sponsored by The Boston Foundation
Catch up with CommonWealth Voices, a weekly digest of opinion pieces from CommonWealth Beacon that you may have missed during the week.
What ICE is doing is abhorrent. But here’s why canceling the state contract to house its detainees might not be the right thing to do.
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.
Boston’s broken land use system blocks the homes we desperately need
Sponsored by The Boston Foundation The Best of CommonWealth Beacon OPINION Boston’s broken land use system blocks the homes we desperately need January 11, 2026 By John Infranca Thirty low-income seniors recently lost potential housing, but 10 mature trees will survive. Those are among the outcomes so far of the neighborhood process and design review for a desperately needed affordable housing project in Jamaica Plain. They are emblematic of Boston’s broken land use process, through which neighbors assert parochial interests to stymie needed housing development or impose additional costs and delays. Even when that development advances the city’s purported goals…
Instead of a war on poverty, we wage war on the poor
Sponsored by The Boston Foundation The Best of CommonWealth Beacon OPINION Instead of a war on poverty, we wage war on the poor December 21, 2025 By Imari Paris Jeffries Every safety net in this country has been stitched with holes just wide enough for many of us to slip through. We’ve recently had a front row seat to this playing out again. From the billions cut from Medicaid in the sweeping tax and spending bill enacted last summer to the use of SNAP food assistance as a bargaining chip during the government shutdown, the most vulnerable among us continue…
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 We can’t sit idle as Washington pulls the plug on the Massachusetts innovation economy December 14, 2025 By Eric Nakajima Massachusetts has experienced a full assault on the basic pillars of our innovation economy. Clean energy programs and infrastructure, biomedical research funding, immigration, and core funding and academic freedom at our state’s leading universities have all landed in the crosshairs of the Trump administration’s reckless cuts and ideologically extreme policy agenda. While President Trump wraps this all in America First rhetoric, these moves will severely undermine our country’s ability…
Efficient electric equipment, powered by clean sources, is the answer to the energy affordability crunch
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 Vick Mohanka In the wake of last month’s elections, one thing is clear: affordability is on the ballot. A poll released days later by the University of Massachusetts Amherst affirmed as much, with one in five respondents rating their own economic situation as “poor” and housing emerging as the most important issue facing Massachusetts. Yet while Massachusetts families struggle to make ends meet, Eversource’s CEO is boasting record quarterly earnings,…
How a 1940 electoral system reform in Cambridge made its 2025 housing breakthrough possible
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.
On bail policy, Massachusetts must catch up
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.
House climate bill is a huge step backward
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…
The Red-Blue Connector: A half-mile of subway that benefits an entire region
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…
Colleges need an experiential learning revolution
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…
Gov. Healey’s mixed message on housing for those most in need
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…
Finding common cause and common sense in complexity
“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…
Why a Democratic supermajority won’t pass Democratic bills
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,”…
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