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.
☔Showers today, with highs in the 70s. Sunset is at 8:06 p.m.
It’s gonna be a rainy one, GBH Meteorologist Dave Epstein said. Different areas will see different levels of rain, but generally, he said to expect the heaviest precipitation mid-day, between 10 a.m. and 3 p.m.
“When those downpours are coming down, we could see anywhere from 1 to 3 inches of rainfall in a relatively short amount of time,” Epstein told GBH’s Craig LeMoult. “That overwhelms the culverts and the stormwater drains, and that’s why we see urban street flooding, which is really the primary risk from these types of weather systems.”
LeMoult also dug into a report from the American Society of Civil Engineers — both the national organization and its Massachusetts chapter — that graded how the state does in managing stormwater. In short: not great. They gave us a D+.
“The state of Massachusetts has some of the oldest infrastructure in the country,” Danielle Spicer, incoming regional director of the American Society of Civil Engineers, told LeMoult. “It was designed for a smaller population, it was designed for different rainfall events. We have seen drastic changes in our climate more recently. It takes time to upgrade everything. It takes funding, it takes investment.” You can get the full forecast here.
Four Things to Know
1. Lawmakers on Beacon Hill will vote today on a bill to train first responders on how to interact with people who have dementia. Massachusetts has about 154,000 residents over the age of 65 living with Alzheimer’s or other forms of dementia, according to the state’s Healthy Aging Data Report.
The bill would also allow family members and caregivers of people with dementia to stay with them in the hospital “at all times that are medically appropriate,” even outside visiting hours or in the emergency room.
2. Riding the MBTA will cost you less through the fall. The state is extending a 50% discount on monthly Commuter Rail passes through November, and with it a program that allows monthly pass holders to bring a friend along for $1 on weekends.
Also: riders will be able to transfer between buses, T trains and ferries for free during a 2-hour window. Starting Sept. 1, the MBTA’s seven express bus routes will cost $1.70 each way instead of $4.25. That pilot program will last six months.
3. Massachusetts lottery games are now available online. That means people 21 and older can now play Mass Cash, Megabucks, Mega Millions, Powerball and Millionaire for Life from their computers or phones, without having to make a trip to their local convenience store.
State Treasurer Deborah Goldberg estimated the online games could bring in about $70 million in taxes in their first year, a small portion of the $1.7 billion the state collected in gambling taxes last year. Bay State residents spend more per person on the lottery than residents in any other U.S. state: $839 per capita, according to a 2022 Boston Federal Reserve study.
4. Pancake, a Kemp’s ridley sea turtle rescued from Duck Harbor Beach in Wellfleet last November, is back in the ocean. Pancake’s journey took the turtle from the Cape to the New England Aquarium Sea Turtle Hospital and then to the Atlantic Marine Conservation Society’s Sea Turtle Care Facility in Westhampton Beach, N.Y. Scientists believe Pancake is between 2 and 5 years old, and they never determined the turtle’s sex — they would have had to put Pancake through an otherwise unnecessary blood draw.
Pancake got back into the water off the Coney Island boardwalk in New York, with kids cheering the turtle’s release. You can see photos of Pancake and the release celebration here. “I think that they are kind of a growing conservation success story in that they have been really well protected and they’ve had this really big rebound,” said Dr. Maia Austin, a postdoctoral researcher for the Wildlife Conservation Society. “But, you know, they still have some issues with entanglement, ship strikes, things like that.”
Massachusetts housing market sees robust spring
The median price of single-family homes sold in Massachusetts went down in June — yes, down. The median sales price was $715,000, compared with about $725,000 last June, according to the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.
It’s not quite affordable yet, especially if you compare it to the pre-pandemic days of June 2019, when median single-family home prices were $440,000. And condo prices rose a bit, from $580,000 to $590,000.
Another point of interest: the gap between the number of homes listed for sale and the number that sold. There were 8,095 houses and 4,804 condos listed for sale last month, and only about 4,773 house sales and 2,032 condo sales.
More expensive homes are taking longer to sell, said Jim Nemetz, manager of Hammond Residential in Chestnut Hill and Coldwell Banker offices in Brookline and Newton. But if you’re in the market for a more reasonably-priced place, things are going fast. “The starter home single-family market has been red-hot. And the lower the starting point in any community, the faster it is,” Nemetz told GBH’s Marilyn Schairer. You can find more home price analysis in Schairer’s full story.
Dig deeper:
-‘We can’t build our way out’: Solving the housing crisis will take multiple creative solutions
-Four things to know before renting in Boston
-‘Granny unit’ law ‘a strong start’ but local rules cause delays, raise costs, report finds
GBH Daily
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