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.
⛅Clouds moving in with highs around 40. Sunset is at 6:48 p.m.
It’s a momentous weekend: Friday the 13th, Pi Day and the Ides of March. Jared Bowen, host of GBH’s The Culture Show, has two recommendations for things you can do.
Say It Loud: AAMARP, 1977 to Now, is an exhibition at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art that features the work of artists in the African American Master Artists-in-Residence Program (AAMARP) at Northeastern University. “This is a glorious show,” Bowen says. “This surfaces nearly 50 years of work by an extraordinary array of Boston artists, work that we have largely not seen before but that was produced here and tells amazing stories.” There’s also a guided exhibition tour — free with admission — most Saturdays and some Sundays through early August.
And “Stereophonic,” a Tony-winning play about a band in a 1970s recording studio, is making a stop in Boston through Sunday. It was written by David Adjmi and has music by Will Butler of the indie rock band Arcade Fire. “We’re privy to both the control room and what’s happening in the studio. You have these bandmates who are coming together, and they are trying to find success with their album. Suddenly they’re No. 1, and what does that mean for artists who want to find their fame, their singularity, try to stay together but also see solo careers arising?” Watch for shades of Fleetwood Mac. Want more from The Culture Show team? Follow them on Instagram.
Four Things to Know
1. The Massachusetts Senate wants to ask the state’s highest court about two potential ballot questions related to how the legislature functions. The first question would, if passed, make the state Legislature and the governor’s office subject to the public records law. Massachusetts is one of just two states where the governor is not subject to the public records law (the other is Michigan) and one of five where the public records law doesn’t apply to the legislature, according to the nonprofit MuckRock.
The Senate’s concerns are that extending the public records law to legislators would infringe on its constitutional order to “determine its own rules of proceedings.” The other question involves how members of the Legislature get paid: if the question passes, lawmakers would only be able to receive additional compensation if they comply with specific procedures related to handling legislation.
2. The Greater Boston Real Estate Board commissioned a study that predicts that if Massachusetts voters pass a ballot measure capping annual rent increases at 5%, property values could fall by 14% over a decade. The study, from the Center for State Policy Analysis at Tufts University, also says that if property values fall, so will city and town revenues.
“This question is so poorly drafted and has so many issues; it’ll impact not only people and homeowners, but it’s really going to impact cities and towns in ways that I’m not sure that people fully understand,” said Greg Vasil, the Greater Boston Real Estate Board president and CEO. Last year he said he would fight the rent control ballot initiative “every step of the way.”
3. GBH President and CEO Susan Goldberg said she wants Boston’s two public media stations, GBH and WBUR, to consider merging. (Of note: Boston also has two daily newspapers and five TV stations with local news operations.) “In an interview, [a Globe] reporter asked me if I thought GBH and WBUR should merge, and I answered honestly: the loss of public funding must prompt a re-examination of how public media operates — here and nationwide — and that, in Boston, a merger between our two organizations would make a lot of sense,” she wrote in an email to staff.
WBUR CEO Margaret Low sounded more skeptical. “WBUR and GBH have no plans to merge. Full stop,” Low wrote in a note to her staff. “Conversations about how to navigate these uncertain times are happening all across the NPR network and across all media.”
4. The semifinals for Paralympic curling take place today. Curler Sean O’Neill of Falmouth, who is competing in the games, said he’s been focused on the competition but is also trying to explore the area around the stadium in Cortina and meet other athletes.
“We’re all disabled athletes of one form or another. In some ways, to me, it makes it even more special that we’re coming together, all as elite disabled athletes from all these countries,” he told CAI. “I’ve particularly enjoyed sort of checking out and admiring the various uniforms and kits and sweatsuits that other countries have. They’re pretty remarkable. And things like meeting Haiti’s first winter Paralympian. I mean, that’s an incredible experience.”
High rents, new bill in the quest for affordable housing
Two stories about the price of housing. First: about half of renters in Greater Boston are cost-burdened, meaning they spend 30 to 50 percent of their income on housing every month, according to a report from Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. The study shows that all of Massachusetts and Rhode Island, most of Connecticut and significant parts of New Hampshire and Vermont — as well as southern Maine — have at least 40% of their renters using more than 30% of their income on housing.
Senior Researcher Whitney Airgood-Obrycki said rents are starting to decline slightly, but they have not yet fallen below the heights they reached during the start of the COVID pandemic, when they rose by up to 20% in some places, GBH’s Diane Adame reports.
“If you think about places like Boston, they saw this massive growth in rents,” Airgood-Obrycki said. “We saw rent growth sort of tapering off a little bit, but still increasing by 2% to 3% for several years and are only now just starting to decline by less than a percentage point, right? Or by less than a percent rather.” The study also found that renters today are more likely to have incomes over $75,000 than in previous years.
Second: yesterday the U.S. Senate passed a bill aimed at making housing more affordable across the U.S. in an 89-10 vote. Sens. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Tim Scott of South Carolina co-wrote the 303-page bill, which you can read in full here. If the bill becomes law, it would ban large investors from owning more than 350 single-family homes. It would also change some requirements for environmental reviews and eliminate certain regulations on modular housing, the kind that can be built in one place and trucked to another for assembly.
Warren said she hopes the law can drive down prices by boosting supply: “We need more housing of every kind,” she told the Associated Press. “More housing for first-time home buyers, more housing for renters, more housing for seniors, more housing for people with disabilities, more rural housing, more urban housing, more, more and more.”
Dig Deeper:
-Rent control: The governor says no. Boston’s mayor says yes. It could be up to voters.
-Keeping private rentals cheaper is key to Mass. housing crisis, new report says
-What happens when you lose your home at 72?
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