Boston Business

Boston will forgive $33 million in taxes to get 1,400 approved apartments built Four large projects already approved but not under construction would get targeted tax abatements under a $33 million proposal the Wu administration announced in mid-September 2026: Fulcrum Global Investors’ 408-unit, 16-story tower at 1 Mystic Ave. in Charlestown, Hines’ 318-unit building at 22-24 Pratt St. in Allston, Nordblom Company’s 333-unit complex at 83 Leo Birmingham Parkway in Brighton, and the 341-unit building D at Allston Yards. The deals are Chapter 121A tax agreements and, as of the announcement, still needed the assessors’ sign-off. Chief of Planning Kairos Shen said at a Sept. 14, 2026 briefing that roughly a dozen other stalled projects of at least 100 units apiece are in play for future abatements, which together could add about 4,000 units. The announcement landed alongside real frustration that Boston is treating this project by project instead of rezoning. Boston is exempt from Chapter 40A, the state Zoning Act, so its zoning is the mayor’s to change, and the administration’s own upzoning program, Squares + Streets, has rezoned one neighborhood area since 2023: Roslindale Square. “Our suburban communities, at least on paper, have higher density to allow multifamily housing near transit than the city of Boston does near subway or light rail lines,” says Jesse Kanson-Benanav of Abundant Housing MA, who calls the neighborhood-by-neighborhood approach a way of “elevating the voices of those who are opposed.” Boston still requires a 20 percent income-restricted component in any development of seven units or more, and while Chelsea and Waltham both scaled their requirements back earlier in 2026, the city has not. Per Banker & Tradesman’s Steve Adams. More

The SJC has closed off the last big argument against the MBTA Communities law The Supreme Judicial Court rejected Marshfield’s bid to avoid the 2021 law that requires cities and towns near the MBTA to zone for multifamily development — unanimously, on every argument the town raised. In a 22-page decision upholding a lower court’s dismissal, Justice Serge Georges Jr. wrote that Marshfield’s complaint “does not plausibly allege” that the act imposed an unfunded local mandate, the town’s central claim; the state constitution bars the Legislature from imposing substantial costs on municipalities without a funding source, but the court found Marshfield never showed the rezoning cost it anything beyond ordinary administrative work. The court also called the act a “valid general law,” and held that the town and its select board lacked standing to bring a constitutional claim on behalf of town meeting voters. This is the second time the SJC has upheld the law, after a 2025 ruling that made it enforceable by the attorney general’s office; a few dozen holdout communities had been waiting on this one. Attorney General Andrea Campbell applauded the decision on the afternoon of Friday, Sept. 18, 2026. Per CommonWealth Beacon’s Jennifer Smith. More

Mike & Patty’s is taking the old Johnny Pomodoro space on Main Street in Charlestown The breakfast-and-sandwich group is moving into 297 Main St., a storefront that was Johnny Pomodoro and, before that, New Speedy Chen’s. The plan surfaced in the Friends of Boston’s Hidden Restaurants Facebook group and is confirmed on the company’s own site, where the address is listed as coming soon; no opening date had been announced as of Sept. 21, 2026. It would be the seventh Mike & Patty’s counter, joining the original in Bay Village, High Street Place downtown, Logan Airport, Jamaica Plain and Bow Market in Somerville, plus a collaboration with Flourhouse Bakery in Newton’s Nonantum. The interesting part for Charlestown is that a neighborhood in line for part of the city’s proposed $33 million in tax breaks — including 408 apartments at 1 Mystic Ave. — is, in the meantime, filling its vacant storefronts with small local operators rather than chains. Per Boston Restaurant Talk. More

Towns now get the first say on data centers, and at least 16 have already pushed back At least 16 Massachusetts communities have taken steps to limit data centers, through proposed or approved moratoriums or outright bans on large facilities, according to a count by Boston-based Hunneman. Since early September 2026 they also hold the first move: Gov. Maura Healey’s executive order, which she discussed at the State House on Sept. 8, 2026, requires a data center developer to get a benefits agreement approved by the host community before it pursues state approvals. Banker & Tradesman’s Steve Adams reports the order could end a potential construction boom before it starts. M. Matthew Madden Jr., a partner at Bowditch, reads it more narrowly: “It’s not saying data centers are not allowed here,” only that the communities, ratepayers and taxpayers who live there “will be on the front line of making these decisions.” The market was small to begin with. Massachusetts has 168 megawatts of existing data-center capacity across 58 facilities, per Baxtel Advisory, while Greater Atlanta had 2,882 megawatts under construction in the first half of 2026 alone, per CBRE, and CoStar’s Juan Arias says the state’s commercial electricity rates, third-highest in the country behind Hawaii and California, already discourage developers, and expects short-term demand for hyperscale data centers here to stay low. The administration had halted the data-center sales-and-use tax break in June 2026. The local fights are specific: Plymouth’s Select Board has unanimously recommended a one-year moratorium to its Oct. 17, 2026 town meeting, Westfield passed one in July 2026, and in Lowell a Middlesex Superior Court judge in August 2026 blocked installation of eight new 3,000-kilowatt generators at Markley Group’s 352,000-square-foot data center while a suit by ten residents is heard. “The key issue is: Will the towns let them build, and will they be able to underwrite it?” asks Hunneman’s Mark Fallon. More

Boston Medical Center’s nurses have voted to authorize a three-day strike Nearly 2,000 registered and licensed practical nurses at Boston Medical Center’s main campus, together with about 70 nurses at the BMC-affiliated Brockton Behavioral Health Center, voted in person and online on Sept. 9 and 10, 2026, and nearly 90 percent of those voting authorized a three-day strike. They are represented by 1199SEIU United Healthcare Workers East and had been bargaining with BMC management for more than six months at the time of the vote. An authorization is not a walkout: federal labor law requires ten days’ notice before any strike at a hospital, and as of Sept. 14, 2026, no notice had been issued. The two sides were next scheduled to meet at the table on Friday, Sept. 25, 2026. Per WHDH 7News. More

Committee’s parent company is suing the restaurateur behind Kaia and Krasi Demetri Tsolakis, 43, runs Xenia Greek Hospitality: Kaia in the South End, the Back Bay mezze and wine bar Krasi, Bar Vlaha in Brookline, the lounge Hecate and the fast-casual Greco, at seven locations as of September 2026, with his 12th restaurant due later in 2026. For the better part of a decade before that he worked at Committee, the Seaport restaurant owned by George Aboujaoude, who hired him young. In March, Committee’s parent company, Pier 50, sued Tsolakis in Suffolk Superior Court, alleging that while working at Committee he misappropriated more than $1 million of its money on barstools, flatware, plates, floral arrangements and interior design, cleaning, printing and branding services for his own restaurants. Tsolakis denies all of it, and says he learned of the suit when a legal reporter called for comment. His lawyers have filed a third-party complaint seeking to shift responsibility for any financial mismanagement onto Committee’s outside bookkeeping firm; Pier 50’s attorney, David Rich, answers that the firm was retained to process payments as Tsolakis directed, not to audit the books. Aboujaoude says the decision to sue was made by Pier 50’s investors, not by him. Nothing has been proven: as of September 2026 the case is in discovery, and Rich hopes for a trial in late 2027. Per Boston Magazine’s Wyndham Lewis, who interviewed both men. More

The gap at Encore is $10 an hour, and it has 1,300 workers on the sidewalk The unions want a $10-an-hour raise phased over three years for non-tipped workers and $5 for tipped ones — the number at the center of the strike that began at Encore Boston Harbor on the morning of Sept. 4, 2026. Hourly wages in the bargaining unit run from $15 to $32, according to the union, and the increase is pitched as the amount that would put a five-star casino level with the union hotels downtown. “If we’re a five-star worker, we should at least get what a Hampton Inn employee gets,” Seth Ogilvie, communications director for UNITE HERE Local 26, told GBH News. More than 1,300 workers — housekeepers, cooks, slot attendants, drivers, grounds crew — are covered by the contract that expired Aug. 31; about 100 walked off that first morning, and more than 100 were still on the line Sept. 5. Money is not the whole of it: both unions are also fighting to keep job-security language and healthcare from the last contract, including a clause guaranteeing a set number of staff a minimum number of hours, which workers say Encore wants to drop and which Encore, asked by GBH, denies trying to drop. Wynn Resorts says it is committed to a deal that is “fair, financially sustainable and protects jobs for the long term,” and offers its own arithmetic: an average compensation-and-benefits package above $95,000 a year for union-represented employees, and union wages and benefits up 36.8 percent over four years against revenue growth of 1.9 percent. Everett’s mayor, Robert J. Van Campen, walked the picket line Sept. 5. The casino stayed open throughout. More

The firm behind Suffolk Downs is buying strip malls and church land instead HYM Investment Group is the Boston firm known for the biggest and slowest things in the city — Bulfinch Crossing downtown, the Suffolk Downs redevelopment in East Boston and Revere. In the financing climate of 2026 its growth is coming from somewhere else entirely: 55-and-over rental communities in the suburbs, built on land nobody else is competing for. Chief investment officer Doug Manz, who has been at the firm since 2009, told Banker & Tradesman his job is finding underused strip malls and college- and church-owned parcels in towns whose demographics fit — the average resident age in these buildings is around 79 or 80. Arlington cleared a rezoning in May 2026 for 145 units at the former St. Camillus church site. There is a 20-acre parcel in Weston under contract from Regis College, and 184 units planned at the old Benny’s plaza in Plymouth. The model is deliberately small next to the old continuing-care campuses, 150 to 200 units against 2,000, and it is rental rather than a large buy-in, with independent living, assisted living and memory care in one building and roughly two-thirds of it independent. The partner is NexCore of Denver, whose Experience Senior Living arm operates the buildings. What makes the cost different from ordinary apartments, Manz said, is not the apartments: it is the commercial kitchen, three restaurant-style dining rooms, a secured memory-care floor, pools and fitness and craft rooms, and running the shuttle vans. More

After 37 years in Central Square, Brookline Lunch is taking the old L Street Diner Brookline Lunch has been doing breakfast plates and Mediterranean cooking on Brookline Street in Cambridge for 37 years, and it had never had a second location. That changes at 108 L Street in South Boston, the room the L Street Diner ran out of, which the owners say they had quietly been working on for four months. Boston Restaurant Talk reported the expansion on Sept. 4, 2026, and the business’s own announcement said it was “racing toward opening,” with the first plates hoped for within about a week of that and new signage still to come. Two things make it notable. One is the arithmetic of the neighborhood: a 37-year-old independent taking over a shuttered diner is the opposite of the direction most of these stories run. The other is what the owners said themselves, which was less a growth announcement than a hedge — that no second room will ever make the magic the original did. More

None of Beacon Hill’s recent zoning reforms apply to Boston Chapter 40A of the General Laws hands 350 Massachusetts cities and towns their zoning authority, and it is the statute the Legislature keeps amending to get more homes built: the 2021 MBTA Communities law that ordered 177 municipalities to zone a multifamily district by right near transit, the 2024 Affordable Homes Act that legalized in-law apartments and backyard cottages in single-family districts, and a change tucked into the fiscal 2027 budget that replaced the old “substantial hardship” test for zoning variances with the far easier “practical difficulty.” Boston is covered by none of it. Its zoning comes from a separate, 70-year-old state statute, the Boston Zoning Enabling Act, which is why a homeowner in Milton or Quincy may soon add a second or third unit as of right while a homeowner 500 feet away across the Neponset cannot. Luc Schuster, executive director of the Boston Foundation research center Boston Indicators, told Banker & Tradesman that statewide changes can be great, but “there’s a big donut hole in that approach when Boston is exempt.” The shortfall all of this is aimed at runs to roughly 222,000 units statewide; the accessory-apartment law produced just over 1,200 permits in its first year against the administration’s own target of 1,600 to 2,000, with 854 approved in the first half of 2026. More

Two waterfront institutions are spending $23 million of their own money on flood defense The Boston Children’s Museum broke ground in August 2026 on a nearly $15 million coastal resiliency project at its Fort Point home, eight years after a 2018 coastal storm pushed the channel over the Harborwalk at its front door and water ran into a crawl space off Sleeper Street. CEO Carole Charnow told Banker & Tradesman that local philanthropies kept answering her fundraising pitch with questions rather than cheques — why not move, why isn’t the city paying, how do we fund you when everyone else will ask too — until a $7 million gift from the New Balance Foundation carried it over the line. This phase runs a synthetic rubber membrane more than four feet up the base of the 1888 warehouse; in 2027 the mechanical plant moves to higher floors and a cistern holding 2,507 cubic feet of flood water goes into the old loading dock. Across the harbor the New England Aquarium is spending $8 million on Central Wharf, which has water on three sides and faces a harbor projected to rise about 40 inches by 2070; it has already replaced a steam pipe that past flooding corroded and is lifting basement HVAC to the roof. The Army Corps of Engineers barrier meant to protect the whole waterfront is not expected to start construction until the 2030s at the earliest, and its public comment period runs through Sept. 18, 2026. More

The city is studying whether the harbor can heat and cool its buildings City and state officials launched BosTEN — the Boston-Area Thermal Energy Network — in August 2026, a year-long feasibility study into whether Boston Harbor, Fort Point Channel and the Charles and Mystic rivers could heat and cool large buildings through networks of heat pumps, energy transfer stations and underground pipe. The Massachusetts Clean Energy Center put up a $500,000 grant, the engineering firm Salas O’Brien and five subcontractors are doing the work, and the Boston Green Ribbon Commission is administering it. The technology is not speculative: Toronto draws on Lake Ontario, Esbjerg in Denmark on the North Sea, and UMass Boston has cooled its Columbia Point campus with cold seawater from this harbor for years. “Geothermal energy is definitely having its moment right now,” the commission’s executive director Lindsey Butler told Banker & Tradesman. What the study has to answer is which commercial districts could actually be plumbed for it, and at what cost. More

Massachusetts banks wrote 44 percent more commercial real estate loans Bank commercial real estate loan volume across the state rose 44 percent year over year in the first six months of 2026, on the Warren Group data behind Banker & Tradesman’s annual Fast 50 ranking of the fastest-growing lenders. Originations were up 46 percent on the same basis by the brokerage Newmark’s count, and its national head of commercial capital markets research, Joe Biasi, says regional banks did the largest share of it in the first two quarters — private lenders taking market share, he argues, is not the same thing as banks pulling back. The sharpest single climb on the list belongs to Reading Cooperative Bank, up 338.6 percent statewide, partly on ten loans worth $20.27 million for projects in Lawrence. More

A Brighton battery project finds a path around the local approvals Flatiron Energy’s Project Lite Brite — a 62,000-square-foot battery storage facility on a 2.8-acre site at 35 Electric Ave in Brighton — paused its Boston permitting in June 2025 after opposition from neighbors and elected officials. Boston’s new clean energy zoning, approved by the BPDA board in August 2026 and, as of Aug 24, 2026, still awaiting final sign-off from the Zoning Commission, is written so that a project of that size can bypass local approvals; a BPDA spokesperson says its fate now sits with the state Energy Facilities Siting Board, which gets a maximum of 15 months to review. State Sen. William Brownsberger’s comment letter to the Planning Department raised fire risk from lithium-ion batteries next to a dense residential neighborhood; the company has said the site would help fill the gap left by the Mystic Generating Station’s 2024 closure. More

A legal foundation says 150 owners who appealed got their assessments put back The Pioneer New England Legal Foundation said in mid-August 2026 that over the previous two years Boston agreed to lower assessments on more than 150 struggling office and commercial buildings, then raised them back to the previous year’s levels in retaliation against owners who had filed for abatements. The foundation, the legal arm of the Pioneer Institute, says the figure came out of discovery in the lawsuit it filed in 2025, and that it had previously identified only a few dozen affected buildings; it says owners learned of the change only when the bills arrived, with a cryptic “ATB dispute” notation on the property card. The Wu administration denies all wrongdoing, and the practice appears to have stopped. This is Scott Van Voorhis’s Commercial Interests column in Banker & Tradesman — the allegations are Pioneer’s, and they are untested in court. More

16.6 million square feet of lab space, and 2.45 million wanted Local brokerages were tracking up to 16.6 million square feet of empty lab space across the region in mid-August 2026, against the 2.45 million square feet of companies actively looking that CBRE counted. Suburban lab rents still asked north of $71 a foot against a 29 percent vacancy rate, and some landlords had already blinked — Alexandria leased nearly 160,000 square feet in Andover to a semiconductor firm at a starting base rent of $17. Lenders took back BioMed Realty’s 321 Harrison Ave and 1000 Washington St in the South End. The construction pipeline was down to 2.1 million square feet, and Alexandria’s 421 Park in the Fenway, finished in June, was the last lab built on spec without a tenant. More

Harvard’s academic workers have a strike authorized and no date on it Harvard Academic Workers-UAW represents about 2,600 researchers, teachers and instructors across several Harvard schools. Of the 1,366 members who voted in the authorization ballot, which ran from late March to July 25, almost 94 percent voted yes — well past the two thirds required. Cambridge Day reported on Aug 14 that no strike date had been set, after 44 bargaining sessions since September 2024 over protections for non-citizen workers, recourse on discrimination and harassment, job security, workload and pay, with raises and cost-of-living adjustments frozen throughout. Harvard’s graduate student union ended a 40-day strike on June 1 without an agreement. More

Sweet Cheeks Q and Fool’s Errand are both closing on Nov 24 Tiffani Faison is not renewing the lease on either Fenway room — Sweet Cheeks Q at 1381 Boylston, the barbecue place she opened fifteen years ago, or Fool’s Errand next door at 1377, which shares its liquor license — and both serve their last night on Nov 24, 2026. Boston Restaurant Talk reported the closings on Aug 14 off an interview she gave Boston.com, in which she cited fuel surcharges, tariffs on imported goods, food costs up across the board, and a payroll she describes as a fair wage that is genuinely hard to carry. More