the T needing someone who can jump right into the mechanics of running the beleaguered transit system, one observer noted.
P.S. Governor-elect Maura Healey said last week that she plans to pick a new leader for the T before she takes office on Jan. 5.
Brain drain: At one of Gannett’s top local papers, veteran journalists pull ripcords and bail out
At Worcester’s Telegram & Gazette, veteran staffers Kim Ring, Christine Peterson and Nancy Campbell have left the building.
As Gannett continues to slash expenses at its local papers in Massachusetts and across the country, the trio have taken buyouts.
This is a huge blow for the T&G. Whether CEO Mike Reed - Gannett’s “$7.7 million man,” as Media Nation’s Dan Kennedy recently dubbed him - is smart enough to realize this, though, is another matter altogether.
The trio is taking with them decades of experience in local journalism.
Petersen has been a staff photographer at T&G since 2000, Campbell has been features editor, and Ring had been a reporter at the paper for 17 years, covering crime and local government, among other beats.
Incredibly, it also leaves the T&G newsroom without any women, Kennedy at Media Nation reports.
Casino developer doubles down on bid to build Worcester area racetrack
Sounds like there has been some intense lobbying going on at Hardwick Town Hall.
After voting last month to shoot down plans by horse racing enthusiast and casino developer Richard Fields to build a thoroughbred racetrack and sports betting parlor, Hardwick’s select board reversed course last week, voting 2-1 to revive the plan, according to BloodHorse, an industry publication.
The decision gives a new lease to the proposal by Fields, who built a casino for the Seminole Tribe in the early 2000s and was behind an unsuccessful plan to build a gambling resort at Suffolk Downs.
The Massachusetts Gaming Commission is expected on Monday to take up an application by Fields’ investment group to hold live racing next year at the yet-to-be-built Hardwick track, slated to take shape on a 365-acre former dairy farm.
Consider us skeptical that the sports betting component of the plan - a kiosk which would be only open on racing days - would be enough to keep afloat what is likely to be a break even venture at best.
Having covered gambling proposals for a couple of decades now, where there’s a racetrack, a lobbying campaign for slot machines is typically not far behind.
Quick Hits:
What a mess! “Ed Markey slams Elon Musk after reporter creates verified Twitter account impersonating senator, Musk jabs back” Boston Herald
Warren egged on progressive candidates in House primaries, who are now losing in the general election as the final votes are tallied: “If Dems lose the House, Sen. Warren may be to blame” CommonWealth Magazine
We can always hope: “Republican rivals start plotting a post-Trump future” Washington Post
I have fielded emails over the past couple weeks 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 Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. In Contrarian Boston you’ll find analysis of the day’s news, and original reporting as well.
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· 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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· And whatever else catches our fancy.