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🌂A chance of showers, with highs in the 80s. Sunset is at 7:48 p.m.
How much money do people in Massachusetts have? Let’s zoom in on a few data points from a study on wealth that the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston released yesterday. It shows some stark differences: about one-third of people surveyed said they would not have the cash to cover a surprise $400 expense. But at the higher end of the spectrum, some groups reported much higher net worths. Homeowners had a median net worth of $790,500. Households with someone 65 or older had a median net worth of $702,500, and households with someone holding a graduate degree had a median net worth of $947,400.
This is a follow-up to a study the Boston Fed released in 2015. You might remember it for its finding that the median net worth of U.S.-born Black families in the state was just $8. The study released yesterday uses different methods of calculating household net worth, so researchers said making direct comparisons between the two data sets would be inaccurate. But what remains true is that there are still racial disparities in wealth. The median net worth was $549,200 for white families, $305,000 for Asian families, $7,800 for Black families and $1,200 for Hispanic families. GBH’s Chris Burrell has more analysis of the study here.
Four Things to Know
1. Massachusetts residents from Colombia have spent the days since Monday’s 7.4-magnitude earthquake in their home country getting in touch with loved ones and trying to figure out how to help. Los Primos Barbershop in East Boston is collecting supplies like blankets, flashlights and new hygiene items, and raising money online.
“Any amount would be a huge help,” said Breiner Scarpeta, the barbershop’s owner, who is from the Chocó province. “Fortunately, my family is fine. Everyone is alive. But the goal is to help other people who suffered losses, both in terms of lives and material possessions.”
2. Boston Mayor Michelle Wu said her administration has been trying to get the federal government to give them information about how immigration agents are operating in the city — and they are hearing nothing back. She said she heard about Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials looking to lease 249 parking spots in downtown Boston from news outlets.
“It’s not just that they are not responding to us, it’s that they are attacking us,” she said. “They’re suing us. They’re taking away our funding. They are doing everything they can to undermine the places that prove why they are wrong about everything.”
3. Last week Worcester City Manager Eric Batista’s office published a press release saying the federal Department of Justice is closing its investigation into wrongdoing in the city’s police department “without sustaining any allegations.”
You might read that and assume investigators are taking back what they said in 2024, when they published a report alleging that police officers in the city took part in “outrageous” sexual misconduct and targeted residents of color. That’s not what happened: GBH’s Sam Turken obtained a copy of the letter DOJ officials sent the city. It says the city’s police department has made some progress, but does not retract any previous findings. You can see the letter here.
4. Waters in the Gulf of Maine, which include the Massachusetts coast, are colder this summer than usual. “You’ve probably heard stories about how rapidly the Gulf of Maine is warming,” said Nick Record, a senior research scientist at Bigelow Lab for Ocean Sciences. “And indeed that has been happening. But one of the interesting things we’ve seen oceanographically is the last two or three years, there has been this pulse of subarctic water that has come into the Gulf of Maine and slowly worked its way toward the coast.”
In short, some years will bring higher highs and others lower lows. “It’s these sort of extremes that we’re getting and it makes the year-to-year changes in the Gulf of Maine and many other places a little bit harder to predict, a little bit harder to expect what’s coming,” Record said.
Photographer takes modern-day photos of Holyoke with 100-year-old camera
Charles Abel made a fortuitous discovery: while going through a collection of cameras at the Wistariahurst Museum in Holyoke, he found a Gundlach Korona Pictorial View Field Camera. It’s a 100-year-old camera with a 125-year-old lens attached.
“I was like, oh, wow, this would be so much fun and cool to take some pictures with it. And so, I tested it out. No light leaks. It worked! The lens worked. It was sharp,” Abel told NEPM’s Nirvani Williams.
Now he has an exhibit of present-day Holyoke, captured with a century-old camera.
“This is the meeting of two things,” Masslive photographer Sebastian Restrepo told Williams. “A well-functioning machine and a person who’s got the vision to create something and do it right the first time in camera with none of the digital trickery,” Restrepo said. “Film is like a very good representation of the world as it was and that’s kind of what I’m always after, too. And so for me, these images are fantastic.”
You can see a bit more of the exhibit here.
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