The Herald reports the death of Harold Brown, who only retired last year as CEO of the Hamilton Co.
Home 'n' hearth
From a safe place (for now), Jodi Solomon reports on a Jamaica Plain street held hostage: Read more.
Councilors Lydia Edwards (East Boston, Charlestown, North End) and Kim Janey (Roxbury) say the city's current affordable-housing efforts are not enough to stop the Manhattanization of Boston. Read more.
A rising tide raises all property taxes, well, half of them, anyway: Boston Magazine reports a townhouse on Holyoke Street in the South End just went for $6.6 million - a record for the neighborhood and way, way more than it sold for in 2012. BoMag quotes one of the real-estate agents involved as being quite satisfied with himself, not just for making a boatload of money but for helping to preserve the South End's rep as one of the "most culturally diverse neighborhoods" in the city.
Cambridge city councilors say renters and condo owners who buy electric cars are increasingly running extension cords out their windows and across sidewalks to power up their vehicles.
Cambridge can't have that - it's a menace to pedestrians, for one thing, the councilors say. But rather than try to discourage people without driveways in which to install car chargers, in a city where public chargers are still fairly rare, councilors want city staffers to start looking at ways that renters and condo owners could power up their cars safely - like maybe with conduits under sidewalks in which to run power cords to the curb, the Cambridge Civic Journal alerts us. Read more.
Jamaica Plain News reports the one-floor unit was listed at $1.15 million - and that the city assessed the entire building for about $972,000 this year.
Mayor Walsh announced this morning Boston is upping its 2030 housing goals by 30% - from 53,000 new housing units by then to 69,000, based on new projections that show the city's population growing to nearly 760,000 by then.
A concerned citizen asks the city to do something about a roofy raccoon on Temple Street in Mattapan.
Visual by local org Keep it 100 showing mistmatch between housing types built & incomes of Bostonians. Will add our Housing 2030 plan for future construction would more than cover need for upper-middle incomes but fall far short of need for the 50% of Bostonians making <60%AMI pic.twitter.com/dNnBCJTlXH
— Grace Holley (@hollley) September 19, 2018
The Board of Appeals yesterday rejected a request from the owner of a Milton Avenue to legalize the way a previous owner enclosed its porches without a permit some 20 years ago, after neighbors objected to the way he was trying to sell the property to a non-profit group that helps house homeless families. Read more.
The Boston City Archives have posted a couple of photos from Sept. 13, 1950, when somebody decided they had to move a house in East Boston, from 408 Frankfort St. to 2 Milton St. (which no longer appears to exist). Read more.
Mayor Walsh today announced a new proposal for dealing with short-term rentals that would by default bar investors from buying up units or even entire buildings and offering rentals on Airbnb and similar sites. Read more.
Ed. note: Corrected to reflect fact that a family of three would need two bedrooms, not three, and that the BPDA requires rental units be available to people making up to 70% of the area median income, which drops the monthly rent from nearly $1,900 to $1,400.
In Boston, developers putting up buildings with at least 10 units are required to set aside 13% of the units in new buildings as "affordable" (or contribute even more to a fund that acquires such units elsewhere). Typically, this means they have to be affordable to people making up to 80% of the "area median income."
The BPDA last week released its 2018 calculations for just what that means: Read more.
You think the developer of this complex is working on anything in Plain Jamaica or Bay Back?
Residents of buildings in the Back Bay and Fort Point say they realize they live in the city and that means a certain level of sound - that's why they've bought white-noise machines. But the devices have proved no match for a nine-piece band in one case, and throbbing bass in another, the residents told city licensing head Christine Pulgini today. Read more.
City Councilor Matt O'Malley (Jamaica Plain, West Roxbury) has had enough of storefronts and apartments that go empty - sometimes for years - in even the swankiest of neighborhoods and wants to begin looking at ways to prod landlords to rent the spaces out that could include "vacancy fees." Read more.
For the third time, a federal judge has rejected an effort by the owner of the fire-ravaged building at 97 Mt. Ida Rd. to move his case from state Housing Court to federal court - this time with a warning for the man to knock it off. Read more.