 Business Monday · Monday Edition Monday, August 31, 2026 | The Daily Spotlight · Presented By Warrior Ice Arena Skate where the Bruins practice – Brighton’s home rink. | Sponsored advertisement | Weather 🌤️ 80° / 61° Mostly sunny, high near 80, northeast wind around 6 mph, and no rain in the daytime forecast. It turns after dark: rain showers become likely overnight at a 60 percent chance, with patchy fog, and Tuesday is 71 with rain showers · full forecast → | The T Right Now ● RL ● OL ● GL ● BL The Orange Line is back. The eleven-day suspension between Oak Grove and Back Bay ended overnight, and the crowding notice the T had posted for the Green Line ended with it. Green still has Brandon Hall bypassed on the C branch through Oct 4 and Symphony closed on the E. Red and Blue are normal · live status → | Roads MassDOT’s weekday lane work restarts this morning north of the city: Route 28 and Route 16 in Medford and the Mystic Valley Parkway connector from 7am to 3:30pm, Route 28 and Route 38 in Somerville from 9am to 3pm, and Route 2A in Lexington from 7am. Midday it is I-93 southbound, with intermittent lane closures from Stoneham down to Somerville between 10am and 2pm. Overnight work runs on I-93 both directions and on I-95 through Waltham. |
| The number: 350 — how many Massachusetts cities and towns draw their zoning authority from Chapter 40A, the statute Beacon Hill keeps amending to get more homes built. Boston is not one of them. Day 243 of 2026. the business page → | ⚾️ Red Sox drop the finale 16-1 at Yankee Stadium — a Sunday loss after splitting Saturday’s doubleheader, 6-0 in the opener and 9-2 in the nightcap. Seattle is at Fenway tonight at 6:45 · full scoreboard → | 💼 Business Monday The reforms that stop at the city line Three stories about the built city and who pays for it: the state zoning overhaul Boston is legally exempt from, the $23 million two waterfront institutions are spending to keep the harbor out of their basements, and a study asking whether that same harbor could heat downtown instead. Zoning · Policy 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. Read more → | Waterfront The Boston Children’s Museum broke ground this month 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; next year 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 closes Sept. 18. Read more → | Energy City and state officials have launched BosTEN — the Boston-Area Thermal Energy Network — 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. Read more → |
On the business calendar this week: the BPL’s free Business and Beyond book club takes on small-business taxes, online Tuesday; the city’s Office of Small Business holds Business Certification office hours Wednesday; and the Venture Café Thursday Gathering at CIC Cambridge takes on AI, quantum and the tools reshaping work, free with registration. | Bring whatever you are reading or whatever you are trying to finish writing, and sit with other people doing the same thing in silence. The lowest-effort way to leave the house on a Monday. | The Atlanta rapper brings the Xperimenting run to Lansdowne Street. Tuesday is the wet day, and this one is indoors. | The Everett brewery’s beer garden on the Greenway, five minutes from South Station and built for the walk home from the Financial District. | The poet and comedian’s stand-up tour lands at the Wilbur for one night, if you want something on the books for the long weekend. |
| Local MBTA Transit Police say the man entered the station around 1 p.m. Saturday with a woman, both carrying flags of Caribbean countries on the day of the Boston Caribbean Carnival. Police say the woman was unsteady on her feet, lost her balance on the platform and fell backward into the right-of-way; the man, trying to help her up, fell with her and landed on the electrified rail. He was pronounced dead at the scene. The woman was taken to hospital. Investigators do not suspect foul play, the case remains under investigation, and Transit Police called it a horrific tragedy in offering condolences to his family. Per NBC10 Boston. Read more → | Politics Massachusetts votes in its party primaries on Tuesday, Sept. 1 — the same day the city does its September moving weekend. Several State House seats around Cambridge and Somerville are genuinely contested, and Cambridge Day published a primer on Thursday walking through the competitive races district by district, drawn from its own campaign reporting, candidate websites and public forums; it compares where each candidate stands on affordability and on transparency in the Legislature. Worth ten minutes before you get to the booth. Read more → | Education MIT evacuated Building 18 — the I.M. Pei-designed Dreyfus Chemistry Building on Ames Street — on Wednesday after a spill involving dimethyl mercury. The institute’s emergency management office said Saturday that one person in a chemistry laboratory had gone to a local emergency room claiming to have synthesized the compound, that an initial blood test showed no sign of mercury exposure, and that the building would stay closed at least through Sunday while it was decontaminated. An email to the chemistry department obtained by Cambridge Day said the substance “was not part of any MIT research program, and its presence in the lab was unauthorized,” and that lab members and others who had been on the second floor were contacted for surveillance testing. Dimethyl mercury is extraordinarily toxic: a researcher died months after being exposed to a few drops of it in 1997. Read more → | Business Boston Fry House is now open at 22 Kneeland Street in Chinatown, between Harrison Avenue and Washington Street, with a menu built around chicken tenders, fried clams, calamari, haddock nuggets, wings, onion rings and fried pickles. Boston Restaurant Talk wrote it up on Friday, citing Boston.com. Read more → |
| Forward this to a Boston founder. One email, every morning at 6:30, and Monday is always the money. Send them here → | Tomorrow: Transit Tuesday — the whole board before your commute, on primary day, with the Orange Line running again. You are reading Business Monday, the Monday edition of The Daily Boston Brief. ExploreBoston.com is wicked proud to be a local Boston small business. ExploreBoston · 1 Beacon Street, Floor 15, Boston, MA 02108 |
|