“If the city wants to make real progress on climate goals, the building sector is where the biggest changes have to happen.”
CW in Depth
Posted inMiddle class
‘I want a legacy for my family’
For years, small business ownership has served as a “gateway” to the middle class, particularly for residents in Gateway Cities like Holyoke where economic mobility is otherwise limited and educational attainment is low. But since the pandemic, experts and advocates have warned that Massachusetts’s small businesses are struggling to survive.
Posted inMiddle class
It’s hard work making it in the middle class
If there’s a single unifying theme to the Massachusetts middle-class outlook in 2026, it’s contradiction: We have more than ever, and in many cases, that’s not enough to enjoy the stability of prior generations.
Posted inPolitics
‘They’re making a huge bet’: Rent control referendum splits progressives
If a campaign to instate rent control across the Commonwealth makes it to the ballot, voters will need to weigh whether every municipality should adopt a measure more stringent than earlier attempts by Boston, Brookline, and Somerville.
Posted inHealth Care
When communities lose trust: One year after Steward Health’s bankruptcy and the death of two hospitals
One year after Steward Health Care’s demise, the Nashoba Valley and Dorchester communities are grappling with strained EMS services, diminished access to care, and trust that has been broken. Local leaders, hospital staff, and residents say they are a testament to the devastation that lingers after communities lose their critical infrastructure.
Posted inEducation
Mass. faces grim reality of fewer international students
Massachusetts’s schools have recruited higher proportions of international students than colleges and universities almost anywhere else because of a demographic decline and the comparatively high cost of higher education here. But even before the second Trump administration, there were signs the bottom was falling out.
Posted inEnvironment
When the river rises
By 2050, severe floods that were expected to happen once every 100 years will be three times more likely to occur in the Connecticut River Valley in Massachusetts. But the uneven distribution of resources across municipalities leaves some towns less equipped to plan for and respond to disasters.
Posted inEnvironment
Betting (on) the farm
The latest data from the US Agricultural Census show more than 100,000 acres of farmland in Massachusetts have been lost since 1997. That’s an average of losing just under 15 acres of farmland a day, roughly double the rate of farmland loss nationwide.
Posted inEnvironment
‘Water doesn’t know property lines’: Where Massachusetts’s climate and housing crises meet
“The state rules have to catch up with the reality of climate change,” said Matthew Fee, a Nantucket select board member. “A town road can’t be abandoned if someone’s [living] on it, but what happens when the road goes into the ocean?”
Posted inEducation
Mass. education secretary’s votes reflect growing Democratic hostility toward charter schools
Growing Democratic opposition to charter schools was cast in sharp relief at February’s state education board meeting, where Gov. Maura Healey’s education secretary, Patrick Tutwiler, voted against all five proposals for expansion of charter schools.
Posted inImmigration
‘It’s not going to be pretty’
Immigrant advocates have good reason to think New Bedford may figure prominently on a list of places that will be targeted under an aggressive deportation campaign by the new Trump administration.
Posted inCourts
Post-Bruen decision, everyone has to be a gun-law historian
The decision has opened almost all aspects of the state’s gun safety law regime to challenge and sent lawyers scrambling for history books. As recent Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decisions have shown, if a policy is not tied to a founding-era law or practice – a so-called historical analogue – it likely will not survive judicial scrutiny.
Posted inPolitics
Why are so many amendments being withdrawn on Beacon Hill?
A lawmaker gets up to make a speech, notes how important it would be for his or her colleagues to pass the amendment, and then withdraws the very amendment that was supposed to be so important.
Posted inBallot Questions
Lessons to learn from Oregon on psychedelics ballot measure
A group called Mass. for Mental Health Options has gathered the necessary signatures to put a question on the November ballot that would make it possible for Massachusetts residents to do the same. However, the measure in Massachusetts is much more expansive than the one that legalized psilocybin therapy in Oregon in 2020.
Posted inPolitics
Seeking a right to medical aid in dying
Margaret Miley is frustrated, in pain, and dying. But Massachusetts has thus far resisted the movement, now law in nearly a dozen other states, to allow patients near their end of their life to obtain medication that would hasten their death.
“Who benefits from this?” she asks.
Posted inEducation
In wake of pandemic, Mass. achievement gap has widened
As schools try to recover the learning loss students experienced in recent years, a study by researchers at Harvard and Stanford universities shows that the achievement gap separating poor and non-poor students in Massachusetts has widened more since the pandemic than in any of 15 states they studied.
Posted inPolitics
The bomb-tossing bean counter
Not even halfway through her first term as auditor, Diana DiZoglio has essentially returned to the campaign trail. She is lobbying voters, and emptying her own campaign coffers, to support an initiative she wants to put before voters this November.
Posted inPolitics
The last of Somerville’s old guard
Corruption cases, and attempted prosecutions, were once regular headlines in Somerville. The recent bribery conviction of a one-time local power broker, with echoes of another era, came and went without much fanfare.
Posted inEducation
Is tutoring the answer to pandemic learning loss?
Tutoring has a stronger base of solid positive evidence than almost any other school intervention, but joins lots of other innovations in education that seem to offer great promise but have been stubbornly difficult to implement at the kind of scale that would really drive population-wide improvements.
Posted inEducation
Boston schools grudgingly release some sexual misconduct data
The numbers, which were released grudgingly after a six-month public records battle, begin to paint a picture of how prevalent sexual misconduct, bullying, and biased-based incidents are in the Boston schools.
Posted inHousing
Yes, building more housing does lower rents, study says
Does increasing the supply of housing, even if it’s mainly higher-cost, market-priced units, temper the runup in costs that has so many residents straining to make ends meet? The idea follows the basic economic principle of supply and demand – when more of something is made available, its price falls. But there are plenty of “supply skeptics” who aren’t convinced that simply opening the housing production spigot will lower costs, and argue instead that it often just drives up prices by promoting gentrification.
Posted inEnvironment
‘Re-wilding’ Massachusetts cranberry bogs
As Massachusetts’ famous cranberry industry consolidates and some of the cranberry bogs fade out of use, famers, governments, and conservationists are increasingly eager to start “re-wilding” them to natural rivers and wetlands.
Posted inPolitics
At 90, Michael Dukakis still looks ahead
Michael Dukakis remade the Massachusetts Democratic Party, suffered a bitter loss after winning his party’s nomination for president, then spent three decades teaching college students and preaching the virtues of public service, something he has modeled for more than six decades.
Posted inTransportation
Why did MassDOT hang T employees out to dry?
A Boston Globe story on employees working long-distance at the MBTA had 4 corrections. The employees who were incorrectly targeted and the reporter who lost her job were victims of a state bureaucracy that failed to stand up for its workers.