Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter says flourishing cities have sex appeal. I hadn’t thought about cities that way, but she’s got a point. The good ones have a certain magnetism about them, attracting people, resources, opportunities, and ideas. “Cities are one big dating game,” she says. Kanter’s perspective is showcased in an interesting […]
Growth and Development
Posted inEconomy, Education, The Back Story
Supply and demands
Four charter schools are opening in Boston next fall and they need classroom space. The Boston Public Schools are downsizing and will have 10 empty buildings at the end of this school year. It seems like a simple case of matching supply and demand, where both sides could benefit from striking a deal. But nothing […]
Posted inEconomy, Opinion
Thinking outside the box to build a square
Cities and towns across the Commonwealth are being hit harder than ever as revenue and state aid decrease. Many municipalities have put on hold development projects that could revitalize public spaces critical to long-term growth and sustainable development. Consequently, municipalities need to start thinking more creatively and boldly about how to work with developers in […]
Posted inEconomy, Politics
Fall River gambler
in upending a planned 300-acre biotech park, Fall River Mayor William Flanagan picked a fight with the governor, angered the state university, junked a decade’s worth of planning, and endangered a $23 million development project. He did it all for a roll of the dice with the Mashpee Wampanoag, who promised to bring a casino […]
Posted inEconomy
Untethered competition
wireless phones, it seems, are ubiquitous. Talking, texting, surfing. On the street, on the T, and in the car. You can’t swing a dead Samsung without hitting someone with a cell phone of some kind. In Massachusetts, as you would expect, cell phone saturation is near 90 percent, with more than 5.8 million wireless phones […]
Posted inEconomy
Urban (love) affairs
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier By Edward Glaeser New York, The Penguin Press, 352 pages REVIEWED BY JOHN SCHNEIDER cities have always been my hometown. I’ve lived in five of them during my lifetime. The only house I have ever owned is in a city. […]
Posted inEconomy
Convention center questions
A panel weighing the expansion of the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center said on Tuesday that state lawmakers would have to identify between $78 million and $117 million annually in new revenues to support a planned $1 billion expansion of the South Boston facility. That sum could prove difficult to generate in a narrow, targeted […]
Posted inEconomy
Money talks—and delivers
until his arrest last year, few Bostonians had heard of Martin Raffol. Many more people, however, had probably heard of his boss, Arthur Winn—one of the state’s most prolific affordable housing developers, the businessman behind the failed Columbus Center development, and a highly public business figure who had become entangled with Dianne Wilkerson, the disgraced […]
Posted inEconomy, Politics
Congressional math
massachusetts legislators got the bad news in late December. And by late February or early March, they should have detailed Census figures confirming what they’ve long expected: The state’s congressional delegation is about to shrink by one, forcing Beacon Hill to choose which of the 10 US House seats to eliminate. “It’s going to be […]