CommonWealth Voices

How the country addresses immigration is, admittedly, not an easy issue. We need immigrants – and have long been a place where those from other countries sought to a build a new, better life — and we also need secure borders. I know how hard striking this balance can be.

Sponsored by The Boston Foundation The Best of CommonWealth Beacon OPINION Boston’s iconic three-deckers line Adams Street in Dorchester. (Photo by Michael Jonas) Boston’s broken land use system blocks the […]

Sponsored by The Boston Foundation The Best of CommonWealth Beacon OPINION Attorney General Andrea Campbell speaks about the impending cutoff of SNAP benefits at a rally outside the State House […]

Sponsored by The Boston Foundation The Best of CommonWealth Beacon OPINION (Image via Pixabay by FotoRichter) We can’t sit idle as Washington pulls the plug on the Massachusetts innovation economy […]

Sponsored by The Boston Foundation The Best of CommonWealth Beacon OPINION Efficient electric equipment, powered by clean sources, is the answer to the energy affordability crunch December 7, 2025 By […]

Earlier this year, Cambridge quietly accomplished what few cities have dared: through an ambitious zoning reform, it legalized four-story buildings across nearly every neighborhood. The reform dramatically increases the city’s capacity for new housing, with projections that it could add 3,590 net new units by 2040.

This is more than just a housing “win.” It’s a triumph for Cambridge’s unique brand of representative democracy—one that balances citywide priorities with fair representation for diverse communities. 

Why did Cambridge succeed where other cities have failed? The answer lies not just in zoning, but in how Cambridge elects its city council.

Massachusetts has positioned itself as a leader on a range of policy domains under attack by the Trump administration. But as a national conversation has arisen about cash bail and public safety, fueled by misinformation from the White House, Massachusetts is on the sidelines.  

At the same time, Massachusetts has been undergoing its own experiment with releasing people who would otherwise be detained pretrial this summer—people who were denied their right to counsel while bar advocates declined taking new appointed cases, holding out for a pay raise to continue serving as public defenders.

Massachusetts is known as a leader in clean energy and climate action. Our policies have lowered emissions, created jobs, and helped families save money on energy. But a bill currently under consideration in the House of Representatives on Beacon Hill threatens to undo that progress and would be a damaging mistake for our state.  

This bill, proposed by Rep. Mark Cusack, the co-chair of the Legislature’s Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities, and Energy, is essentially a fossil fuel industry wish list. It rolls back the Commonwealth’s enforceable 2030 climate targets, weakens the Mass Save energy efficiency program, eliminates efforts designed to make energy efficiency more affordable for working families, and even resurrects the disastrous “pipeline tax” that would allow utilities to charge residents for unnecessary gas infrastructure. In short, it hands fossil fuel companies a gift while leaving Massachusetts households to foot the bill.

How long is too long to wait for all subway lines on the MBTA to be connected?  

100 years?  

This December, it will be 101 years since the Boston Globe first reported on the idea to connect the MBTA’s Red and Blue lines, noting that riders “using either the East Boston Tunnel [the Blue Line] or the Cambridge Subway [the Red Line] could change cars at Charles St, instead of transferring at Scollay Square and Park Street, the most congested parts of the whole system … This would have a distinct tendency to remove this congestion and would therefore be a highly desirable end in itself.” 

A century later, the Globe’s description remains accurate: the Red and Blue lines remain the only two subway lines on the T that do not connect. Riders must make two zigzag transfers, using the Green or Orange lines, to travel between them. Not only is it inconvenient for riders, it also increases congestion and decreases capacity at Park Street and Government Center. These pressures on system capacity will only worsen with time.

America is falling out of love with college, and it’s not hard to see why. 

First, colleges are not doing enough to build purpose, confidence, agency, and maturity. Colleges are not the cause of growing anxiety and a declining sense of purpose among young people; but, faced with the reality of these trends, colleges have not changed their models nearly enough to help students build purpose, confidence, agency, and maturity. 

Second, colleges are not doing enough to build “durable” or “transferable” skills and the networks and experiences students need to transition successfully from high school to 21st century careers that pay good wages.

As a family medicine physician at Boston Medical Center, I have cared for hundreds of individuals and families experiencing homelessness over the last 20 years. The landscape of housing services that I can offer them continues to change, sometimes leaving me with a great sense of hope and possibility and, at other times, more hopeless than ever for my patients’ restoration to health.  

Recently, this seesaw from hope to hopelessness has become more extreme, as decisions by our state leaders seem to be simultaneously pulling in opposite directions when it comes to housing help for those most in need. Two families for whom I provide medical care illustrate the mixed messages of our state’s recent housing policies affecting the state’s most vulnerable residents.

“There’s a place in the world for the angry young man,” wrote Billy Joel almost 50 years ago.  Unfortunately, that place seems to have expanded in our public square (for both men and women), creating echo chambers of primal screaming on both the right and left, leaving the large majority of us wondering where all the middle ground went. 

For much of the past year, I’ve been writing a series of issue briefs for CommonWealth Beacon (see below) on a variety of controversial policy topics, providing evidence-based arguments pro and con, in contrast to the bumper stickers from the left and right that too often pass for civic discourse.

Five and a half hours into a tedious rules debate at the Massachusetts State House in January 2019, acting Speaker Tom Petrolati ordered a roll call vote on a noncontroversial amendment, and voted no. Within seconds, red lights, representing “no” votes, lit up the electronic vote-tally board in the House chamber as dozens of rank-and-file members followed his lead.  

Then, realizing he had made a mistake (but not realizing his mic was still on), Petrolati stammered: “It’s a yes?… Switch ’em. Yes, yes, yes, yes. Yes. Yes!”  

After his vote on the large display board flipped to green for “yes,” so, too, did the votes of at least 63 Democratic representatives. (The video of this moment remains on the Legislature’s website, beginning at 5:35:49.)

Over the last two years, Massachusetts launched a bold initiative with a clear message: college is accessible again. Community college? Tuition- and fee-free for everyone. Four-year public college? Tuition- and fee-free if you’re low-income. Books, supplies, cost of living costs? Covered, up to $2,400, by stipends for those who qualify. 

These promises were backed by transformative new programs, MassReconnect and MassGrant Plus Expansion in 2023, followed by MassEducate in 2024, all made possible by the Fair Share Amendment, a surtax on millionaires that voters overwhelmingly approved in 2022 to fund public education and transportation. The rollout was visible. The message resonated. For the first time in years, students and families began to believe in public higher education again.

Health care spending in Massachusetts is just about the highest in the world. It is enough to finance health security for all of us. Health security means that we get care that’s effective, competent, quick, and kind—with no more than tiny co-payments and no worry about medical debt. To redeem the promise of plastic insurance cards, health security requires having enough good doctors, dentists, nurses, hospitals, and other caregivers where we need them.   

That doesn’t make health security for all easy to win—just easier than housing, education and job training, global warming, personal and national security, decent living standards, or the other huge challenges we face. Because we already spend enough on health care to get the job done.

When COVID arrived, in March of 2020, Dr. Paul Hattis and Dr. Jarone Lee, a critical care and emergency medicine physician at Massachusetts General Hospital, started a series for CommonWealth Beacon of what came to be more than a dozen interviews during the initial years of the pandemic. (You can read more here.) It has been about two and half years since their last Q&A posting. Hattis, a former professor at Tufts University Medical School and currently a fellow at the Lown Institute, decided to have a check-in discussion with Lee to see what his world is like these days and what sort of longer lasting impact Covid has had on it. This conversation has been edited for clarity.

Sponsored by The Boston Foundation The Best of CommonWealth Beacon  OPINION (Photo via Canva) Follow the money: Is the CVS-MGB primary care deal good for Mass.? September 7, 2025 By John […]