bpchesney.org

The candidates for Senate in the Special Election to fill the seat vacated by the death of Ted Kennedy filed their first disclosures today with the FEC on the amount of money they’ve raised.  As reported, Martha Coakley and Alan Khazei have raised considerable sums of money in a short amount of time: $2 M for Martha in a month and $1 M for Alan in a week.  Below is a chart showing the funds raised by the 5 candidates.

Pagliuca has actually disclosed $200,000 but $50,000 of that cannot be used in the primary due to campaign finance restrictions.  An individual may only contribute up to $4800 in the primary and $4800 in the general election.  Capuano started out with $1.2 M in his war chest banked from previous campaigns.

I just came from the opening conversation for the Housing Cities 2009 symposium.  It was a discussion primarily by Sandra Henriquez, the head of the Boston Housing Authority, prompted by Lawrence Vale, a professor at MIT.  The salient points seemed to be these:

• Make public housing look like multi-family housing
  • Maintain compliance to the same set of standards and eliminate the bureaucracy associated with publicly-funded housing
  • Add the ability to finance/leverage public housing to make improvements
  • Learn property management principles from private management
• Blend publicly-subsidized and unsubsidized housing in the same development
  • Higher income renters set a standard for the quality and care of the site
  • Helps encourage low income tenants to pay their rent on time because they feel like the neighborhood will improve with the influx of unsubsidized renters
• Decouple social services and property management
  • Sends a mixed message when the property management has to both run a business and act as a social worker
  • Decoupling allows the property to be managed as any other real estate asset which can make upgrades
• Green building
  • Photovoltaic panels have been installed on the roof of a HOPE VI project, Maverick Gardens, near the Maverick T stop.  It is one, if not the, first public housing project to be LEED certified.
• Ms. Henriquez’s dream state
  • High density, high physical profile affordable housing that blends into its surroundings through a connection to less affordable, lower housing.  There would be a scale of height and affordability, all under the same housing development — this is based on a model in Vancouver.  This would help the neighborhood integrate seamlessly together.

(But who are the middle class folks who will act as the bridge and what’s their incentive?)

It was a very interesting conversation and Ms. Henriquez did an admirable job of providing a background in the challenges facing federally-funded housing today.

On espn.com, John Clayton pegs the player’s salaries as 60% of the NFL’s total expenses.  He also reiterates a now widely-circulated number of $25 million of profit for each team in 2008.  He also refers to a report issued by Chicago Partners on the state of NFL finances that I’m currently unable to find.