Spend shift

Over the past century, shelter has replaced food as our biggest household
budget buster

By Robert David Sullivan Cost of Living and Consumer Affairs 0 Comments Nov 26, 2006

A long line at JP Licks is an inconvenience, but it may also signal a turning point in Boston’s spending habits. While the rest of the country spends less and less on food, we’ve started a reverse trend, devoting more of our paychecks to eating in and dining out—which may explain the recent proliferation of(...)

Economy

THE LONG VIEW

By Robert M. Krim Growth and Development 0 Comments Nov 26, 2006

boston’s recovery from the last recession has been slow and uneven. Some sectors of the region’s economy have crept back to pre-recession employment levels, while others—notably, information technology—remain below early 2000 peaks. More importantly, the road back has been marked by worrisome signs of ground lost to other regions, with a number of major hometown(...)

Education/ Politics

A tale of two valleys

Holyoke tries to grab some of the happy vibes from its college-town neighbors to the north

By Melissa DaPonte Katz City and Town Profiles, Municipal Government 0 Comments Nov 26, 2006

The first signs of life downtown are at Open Square,a renovated mill complex. The pioneer valley of western Massachusetts is not one valley but two. To those who think of it as Amherst or Northampton, it is a land of cafés, bookstores, and lively public spaces. Pedestrians swarm the sidewalks, bicyclists wait patiently at traffic(...)

Politics

Statistically Significant

By Robert David Sullivan Demographics 0 Comments Nov 24, 2006

Illustrations by Travis Foster the graying of the do-gooders According to the Corporation for National and Community Service, volunteerism is on the decline in Massachusetts, while it’s flat in the nation as a whole. The CNCS survey indicated that 27.0 percent of Bay State residents over 16 did volunteer work in 2005, down from 28.2(...)

Uncategorized

New neighbors

By Robert David Sullivan Demographics 0 Comments Oct 25, 2006

Cape cod apparently saw a lot of moving vans last year, but the South Coast was unusually quiet in home-buying activity. The larger map below shows the number of single-family homes and condos (both new and pre-owned) sold for every 10,000 current residents in each town. Provincetown (population: 3,400), was the clear leader in the(...)

Uncategorized

Letters

By CommonWealth Staff 0 Comments Oct 24, 2006

I really enjoyed Dave Denison’s “Tax Talk” (CW, Summer ’06). Just a few response items. Point 1: Dave asks if 10 percent of income is “too much for a middle-class family to pay in order to have decent public schools, police and fire protection, roads and sewers, and state services provided for the health and(...)

Politics

Treatment discontinued

Town and state officials agreed on what to do with Medfield State Hospital, but then time ran out

By Ray Hainer City and Town Profiles, Municipal Government 0 Comments Oct 24, 2006

medfield When it opened in 1897, the Medfield Insane Asylum represented the latest thinking in psychiatric care. Huge institutional buildings had been the norm for state psychiatric hospitals, but the Medfield asylum looked more like a prep school than a prison; the three-story brick buildings, on several hundred acres of farmland and forest bordering the(...)

Uncategorized

New states for newcomers

By Robert David Sullivan Demographics, Immigration 0 Comments Oct 24, 2006

Massachusetts has long been losing native-born citizens to New Hampshire. Are we about to start losing immigrants to our northern neighbor too? To be sure, the immigrant population in the Bay State has grown briskly since 2000, based on recent estimates by the US Census Bureau. We’ve moved up to ninth place in the percentage(...)

Politics

New media guru Dan Gillmor wants to reinvent traditional journalism

By Dan Kennedy Media and Journalism 0 Comments Oct 24, 2006

bloggers in one corner, journalists in the other. Or is it bloggers versus journalists? Perhaps this is a false dichotomy, or an outdated one. After all, it was nearly two years ago that New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen wrote an essay for his influential blog, PressThink, called “Bloggers vs. Journalists Is Over.” Yet,(...)

Politics

Two startups try to make consultants affordable for nonprofits

By Gabrielle Gurley 0 Comments Oct 24, 2006

most nonprofit organizations run lean, if not mean, operations, with only the largest able to afford luxuries like contracting out a new database design to private management consultants. But even in the nonprofit world, performance matters more than ever, and engaging expert consultants is no longer a frill, but a necessity. What’s a shoestring operation(...)