Business Monday — The Daily Boston Brief, August 10, 2026

This week in Boston business: a Small Business Administration session on starting and growing a company at the Copley library tonight at 6 · the Somerville Chamber’s Business After Hours at Foundry on Elm, Wednesday at 5 · and Venture Cafe’s Thursday gathering at the CIC in Kendall, 4:30.

Transit and the economy

Rick Dimino, writing in Banker & Tradesman, makes the argument with this summer’s figures rather than adjectives. During the World Cup the MBTA moved almost 110,000 fans to matches; the average wait at South Station was 12 minutes and the average wait for return trains out of Foxborough was 27; every train reached Gillette at least 90 minutes before kickoff. Away from the tournament he points to bus trips dropped for want of an operator or equipment, more than 8 percent of the schedule in spring 2023 and under 1 percent now, and to regional transit ridership outside Greater Boston passing pre-pandemic levels for the first time. His conclusion is that reliability has become a thing Boston can sell, and should keep paying for. Read it on a morning when the Central Subway is closed and you have both halves of the argument in one commute.

Development

A year ago Salem became the first Massachusetts community outside Greater Boston’s urban core to drop minimum parking requirements for new multifamily buildings. Jonathan Berk’s Banker & Tradesman piece reports what actually followed, and it is not what opponents warned. Developers kept building parking. The rule Salem repealed dated to 1969 and demanded at least 1.5 spaces per apartment; MAPC research had found 38 percent of required spaces sitting empty overnight against real demand of about 0.85 per unit. The first phase of the Salem State South Campus redevelopment still carries roughly 524 spaces for 340 apartments — about the old ratio, chosen rather than commanded — while a plan to turn underused office floors at Pickering Wharf into apartments only pencils out because the mandate is gone. Berk’s ask is that the Legislature stop making cities fight this one at a time.

Openings

Juici Patties is planning two more Massachusetts locations, Boston Restaurant Talk reports: 16 Taber Street in Nubian Square, and the Westgate Mall in Brockton. They join one already headed for Gateway Center in Everett, and which of the three opens first is not yet known. The chain opened its first shop in Jamaica in 1980 and now runs more than 60 there, with US outlets so far in New York, Georgia and Florida. Three sites at once is the kind of move that usually means a company has decided a market is real.

Dave Zirin at Harvard Book Store · Free · Tonight 7pm · Harvard Square

The Nation’s sports editor talks and takes questions in the back room on Mass Ave. Red Line to Harvard, and it costs nothing.

George Howell coffee tasting · Free · Tuesday noon · Boston Public Market

An hour of slurping and comparing single-origin pours, led by the roaster’s own team, in the market by Haymarket. A free lunch break with a point to it.

Improv Asylum’s free summer Wednesday · Free · Wednesday 7:30pm · North End

The Hanover Street basement runs its free Wednesday-night set again. Nothing is written down, which is the whole appeal and occasionally the whole problem.

Free admission all day at the ICA · Free · Thursday 10am to 9pm · Seaport

Eleven hours with the door open and no ticket, out on the Seaport waterfront. Worth building an evening around rather than a rushed half hour.

Night sky

The shower peaks Wednesday night into Thursday morning, and this year the peak lands on a new moon, so there is no moonlight washing the sky out. The Associated Press reports NASA putting the ideal rate at 50 to 100 meteors an hour and the American Meteor Society at 30 to 50 from genuinely rural skies, which is the honest number for anyone driving out of the city. Best window is midnight to dawn, looking north; give your eyes half an hour to adjust and leave the phone in your pocket. The debris belongs to comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle, not due back until 2125.

Somerville

Somerville is closing out the bid process on the quick-build portions of the Elm-Beacon Connector and has already started swapping signs, a senior planner in the city’s Mobility Department told Cambridge Day, with Thanksgiving as the target. The work calms Elm Street at Willow Avenue and at The Mix, adds a raised crosswalk at Cherry Street by the Kennedy school, turns Mossland Street into a “Neighborhood Way,” and runs a separated bike lane from Davis Square to Union Square. Cambridge is doing matching work on Beech Street.

Cambridge

Ahmed Abdelsalam, a sixth grader at Darby Vassal Upper School, is one of ten national finalists for the 3M Young Scientist Challenge. His device, which he named VERDA, uses a magnetic fluid to turn motion — walking, wind, waves — into an electrical charge that powers the device itself. Seven months of work went into it, three of them spent stopping the fluid leaking out through microscopic holes in his 3D prints, and he taught himself the design software to get there.

Business

Scott Van Voorhis uses his Banker & Tradesman column to ask what accountability looks like at MassHousing, the state’s quasi-public lender, after Boston Globe Spotlight reporting in June found the agency had paid $1.4 million to two developers on invoices naming subcontractors who told the Globe they had never done the work. The executive who awarded that money later bought a West Roxbury home from the same pair below the original asking price without disclosing the connection, the Globe reported; he resigned last month from a $255,000 job. A separate sprinkler-grant program is the subject of a further claim, which the operator involved denies.