Sins of journalistic omission | Bad signs for big lab deal | Not all home buyers are hurting equally | Musical chairs on 128 | Subsidizing wealthy suburbs | Celebrating a birthday | Quick Hits | About Contrarian Boston |
News tips? Story ideas? Email us at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com
We’re one! Contrarian Boston celebrates first anniversary
We launched CB just over a year ago to fill a growing void in Greater Boston for meaningful local news and commentary. Our goal, simply put, is to cut through the happy talk and the ideological hogwash that too often enjoys a free ride in the media and get to the bottom of what’s really going on.
Over the first year, we’ve had the privilege of running pieces by great journalists like Maggie Mulvihill, Karen Cord Taylor and Mark Pickering, as well as long-time teachers and academics like Paul DeBole, a professor at Lasell University, and Harry Lynch, a retired independent school administrator and instructor.
And of course, last but not least, Statman, aka 18-year-old David Van Voorhis.
We’ve also benefited from some timely and sage advice from Jay Fitzgerald, who I worked with at both the Boston Business Journal and at the Boston Herald, and a number of other current and former colleagues from the small world of New England newspapers.
Photo by freestocks on Unsplash
If our growing backlog of tips and great story ideas from readers is any indication, we are off to a great start.
Keep it coming and thank you for your support!
Early Christmas: Mass. lawmakers get tens of millions for pet projects
It was an impressive performance in foot dragging, even for a state Legislature with a reputation for moving at a glacial pace.
Beacon Hill hemmed, hawed and who knows what else for nearly 100 days after the end of the legislative session in July before finally passing a critical $3.7 billion economic development bill.
Along the way, state lawmakers jettisoned $700 million in tax cuts for seniors, renters and low income families proposed by Gov. Charlie Baker, who ended up signing the bill anyway a couple of weeks ago.
But while giving the outgoing governor a lump of coal, lawmakers went on a holiday spending spree for themselves, stuffing the economic development bill with $84 million in local earmarks for their districts, the polite word for political pork.
Most galling are the taxpayer-financed goodies sprinkled across wealthy suburbs with median home prices well over $1 million.
Political pork in the old days. Some things never change. (By Internet Archive Book Images)
After all, does Lexington really need $200,000 in state money to help pay for farmers markets, local festivals, and parades, in addition to musical and theatrical performances?
Can’t Wellesley foot the bill for the $355,000 or more it will take to make it easier for residents to cycle or walk to the Elm Bank nature reservation?
And does Belmont really need $100,000 in state money to help pay for a ice skating rink?
Just saying.
Life sciences slowdown: Another big lab conversion project fades
That would be plans by retail giant Hudson Bay Co. to convert a trio of ailing Boston area Lord & Taylor department stores into lab space.
HBC announced plans with great fanfare in July, saying it hoped to line up permits for the conversion of Lord & Taylor stores in malls in Natick, Burlington and Braintree in a matter of months.
Now HBC seems to have cooled on the idea and may have even dropped it altogether, industry sources say.
Lord & Taylor/Natick Mall/Dec. 2020 Photo by JJBers
With December just a couple days away, there are no signs of any actual plans for the proposed Lord & Taylor conversions, let alone the extensive local permitting needed before any construction can start.
Given the retrenchment taking place in the life sciences market as stock prices in the sector take a hit and financing spigots go dry, HBC’s apparent case of cold feet is not all that surprising.
As we reported here in August, as much as 65 percent of the tens of millions of square feet of labs and life sciences space proposed for Greater Boston may never be built, according to commercial real estate firm Newmark.
Umm, someone obvious is missing from The Emancipator’s story on indigenous identity theft
That would be Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who faced fierce blowback after it was revealed her claims of Cherokee and Delaware ancestry were based on nothing more than some rather thin family lore.
So it was rather surprising that the online newspaper, co-founded by Ibram X. Kendi of Boston University and Bina Venkataraman, former editorial page editor for The Boston Globe, ran an opinion piece in the run up to Thanksgiving on indigenous identity theft that made no mention of Warren at all.
The Emancipator piece, an op-ed by a Columbia University professor, focuses on a pair of academics, one Canadian, the other at the Berkeley, who based whole careers around false claims of Native American heritage.
Now granted, Warren’s claims of indigenous ancestry were never anything so blatant, while her rise to prominence as a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and later Harvard, was arguably the product of brilliant research and writing on the issue of bankruptcy.
Rather, Warren’s claims were more in the nature of playing footsie with an indigenous identity at a time when elite law schools were under pressure to embrace diversity.
For its part, the Globe, one of the institutional backers of The Emancipator along with Boston University, has a spotty record when it comes to reporting on the controversy surrounding Warren’s past claims of indigenous ancestry, for which she has since apologized.
The Globe at one point attempted to debunk claims that Warren had been deceptive about her ancestry, only to be forced to run a correction later, according to this pretty thorough review by the Washington Post of the controversy surrounding Warren on this hot-button issue.
For The Emancipator to run an opinion piece on the abuse of indigenous identity by ambitious academics and not even mention Warren seems really odd.
Correctly or not, it gives the impression that The Emancipator, whose name harkens back to a tradition of fearless crusading journalism, is carrying water for one of the top political power players on the progressive left.
Heavy price to pay: Working and middle class home buyers washed out of market as rates rise
Buyers searching for a home below the $500,000 mark are paying the heaviest toll right now from the Fed’s rate hikes, stats show.
Pending sales were down for just about all price levels in Massachusetts in October, according to numbers provided by David Bates, a broker associate at William Raveis Real Estate and a stats guy.
The most precipitous drops were to be found in the $350,000 -$500,000 range, with pending sales off statewide by roughly a third in October, compared to the same month a year ago.
By contrast, sales between $500,000 and $900,000 held up considerably better, dropping by roughly 20 percent. In the $800,000 to $900,000 range, the decline was a relatively more modest 12 percent.
Photo by Tierra Mallorca on Unsplash
In another telling sign, loan volume at the Massachusetts Housing Partnership, which connects low- and moderate-income buyers with affordable mortgages, plunged 25 percent in June and July as interest rates took off, Clark Ziegler, the executive director of the quasi-public state agency, told Contrarian Boston.
MHP and MassHousing are now pushing to get buyers of more modest means back into the market with a new program that offers up to $50,000 in down payment assistance.
We will have a better idea how these efforts are faring when the agencies release their fall numbers in a few weeks.
In the office market, a game of musical chairs
That’s the word from R.W. Holmes, a top commercial real estate firm based in Wayland.
It’s not just in downtown Boston that companies are ditching office space for smaller quarters in the suburbs to be closer to their now semi-remote employees.
Some firms in the suburbs, in particular along the Route 128 lab and high tech corridor, are looking to spread their wings and expand or even relocate to cheaper, more convenient space deeper in the suburbs, the firm finds in its third quarter report.
Meanwhile, deep-pocketed institutional investors have taken a step back when it comes to acquiring office and commercial properties along 128.
Investors are seeking significant price reductions and looking ahead to a potential 20 percent drop in commercial property prices next year, according to the firm’s report.
“The gap between the seller’s expectations and what buyers are willing to pay is widening, especially in the Central 128 market, to the point where sales cannot be completed,” said Elizabeth Holmes, director of corporate services at R.W. Holmes.
That said, this has also opened the door to local commercial real estate firms, and companies looking to buy buildings they are renting space in, to do deals they would previously lost out on, according to R.W. Holmes.
Quick hits:
Uh oh, better get Marty Walsh back on the case: “Biden calls on Congress to head off potential rail strike” Associated Press/Boston Globe
Apparently, there is price to be paid for acting like a buffoon: “Elon Musk says Apple threatened to remove Twitter from its App Store” Washington Post via Globe
Brave souls: “Chinese Protests Put Xi Jinping in a Bind” Wall Street Journal
Another big criminal justice scandal taking shape: “Breathalyzer scandal could reopen 27,000 drunk driving cases” CommonWealth Magazine
What is Contrarian Boston?
I have fielded emails over the past year 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.
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.
Thanks Gerri, good point.
Thanks Susan