An obscure nonprofit corporation today made good on Boston Mayor Thomas Menino's promise to loan $200,000 to the Bay State Banner, a weekly newspaper targeted to the African-American community. The board of the Boston Local Development Corp., which generally makes loans to struggling small businesses, unanimously approved a two-year loan for the Banner at a 9 percent […]
Growth and Development
Posted inEconomy, The Download
Florida may bring direct democracy to planning/zoning process
Sun Belt states have long been considered friendly to developers — especially compared with states like Massachusetts, where environmentalists and neighborhood groups often have the power to kill projects outright. But there's a move afoot in Florida to bring some New England-style rules to the planning process. The West Volusia Beacon reports on a ballot […]
Posted inEconomy, Politics, The Download
Gains and credit in the state’s tax foundation
The $27.4 billion budget headed for the governor’s desk contains outside sections that would attempt to smooth out the state’s year-to-year budget gyrations and reveal whether the hundreds of millions of dollars in tax credits the state issues each year are worth their cost. Both provisions were a direct outgrowth of research done by MassINC […]
Posted inEconomy, State House News Service, The Download
Senate wants to hide names of tax credit recipients
Can you have tax credit transparency without identifying who's receiving the tax credits? That's the question facing House and Senate budget negotiators as they try to resolve differences between two tax credit transparency initiatives approved by the two branches.The House budget proposal, borrowing language first proposed by Gov. Deval Patrick, would require state agencies that issue tax credits to […]
Posted inEconomy, The Download
Galvin sitting on development tax credits
Secretary of State William Galvin is sitting on millions of dollars in tax credits designed to spur the economic development of historic buildings across the state. Despite the severe economic downturn and developers desperate for financial help, Galvin decided last year to hold on to 10 percent of his $50 million annual allotment of historical rehabilitation tax credits. […]
Posted inEconomy, The Download
FBI sniffing around Sox stadium deal in Florida?
The Boston Red Sox have sealed a sweet deal with Lee County officials in Florida for a publicly funded spring training complex, including a mini-Fenway, that raised a few eyebrows in the southwest coastal region for its generosity. But the FBI may be signaling a hold sign after investigators requested scores of emails from county […]
Posted inEconomy
Banks balk at short sales of underwater homes
with banks bleeding red ink under the weight of massive losses on home loans, you would think lenders would be scrambling for every dollar they can squeeze out of the devalued houses they hold mortgages on. But when it comes to minimizing mortgage losses, housing advocates and real estate agents say banks often can’t get […]
Posted inEconomy, Politics, The Download
On Filene’s hole in the ground, mayor doth protest too much
There's a huge hole in the ground in Downtown Crossing where Filene's once stood and a $700 million redevelopment project isn't getting built, and Mayor Tom Menino isn't happy about it. That is easy to believe. What's harder to imagine is that Hizzoner was as out of the loop on moving the project forward as […]
Posted inEconomy, The Download
Dr. Seuss and the Biggering Carbon Footprint
Harvard's Ed Glaeser kicks two Massachusetts icons today in the New York Times. First he says that Springfield native Dr. Seuss had things completely backward in "The Lorax," which so many of us happily read in school on Earth Day: …the unfortunate aspect of the story is that urbanization comes off terribly. The forests are good; […]