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.
☀️The sun is back, with highs in the 70s. Sunset is at 6:46 p.m.
Today we have a story of a reformation in progress. But first: parents of adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities went to the State House this week to express their concerns about how Medicaid cuts passed by Congress earlier this year will affect the care their loved ones need.
“All I wanted was just a life for my daughter, who could look forward to a daily routine, a social life, a real community that she can belong to,” said Oanh Bui, whose 22-year-old daughter has autism. It’s already been hard to find services for her because of careworker shortages, Bui told GBH’s Meghan Smith.
These services do not typically include institutions but instead involve either at-home caregivers or community-based caregiving centers.
Four Things to Know
1. Hundreds of people came to the Boston Common last night for a vigil remembering Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist shot and killed in Utah last week.
One attendee, Tyler Guptill, said he came from New Hampshire to grieve together. “I didn’t eat for a couple of days, and it was just this heavy sadness,” he said. “It was important to come as kind of a healing process and to work through it with others here.” There were some counter protestors marching along barricades police had set up with a sign reading “Fascists get off our lawn.” Police reported no injuries.
2. Leslie Perlera Gonzalez, an attorney with Greater Boston Legal Services, got a call from her husband Wednesday saying “Babe, please come, I’m scared.” She rushed to where he was in Malden to find her husband bleeding: federal immigration agents had side-swiped his car, broken his window, and detained him. Edgar Hernan Elias Escobar has no criminal record in the U.S. or El Salvador, where he is from.
“They kept telling me, ’Your husband is unlawfully here,’” Perlera Gonzalez said. “I told them that I am a U.S. citizen, that I’m an attorney, that the process for him to stay was underway. They kept saying, ‘He’s not lawfully here.’”
3. The Trump administration has cancelled a $20 million grant meant to help Boston redesign three major thoroughfares in Roxbury: Melnea Cass Boulevard, Malcolm X Boulevard and Warren Street. The grant, awarded in 2022, was supposed to go toward putting in bus-only lanes, bus stop shelters, new sidewalks and separated bike lanes. It would have also funded green spaces and stormwater infrastructure.
It’s not yet clear what will happen with the project. The state is still moving forward with another project to redo parts of the Mass. Pike in Allston, despite the administration taking away $335 million in previously allocated funds.
4. The two-year legal fight over who gets to lead the state’s cannabis regulator might be coming to an end. Massachusetts Treasurer Deborah Goldberg said she will no longer appeal the reinstatement of Shannon O’Brien, the Cannabis Control Commission’s former chair. Goldberg suspended O’Brien 2023, accusing her of inappropriate conduct, and later fired her. But this year, a judge ruled that O’Brien should be reinstated.
In a statement to the State House News Service, Goldberg said she believes “that continuing with an appeal will further harm the Cannabis Control Commission and impede their ability to focus on their critical priorities.”
Jamaica Plain church-turned-affordable-housing project gets funding boost from state
The effort to turn Blessed Sacrament Church in Jamaica Plain from an empty building into housing units and a performance space just got a big financial boost: a $37.6 million tax-exempt bond. GBH’s Sarah Betancourt has been following the story for years. Let us catch you up.
The church was first built in 1917. The Archdiocese of Boston closed it in 2004, during a large wave of Catholic church closures. The church sold it for $6 million to the Jamaica Plain Neighborhood Development Corporation, which redeveloped the area around the church building into housing but never renovated the church itself.
One thing of note: the church, on Jamaica Plain’s Centre Street, is in the middle of Boston’s Latin Quarter, the only designated Latino cultural district in the city. The church changed hands again, selling to the Hyde Square Task Force for $800,000 in 2014. When it went back on the market about five years later, neighbors worried that whatever replaced it wouldn’t meet their needs and would instead drive the area further into unaffordability. Pieces of the facade crumbled off in 2020 and a large fence went up around the building to protect passers-by.
“Having a building [that is] 100% luxury condos would totally change the dynamic of our neighborhood,” Damaris Pimentel, a neighbor and former patron of the church, told Betancourt in 2021. Pimentel joined other neighbors to create the group Friends of the Blessed Sacrament and advocate for more community involvement. “Geographically, the building had the capacity for a lot of things, and my personal requirement is that it stay linked to our community and our neighborhood.”
That brings us to the presentday: Hyde Square Task Force and the developer Pennrose are partnering to create 55 units, from studios to two-bedroom apartments, reserved for residents earning between 30% and 80% of Boston’s Area Median Income. (The Area Median Income figures are recalculated frequently, but currently a person would qualify for an apartment reserved for someone at 30% AMI if they earn less than $34,740 per year, and for one at 80% AMI with an income below $92,640. For a family of four, those figures range from $49,620 to $132,320 per year.)
Six of the units will be reserved for people who were formerly unhoused. There will also be a performance space that can fit up to 200 people.
Karmen Cheung, regional vice president at Pennrose, said the tax-exempt bond will help fund construction to deal with major structural issues: “A lot of the first four to six months will be a selective demo of pieces of it and recreating the structure,” she said.
Expect the renovation to be done by late 2027 or early 2028, Cheung said.
Pimentel said her group is “really happy.”
“The community understands that the project is already on the way — it was a question mark if it was going to be possible for them to get there based on how expensive the project was. I think the community is being very patient about it,” she said.
Read Sarah Betancourt’s full story here.
Previous coverage:
2021: The Church At The Center Of Boston’s Only Latin Cultural District Is Up For Grabs
2021: Massive Jamaica Plain Church To Become Affordable Housing And Performance Space
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