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You can’t fight City Hall: Boston’s real estate industry is finding out just what it means to be in the mayoral crosshairs

Amid a heated reelection battle, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and her administration are giving off decidedly vengeful vibes.

The latest example? Well, that would be City Hall’s newfound practice of slapping financial penalties on commercial and office building owners.

Their offense? The building owners had all filed for tax abatements, claiming their assessments are too high at a time when remote work has devastated the office market and sent tower values plunging.

Instead of giving them a break, city officials hiked the assessed value of the buildings. That triggered additional taxes ranging from a few hundred dollars to hundreds of thousands for the owners of the buildings in question, according to Daniel Swift, a top Boston tax consultant, whose sleuthing on behalf of his clients uncovered the penalties.

The penalties were hidden, Swift contends, noting he only spotted them when examining paper tax documents for various buildings that had been filed at City Hall.

In an interview with Contrarian Boston, Swift called the penalties “shocking.”

Daniel Swift

“I have certainly never seen it anywhere in Massachusetts, and there is nothing I have seen in state law,” he added.

Certainly, there is no love lost right now between the Wu administration and the Greater Boston real estate industry, which mounted a successful campaign last year to derail the mayor’s push to hike tax rates on struggling office buildings.

It resulted in a humiliating political defeat for the mayor.

Meanwhile, Wu has been busy taking shots at the Boston Policy Institute, which has made waves with its warnings that the collapse of downtown office tower values will devastate city coffers over the coming years.

The potential revenue gap for city coffers could be significantly larger than previously estimated, ranging from a staggering $1.4 billion in the best-case scenario to more than $2 billion in the worst, BPI’s latest report finds.

Wu responded by casting aspersions on BPI, calling the organization, which was founded in 2023 by a pair of local Democratic political consultants and does not disclose its donors, “shadowy,” per The Boston Globe.

Last year, when the nonprofit municipal think tank issued its first report warning of the fiscal fallout for Boston from the collapse of the office market, Wu derided it as “false information,” according to the Boston Herald, which was the first to report the hidden penalties story.

So far, though, BPI’s research, which was conducted by Tufts University’s Center for State Policy Analysis, has proven to be right on the money.

Talk about shooting the messenger and then stomping on the body for good measure.

False advertising? NPR’s flagship media show does little actual reporting on the press and how it works, as it hypes the latest progressive fixations

The NPR show, “On the Media,” bills itself as “your guide to examining how the media sausage is made.”

Too often, though, it is anything but that, choosing instead to amplify, often to a great extent, uncritically, the latest progressive hobby horses.

This week, listeners were treated to yet another story about how Hungary and its right-wing leader, Viktor Orbán, offer a warning of what could supposedly be in store for the U.S. under Trump.