12.13.2022
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Cannabis gold rush: The politically connected lead the stampede for lucrative pot shop licenses
The legalization in Massachusetts of the once forbidden aromatic weed has been accompanied by wonderful rhetoric about righting the wrongs of the drug war and transforming its victims into budding entrepreneurs.
But has the launch of the cannabis industry in the state degenerated into the same old, very Massachusetts game of political insiders grabbing the choicest opportunities for themselves?
The signs aren’t encouraging, with Josh Zakim, a former Boston city councilor turned housing activist, just the latest example in a worrisome trend.
Zakim will be making a pitch for his proposed Copley cannabis shop at a virtual public meeting, slated to kick off at 6 p.m. Wednesday/Dec. 14 on Zoom.
Zakim and his two business partners will likely face at least a partly skeptical audience, with the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay having raised objections to the plan.
Among other things, the pot shop would sit directly across the street from Copley Square Park, which is undergoing a $15 million revamp by the city. And, oh yeah, the cannabis shop is also several hundred feet from the Snowden International School.
“It’s a park,” Elliott Laffer, chair of the Neighborhood Association of the Back Bay, told Contrarian Boston. “It is a park the city is about to put a chunk of money into upgrading.”
“There are better locations - we have told the applicant that,” he added.
But Zakim is hardly alone. Another former city councilor, Mike Ross, has become the go-to legal guy for anyone proposing a cannabis shop in Boston, while another former council member, Tito Jackson, has his own downtown cannabis business, Verdant Reparative.
And let’s not forget former State Treasurer Shannon O’Brien. O’Brien tried her own hand at the cannabis business, and is now under pressure to disentangle herself from her prior business dealings after being appointed, you guessed it, chair of the state’s Cannabis Control Commission.
Here’s betting were are just scratching the surface.
Getting a license to run a cannabis shop or dispensary is a highly complex process in Massachusetts, one involving approvals from at least three different city and state boards.
If you have the right connections, there could be cannabis gold at the end of the tunnel.
But if you don’t, you may very well be left on the outside looking in, no matter how hard-working, determined or inspired you may be.
It’s rotten. And too often, it’s the way business is done here in Massachusetts.
Do new luxury high-rises raise rents and prices? Study casts doubt on key progressive belief
Activists have taken to blaming new luxury rental towers for boosting rents and property values and squeezing out the neighbors.
It’s repeated so often and with such fervor that it’s taken as a gospel truth.
But a new study on the New York housing market raises questions about whether that really is the case.
In a study published last week in the Journal of Economic Geography, Xiaodi Li finds that rents and prices both drop as a new apartment tower or high-rise comes online.
The impact was significant: For every 10 percent increase in new housing, rents dropped 1 percent within 500 feet, or roughly the surrounding city block. Prices also fell as well, while the number of new restaurants increased.
Photo by Ross Sokolovski on Unsplash
Overall, Li looked at a decade’s worth of data, and used actual income from rents, as opposed to just looking at posted rents. That, in turn, offers an inside look at the real numbers, incorporating factors like rent concessions, discounts, and vacancies.
Li, an economist at Moody’s, attributes the declines to the impact of increasing housing supply, not to extraneous factors.
Rents went down not just in other luxury buildings or units, but also in more middle-market rentals as well.
“I find that the supply effect is larger, causing net reductions in the rents and sales prices of nearby residential properties,” Li writes.
Li’s New York study caught the attention of some Boston area real estate types who spotted a post on Twitter about it.
“It made sense to me - it’s supply and demand,” said Andrew Copelotti, a principal at housing developer Boylston Properties. “If 10,000 apartments came on line tomorrow, what would happen to rents in Newton?”
“People with young families can’t afford to live there,” Copelotti told Contrarian Boston.
Nuclear fusion could potentially change world history - and it’s happening right here in Greater Boston
The announcement Tuesday by scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California made headlines across the world.
For the first time, a “fusion reaction in a laboratory setting … actually produced more energy than it took to start the reaction,” The New York Times reported.
While the Globe did an adequate piece on the breakthrough, it was relatively light on the revolutionary fusion research taking place out on Route 2 at the Devens industrial park by a startup founded by MIT scientists.
Yes, the full fruits of the breakthrough just announced could take decades to develop, with fusion technology having been likened to creating a mini star or sun, and then harnessing it for energy.
But at Devens, Commonwealth Fusion is developing technology that could dramatically speed up the practical application of cutting-edge fusion research and create the first fusion-powered electric plant.
And we are not talking 50 years from now, but in a decade or two.
A rendering of SPARC, the compact fusion reactor Commonwealth Fusion is racing to develop at Devens (By Steve Jurvetson from Los Altos)
The company, which has attracted major investments from the likes of Bill Gates and other billionaire backers, appears to be on track to achieve its ambitious goals, having unveiled a major breakthrough of its own.
Researchers at Commonwealth Fusion and MIT’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center announced last year the successful test of magnet technology that will be the key to building a nuclear fusion reactor.
If Commonwealth Fusion is successful, relatively sleepy Devens may suddenly become the 21st century equivalent of Kitty Hawk, where the Wright brothers first proved it was possible to take to the skies.
Or perhaps it will become the place where fifty years from now schoolchildren will visit a museum of nuclear fusion history, to learn about where the technology was born that ended the dirty, fossil-fuel world of their great-grandparents.
Stay tuned.
Quick hits
The headline left us confused. Did the man jump from the 12th floor with the corpse in tow? Are we talking about an epically demented person, or just a bad headline? “Man charged following aborted 12th-floor plunge from Boston apartment with corpse, DA says” Boston Herald
One part in great Washington Post series on Mexico, the U.S., and years of failed efforts to battle the drug cartels: “Cartels shifted from plant-based drugs to synthetics. Detecting them is far more difficult.” Washington Post
Great, here we go again: “Governor’s Councilors skeptical of Amirault pardons” 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;
· 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.