I. Boston Globe columnist Farah Stockman and bilingual journalist and Boston Globe contributor Marcela Garcia joined Callie Crossley on Under the Radar to talk about some of the stories you may have missed this week.
-Should we treat children arriving at the border as refugees, or should we treat them as illegal immigrants? Nearly 70 percent of Americans say these children should be treated as refugees. How does Massachusetts compare? And what is driving these children to come to the U.S.? Are we focusing on the right end of the issue?
-When Farah Stockman was a college student in the '90s, she worked and lived at a summer camp in the Mission Hill public housing development. Twenty years later, she returned to the housing project to find out what happened to the children she worked with. She wrote about it here, and spoke with Under the Radar about the ways the cycle of poverty is at once broken and reproduced.
-Parking is hard to find in Boston, this we know. Should the city raise and lower the price of parking according to demand on streets?
II: Ted Landsmark* (28:15)
When Boston Mayor Marty Walsh took office earlier this year, he promised restructuring of Boston’s most controversial agency: the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA). The agency oversees planning and real estate development for the whole city, and has come under fire for poor staff management, financial oversight, and record keeping. The agency has also long been criticized for favoring certain developers.
Mayor Walsh promised an overhaul of the agency and last week he named Ted Landsmark to the boards of the BRA and the Economic Development and Industrial Corporation (EDIC). Landsmark is the past president and CEO of the Boston Architectural College and has a long history of public service in Boston. He joined Callie Crossley to talk about the changes he’d like to see within the agency.
*Note: We taped this conversation with Ted Landsmark on the day he was named to the board of the BRA and EDIC. We learned later in the week, that the mayor had not been informed that Landsmark was dismissed from Boston Architectural College and his appointment was put on hold.
