THE PIONEER BLOG

Amy Dain

Zoning out or zoning in-clusionary

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Hot trends in local zoning include age-restricted villages, in-law abodes, and inclusionary zoning – a requirement or incentives to include affordable houses in market rate developments. Our 2004 survey revealed that 99 of the 187 communities within 50 miles of Boston have inclusionary bylaws on the books. Developers argue that some inclusionary laws drive up the cost of development (and ultimately the price of market rate housing), and can make some projects infeasible. Housing advocates argue that inclusionary policies are the best way to ensure that affordable housing is integrated throughout communities, and built in the first place. NYU just released a study comparing inclusionary laws in MA localities to San Francisco and DC regions. If you are considering inclusionary […]

Jim Stergios

Results in on Teach for America

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What kind of impact does the influx of young, motivated people (ahem, without formal training in our dear schools of education) have on student performance? A big thank you to the Urban Institute for looking into this question. From their press release (last week): Teach for America teachers may be new to the profession, but they are generally more effective than their experienced colleagues, finds a new Urban Institute analysis. On average, high school students taught by TFA corps members performed significantly better on state-required end-of-course exams, especially in math and science, than peers taught by far more experienced instructors. The TFA teachers’ effect on student achievement in core classroom subjects was nearly three times the effect of teachers with […]

Jim Stergios

Patrick comes out for school choice!

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Your Excellency, We at Pioneer were feeling as double-crossed as perhaps Bobby Haynes.  We were feeling it on school choice, knowing that you benefited from the school choice opportunity provided by the “A Better Chance” foundation to attend Milton Academy.  Bobby felt it on being double-crossed by the Doubleday deal, when you double-booked on the day of the casino vote.  He stayed on the Hill and earned himself the Speaker’s ire.  As someone who respects the free-market, I hope you got a good deal. Now, I know that it is difficult to come right out and say you are for school choice, so I think the sophisticated way you did it is just great.  According to today’s Globe, “an unspecified portion of […]

Steve Poftak

One Last Word on the Film Tax Incentives

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Yesterday’s Globe had an article critical of the film tax credit offered by the Commonwealth. I will say that it has significantly improved the celebrity level of the gossip columns, minimizing the Globe’s Names & Faces section’s embarassing fascination with C-list celebrities eating chinese food at the Kowloon. Wow! John Waite? Pro wrestlers? Wasn’t exactly Page 6 material. However, the Department of Revenue’s report makes one fact clear — these are temporary jobs: …the 20 film productions for which tax credits were claimed in calendar year 2006 employed approximately 2,267 individuals, with an average employment duration of 3.2 months, with the employment duration ranging from one week to 12 months. Weighted for the number employed and the duration of employment […]

Steve Poftak

What’s Going on at Higher Education

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The Commonwealth released a mundane piece of annual debt disclosure a few days ago. One interesting section, on page 11, is the number of budgeted workers in the state’s workforce, which has grown by almost 6,000 employees (from a base of 62,000) since June 2004. Leading the charge? The Department of Higher Education, which has added almost 2,700 employees during that span, an increase of 22.5%. Yet, their enrollment levels have only increased by 6% at best during the span. What gives?

Jim Stergios

Benefit blowout

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You are constantly berated for not saving money, folks. You overspend. You should put the money in bank accounts and let the government do all the borrowing to pay for the promises it makes to you. From John Goodman (and health blog HERE) is a neat packaging of Social Security and Medicare liabilities we are racking up… As John suggested in his email, read and weep. On Good Friday (when most people were off, including most reporters) the Administration announced that the following Tuesday during Spring Break (when Congress was in recess and everyone’s attention was focused elsewhere) the Social Security/Medicare Trustees annual report would be released. Apparently someone isn’t anxious for you to pay close attention to this year’s […]

Steve Poftak

Lottery Questions

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Interested in how your town fares under the Lottery — take a look here: Lottery Workbook This spreadsheet tells you how much your town gets from the lottery relative to the sales of lottery tickets in the community. It also calculates how much people win from those tickets and adds it into the amount of aid to give another angle to the notion of return on investment. Feel free to comment on tweaks, mistakes, or observations from the data.

Jim Stergios

Hope is not a strategy

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The Great Beacon Hill Foodfight has now reached the Big Apple’s fishwrap paper of record. Big news in the New York Times is that Governor Patrick has lost steam, and that this may portend what an Obama presidency would be like. Discussing his loss on resort casinos, the Governor noted in an interview: “I don’t accept that we can’t get anything done because we lose one issue. Come on. People around here act like the only thing that happened last year was picking these drapes and buying a car. There’s a whole lot more.” Mr. Patrick noted the incresae in state spending on education (ho-hum), housing (did I miss something?) and 300,000 residents with health insurance under the health care […]

Jim Stergios

Teacher shortages

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I love the Education Intelligence Agency. Click HERE to enter the dimly lit cavernous corridors of the Agency and read the full version of what follows. The topic is teacher shortages, and it is a great concern; but Mike Antonucci (the Education Spymaster) scopes out a brief history of the teacher labor market to ensure that we are thinking about the current shortage without hysteria: One would think that with all the technological and statistical tools at their disposal, school districts and state agencies would be able to make reasonably accurate predictions of enrollment and, therefore, hiring needs. However, in state after state we are seeing layoffs and marked competition for the job openings that do exist. In Florida, for […]

Jim Stergios

Floor falls out in California housing

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On the LA Times blog today there is a distressing bit of news about the distressed California housing market. Home prices in the state, the blog notes, fell 26 percent (three times the national average) between February 07 and February 08! –Statewide, median sales prices fell by a stunning 26% in February, with home prices dropping at a rate of nearly $3,000 a week, the California Association of Realtors reports. Further, the CAR says the Fed’s interest rate-cutting campaign “will have little near-term direct effect on the housing market.” –In the San Fernando Valley, losing a home to foreclosure is now almost as common for families as buying a home. The L.A. Daily News: “During January and February, there were […]

Steve Poftak

Boston Cops and the Civil Service Commission

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Michelle McPhee, late of the Herald and currently on WTKK, has a gripping piece on the efforts to root out corruption in the Boston Police Department. McPhee was on the crime beat before and her dramatic writing gives an important story even more life. Halfway through the piece, McPhee fingers one of the key suspects: BPD leaders say one of the biggest hurdles to cleaning up the force is the state’s Civil Service Commission, an independent body established in 1884 to prevent politicians from interfering in the hiring practices of public agencies, or managers from canning people unfairly…Any police officer—or civil servant—who has been disciplined or fired can appeal to the commission and have a full hearing. If it decides […]

Steve Poftak

Reaching

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Slate’s Tim Noah attempts to draw a parallel between Obama’s membership in Reverend Wright’s church and Hillary Clinton’s interview with reporters and editors at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, owned by Richard Mellon Scaife. The clear implication is that Clinton should be held accountable for some statements of the paper’s owner, as recounted by Noah. He’s reaching. Her appearance at the 3rd most widely circulated newspaper in a hotly contested primary state should hardly be newsworthy. Particularly if Noah’s chosen candidate has (gasp!) spoken with reporters at the very same paper.

Jim Stergios

School choice programs increase 84 percent in 5 years

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No, not here, silly. In the rest of the United States! Do I have to explain everything to you?! Passing on bits of the press release from the Alliance for School Choice: Student enrollment in private school choice programs, which include school voucher programs and scholarship tax credit programs, has increased by 84 percent over five years, according to the School Choice Yearbook 2007… According to the book, there are 16 private school choice programs in nine states and the District of Columbia serving 150,000 children. Last year, legislators in 40 states introduced legislation to advance private school choice programs. The five states with the largest school choice programs are Florida (39,000 students), Pennsylvania (38,000 students), Arizona (28,000 students), Wisconsin […]

Amy Dain

Seeking better bylaws: Zoning for new housing and historic preservation.

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Chris Skelly at the Massachusetts Historical Commission asked me for examples of projects permitted under an accessory apartment bylaw, adaptive re-use bylaw, downtown revitalization zoning, flexible dimensions bylaw or up-zoning where “new housing was produced while at the same time a historic property was rehabilitated”. He wants to include case studies of bylaws that work in a guidebook to “Preservation through Bylaws and Ordinances”. Pioneer’s policy recommendations have focused more on state level reform of land use laws. We are also happy to promote local reform to zoning that allows for growth and works for the environment. If you have examples of projects that involved housing development and historic preservation, please list them here, and I will forward the ideas […]

Steve Poftak

Open Markets and Open Skies

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The thicket of regulations which used to govern air travel between the US and Europe, which severely limited which airlines could fly to and from various destinations, will be gone on March 30. Here’s hoping the innovators in low cost travel in Europe (Ryanair, Wizzair, et al; take a look at their sites and the unbelievable prices) will make transatlantic travel more affordable. Of course, as an investor, you might be interested in Warren Buffett’s take on the industry: “if a farsighted capitalist had been present at Kitty Hawk, he would have done his successors a huge favor by shooting Orville down.”