This is a web edition of GBH Daily, a weekday newsletter bringing you local stories you can trust so you can stay informed without feeling overwhelmed.
☀️Sunny with highs in the 70s; sunset at 8:16 p.m.
Let’s start with a bit of biotech news: the life sciences workforce in Massachusetts grew last year, but only by 0.03%, according to a report released this morning by MassBioEd. With federal funding cuts to the National Institutes of Health and U.S. Food and Drug Administration, industry leaders said the future might not be as bright as they once expected. About 143,000 people work in Massachusetts biotech, a number equal to the entire population of Cambridge, plus about 22,000 more.
“It’s led to a pretty big contraction in terms of the biotech industry in general, with a number of firms making reductions and making layoffs and that’s fed through to the job market,” said Adam Thomas, chief people officer at MOMA Therapeutics in Cambridge. “In many different disciplines, it’s the worst job market that people can remember.” Read the full report from GBH’s Liz Neisloss here.
Four Things to Know
1. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained 1,461 people in Massachusetts in May, Acting Director Todd Lyons said at a press conference Monday. He said that about half of those detained had “significant criminality,” but also spoke of others, like Marcelo Gomes Da Silva — an 18-year-old Milford High School student detained on his way to volleyball practice over the weekend who has no criminal record. Lyons said agents had targeted the high schooler’s father.
Meanwhile in East Boston yesterday, people whose family members are in ICE custody spoke about what the operation was like for them. “Everything happened so fast,” said Kenia Guerrero of Chelsea, whose husband, Daniel Flores Martinez, was detained while driving to a Mother’s Day church service. “I begged them not to be violent because my children were present, but they smashed the passenger side window anyway.”
2. GBH laid off 45 people yesterday, about 6% of its 750-person workforce, because of revenue shortfalls and uncertainties around funding. GBH is one of the largest public media producers in the country: along with local news on the radio, on TV and online, the nonprofit’s employees create documentaries, national and international news programs and shows for kids.
“Media — and public media in particular — is facing multiple challenges,” GBH President and CEO Susan Goldberg wrote in an email to staff Monday. “We’re being hit with several of them at once: funding cuts, rising costs of doing business, flat revenues and the urgent need to adapt our work to meet audiences’ habits and desires.”
3. A national nonprofit has started bringing fly fishing lessons to children in the Massachusetts foster care system. The state’s first chapter of The Mayfly Project assigns two mentors to each fly fishing student and uses money from the Wonderfund of Massachusetts, a private nonprofit, to pay for their gear.
Why fly fishing? It’s complex, and holds larger lessons about life, according to mentor Michelle DeLateur. “You have to take those [struggles] calmly, just like life. You kind of mitigate your own embarrassment,” DeLateur said. “We try new flies. We try different casts. We put it in new spots. We take things out of trees, and we try something new.”
4. Massachusetts’ first poet laureate is Regie Gibson, who teaches at Berklee College of Music, and Clark University. State officials chose Gibson from a pool of about 100 applicants. In his new role, Gibson will put together readings and other public events throughout the state.
He was sworn in on a dictionary his uncle gave him when he was 7, which Gibson read in its entirety as a child. “It took me three years to read this book from front to back, and it was there that I discovered that words are gateways, and palaces of imaginations that can lead us from where we find ourselves to where we can go,” he said. “Words... have usage and definition. How we live them gives them meaning.”
State properties being made available to developers to help with housing shortage crisis
If you’re trying to build new housing in Massachusetts, one of the first hurdles you’ll encounter is a lack of available land, as GBH’s Sam Turken reported in his series on housing earlier this year. Other parts of the U.S. have vast acres ready to be turned into whatever developers can build. The Boston area, however, is already pretty densely built — but not every built-out parcel is being used.
Yesterday Gov. Maura Healey announced that state officials have completed an inventory of state-owned land and come up with 450 acres across about three dozen sites, from Northampton to Brockton, Lowell to Martha’s Vineyard. They hope to take bids from private developers who can turn that land into about 3,500 new units of housing.
“They all are under the care and control of either a state agency, an institution or a branch of government, and I think in the past, there has been very little incentive for those entities to declare them surplus and make them available,” said Adam Baacke, commissioner of the state’s Division of Capital Asset Management and Maintenance. “One of the wonderful things that the Affordable Homes Act did was it actually created some incentive for those agencies to say, 'You know, we really don’t need this. Let’s make it available.’”
The sites include the Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Boston’s Franklin Park; the site of a former mental hospital in Mattapan; a house at the edge of Salem State University’s south campus; and a building that housed an unemployment office on Main Street in Brockton. We have a map of all the proposed locations here.
So what happens now? The properties will be available for auction or bids by September, with more to come next year, Baacke said.
“The Affordable Homes Act requires us to do some sort of a competitive public process. In some cases it will be an auction, which will literally be bidding. In other cases, it will be a request for proposals where we’ll put out a solicitation and we’ll see what sort of proposals we receive and those will be reviewed against established criteria,” Baacke continued.
Click here to read Robert Goulston’s full reporting — and see a map of property locations.
Read more:
To fix Massachusetts’ housing crisis, we need to build. Here’s why that’s hard.
From 2024: Boston gives away land that Black and brown families once owned.
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