GBH Daily: Do you live in a Gateway City?

A colorful mural in the background with a red heart that reads "Lynn" and a man wearing a flannel jacket walking in the photo. — Famous for its many murals, the city of Lynn is one of the 26 Gateway Cities that GBH will be highlighting during its year-long reporting and community engagement initiative.

Gal Tziperman Lotan is a digital producer for GBH’s Morning Edition.

January 20, 2026

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.

🥶Windy and cold, with highs in the 20s. Sunset is at 4:43 p.m.

Do you live in a Gateway City? About one in four Massachusetts residents do. The label first came into use about 20 years ago, in 2007, when the nonprofit research organization MassINC identified 11 smaller cities that were a “gateway” to the American Dream — cities that used to be centers of industry and manufacturing, but had begun to need extra help to provide jobs, safe housing and other services in more recent years. Today there are 26 cities across Massachusetts that carry the Gateway Cities label, which comes with some opportunities for state funding. Keep reading for a look at who qualifies and why.

If you live in one of these communities, we’d love to hear from you. GBH’s Equity and Justice Unit will spend 2026 looking at Gateway Cities and telling the stories of people who live there. You can fill out this short form to share your story.

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Four Things to Know

1. Cannabis is “blowing away the cranberry as our top agricultural product,” according to Cannabis Control Commission Chair Shannon O’Brien. Consumers spent $1.65 billion on cannabis products in Massachusetts last year, and about 20,000 people work in growing, processing and selling it.

But now that cannabis is legal in more places, more people are coming into the industry — which means more supply and lower prices. “That’s good for consumers, but there are a lot of businesses that went in — they had a business plan, they assumed what their revenues would be, they would assume what their profits would be — and prices have plummeted,” O’Brien said. The commission is looking at its regulations to see which ones they can cut, she said.

2. State lawmakers did not approve Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s request to let the city change its tax system so that commercial property owners pay more, in hopes of decreasing the tax bills of residential homeowners. Instead, the state Senate passed a bill that Sen. Will Brownsberger of Belmont wrote, which will let cities and towns give some of their homeowners tax credits in years where the residential property tax levy goes up by more than 10%.

The people eligible for the tax credits would be homeowners over the age of 65, families with young children and residents of neighborhoods that the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development deems “high-need.”

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3. Any Lucia Lopez Belloza, a Babson student whom federal immigration agents detained and deported to Honduras when she tried to fly from Boston to Texas to visit her family for Thanksgiving, is now asking a federal judge to order the government to facilitate her return to the U.S. Lawyers for the government admitted that they violated a judge’s order to keep Lopez Belloza in the U.S. They also said that the court does not have jurisdiction to order her return.

Lopez Belloza has been staying with her grandparents in Honduras and finished her semester remotely. She said her lawyer shared an apology from the U.S. government with her. “I accept their apologies and I hope that based on this apology, I’m able to return back to my studies and also to be home with my parents,” she said.

4. Members of the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Presbyterian Church in Springfield got to celebrate an MLK Day service back in their own building this weekend for the first time since a man set fire to their sanctuary in 2020. No one was hurt, but rebuilding took years. Investigators said a white supremacist from Maine had started the fire.

“But I’m not going to come in every Sunday and wonder if the person who’s sitting in the back of the church is here to do harm,” Rev. Dr. Terrlyn Curry Avery said. “Faith is taking each step of the way, as Martin Luther King said, even when you can’t see the stairwell in front of you.”

Gateway to prosperity: what’s ahead for Massachusetts’ Gateway Cities almost 20 years after creation

What makes a community a Gateway City? The original definition was fairly straightforward: a place needed to have 35,000 to 250,000 residents, and median incomes and college graduation rates below the state average. The state keeps a list of 26 communities that fall under that umbrella, from Attleboro to Barnstable to Westfield and Worcester.

But that list got its last update in 2014, under then-Gov. Deval Patrick. And things have changed: U.S. Census data shows that Methuen, Quincy and Salem no longer qualify, having increased their median incomes and college education rates.

“It’s a mixed picture,” Benjamin Forman, director of the MassINC Policy Center and co-author of the 2007 Gateway Cities report, told GBH’s Trajan Warren. “Some places have come a long way in the last 20 years and it’s impressive what’s been achieved and very positive. Some places — the trajectory hasn’t changed at all.”

Weymouth and Marlborough, which do meet all three criteria, are not on the list. Sen. Bill Driscoll Jr. of Milton (not a Gateway City) is asking the state to update its list.

“Has it targeted the right places? I think in most cases it has,” Driscoll said. “But I also think that it leaves out similarly situated communities.”

But Rep. Antonio Cabral, who represents New Bedford (a Gateway City) and co-chairs the Gateway Cities Legislative Caucus, said he worries that changing the list would weaken the definition.

“These [are] very specific kinds of cities. These are old urban centers, economic drivers of each region,” Cabral told Warren. “If we were to dilute that definition and allow suburban communities to be so-called ‘Gateway Cities,’ then I think it would defeat the purpose.”

Read Warren’s full story here.

Massachusetts Gateway Cities are: Attleboro, Barnstable, Brockton, Chelsea, Chicopee, Everett, Fall River, Fitchburg, Haverhill, Holyoke, Lawrence, Leominster, Lowell, Lynn, Malden, Methuen, New Bedford, Peabody, Pittsfield, Quincy, Revere, Salem, Springfield, Taunton, Westfield and Worcester. Live in one of these communities? Share your stories here.