"How to live in a Boston micro unit" by Beth Teitell | Globe Staff July 05, 2014
Elkanah Reed, 28, single, and the cofounder of a Scoopr Media, a social-media marketing startup, wants to get to know himself better. For help on his journey, he’s not turning to a guru or a meditation coach, but rather to his studio apartment.
We would rather shock ourselves than meditate, thank you.
“Living in a small space allows me to do that — it forces me to focus my life,” he said, as he stood in the middle of his Innovation District rental in the glossy new 315 on A apartments and gave a (very short) tour of his “living room,” “kitchen,” and “bedroom,” all essentially one.
“I don’t have the time and space for things that are superfluous,” he added, noting that he allows himself to keep only two back issues of Inc. magazine. “It’s an outward representation of how I think.”
That reminds me; I need to start throwing out some Globes and stop buying them. Good for them my friend likes the sports.
As rents approach stratospheric levels in many areas of the city, Boston is allowing construction of smaller apartments — studios in South Boston’s Innovation District can be less than 450 square feet. But those who live in Tweet-sized units know it takes certain adjustments, and they have advice to offer — wisdom that even McMansion dwellers might find beneficial.
Among the lessons: Don’t eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner in bed (even if it is in your “kitchen”). Take a zero-tolerance approach to clutter (buy a new T-shirt, offload an existing one). Host only people you like.
But nods to practicality are only part of it. Cozy living can bring deeper wisdom....
I gotta get outta here! I gotta get outta here! I gotta get outta here!
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Related:
Senior Citizen Cell
Occupy-Supplied Outhouse
I don't know about you, but I feel like the walls are closing in.
Time to get out of Boston:
"Boston’s residency rule routinely flouted; Globe review finds scores of violators have decamped to the suburbs. Mayor Walsh vows to rein in the exceptions" by Andrew Ryan | Globe Staff July 06, 2014
Thirteen of the 22 top leaders in Boston’s Police Department live outside the city in apparent violation of the city’s residency requirement, a law frequently ignored and weakly enforced, according to a Globe analysis of payroll and property records.
So in other words, Walsh was getting all worked up about a problem that didn't really exist and he now finds himself on the other side of the issue??
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The Globe identified at least 50 municipal employees living in the suburbs in apparent violation of the residency requirement. But there may be hundreds more violating the spirit of the law, if not the letter: Many School Department employees — nurses, psychologists, guidance counselors, and others — have been allowed to ignore the residency requirement and live in the suburbs.
In the four decades since the residency rule was introduced — it arrived at a time when the city was hemorrhaging middle-class families — a simple idea has been overtaken by a contradictory patchwork of ordinances, state laws, and labor contracts. At times, tradition, as much as statute, has dictated application of the policy, allowing some employees to live in the suburbs because of the vagueness of the rules.
What do you do when that has happened to a nation?
The city’s newly elected mayor, Martin J. Walsh, saw firsthand the perils of trying to amend the residency rule when his plan to exempt select top officials from the requirement provoked a fierce backlash.
Much ado about nothing!
I'd rather that not spoil the imagery and illusion of the conventional myths that we live under and are repeated ad nauseum, so....
Walsh said he was not prepared to terminate the employment of longtime municipal workers living outside the city, especially members of the police command staff, even though the law calls for firing employees who flout the residency requirement.
“I’m not going to fire people in the city of Boston, but I am going to correct the situation as best we can,” Walsh said in an interview. “We have our legal department looking at it right now, and then we are going to have to take a deeper dive. How do we enforce the law? How is the law distributed, meaning who is exempt and who is not exempt?”
Translation: the LAW means NOTHING in BOSTON!
Look at the contortions and conniptions he's doing?
How can ENFORCING the LAW be that hard?
The employees identified by the Globe were not exactly hiding where they lived. The city payroll office listed the employees’ home addresses in the suburbs. The Globe review — which involved analyzing employees’ home ZIP codes, date of hire, and union status — determined that the residency law has been arbitrarily applied and unevenly enforced.
“There seem to be so many exclusions and rules. There is no real pattern to residency that we can actually come up with.” Walsh said. “My responsibility as mayor of the city is to get [the residency law] under control and come up with a policy that people will understand and follow.”
I'm sick of lame-ass excuses, you?
The ordinance has become so porous that only 43 percent of Boston’s nearly 18,000 employees are now required to live in the city. Still, even if they’re not required to live in the city, most do: According to the payroll, roughly two-thirds of municipal workers call Boston home. Higher-paid city employees are more likely to live in the suburbs, the Globe review found.
Once again CLA$$ is the REAL DIVIDING LINE here!
Now watch the paper that is of and for the elite of Bo$ton do its job and get the serfs at each others throats:
The inconsistency of the residency policy is perhaps most stark in schools. Joe Fidler is a night-shift custodian who earns roughly $17 an hour cleaning the former Hyde Park High School, a building now occupied by two schools.
See: Doing the Bare Minimum For This Post
It's just a janitor job.
With eight years on the job, Fidler is required to live in Boston, and he just moved with his wife and two children to Hyde Park from a three-bedroom apartment in Roslindale because they could no longer afford the rent.
In the building Fidler cleans, 10 teachers and other classroom instructors who have not worked for the city as long as he has live in the suburbs, according to payroll records. Almost all of the instructors are paid more than Fidler, according to payroll records, but they commute from Malden, Quincy, and other towns where property can be less expensive than Boston.
“Why should they be able to live outside the city and I can’t?” asked Fidler, who rents because he said he cannot afford to purchase a home in Boston. “We’re in the same school. What’s fair for one isn’t fair for the other.”
Teachers and other classroom instructors are exempt under state law from the residency requirement, but the statute does not specifically address other School Department employees represented by the Boston Teachers Union.
The School Department has not forced the issue, resulting in an inequitable system that disproportionately affects lower-paid workers.
Working in the school department leads to an education, because that is this whole $ociety in a nut$hell.
Most other unionized city employees — including custodians who mop school hallways — must live in Boston for a decade before having the option of moving out of the city.
Been there, done that, my self-esteem took a real hit.
“A lot of teachers do live in the city, but I’d love to see more,” Walsh said, adding, “If I was a custodian that would probably bother me a little bit.”
The residency requirement still has its staunch defenders, including Walsh, who said he favors residency in “99.9 percent of cases.” Another is Eileen Boyle, a longtime crusader for the residency policy who led a push to toughen the requirement in the 1990s. She credits the law for creating stable neighborhoods filled with municipal workers.
But Boyle expressed frustration that city officials have ignored violators for years.
“There’s a culture of don’t say anything and the department heads don’t do anything,” said Boyle, who serves on the Boston Residency Compliance Commission, a body created to enforce the law. “If your leadership doesn’t care, it’s not going to trickle down. I just feel so bad for the people who are following the rules.”
Some analysts argue that the residency law has outlived its usefulness in a city with a surging population and rising housing costs.
Related: Luxury housing: Don’t just build for Kremlin cronies, global elite
But that is all that is driving the economy.
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Big cities across the nation adopted residency policies in the 1970s hoping to combat urban flight. Boston was not immune from that phenomenon, as the city’s population shrank 20 percent over two decades. But Boston’s residency requirement has been, from the start, a convoluted remedy.
For example, top city officials and mayoral appointees have historically been given six months to move to the city, a courtesy Walsh recently extended to a year. But the legal foundation for the grace period is questionable, according to John McGonagle, who has served as chairman of the residency compliance commission since its inception.
“That’s kind of a mayoral amendment. It’s kind of evolved over the years,” McGonagle said, adding in an e-mail, “My understanding of the residency ordinance [that] has been explained to us by corporate [counsel], is that this ordinance provides for no exemptions, delays, or ‘phase in’ periods for any employee.”
Meaning the dictator, 'er, mayor of Boston is breaking the law!
Can you impeach a mayor?
*************
And if so, who could they get to do the job?
In the early 1990s, Mayor Thomas M. Menino strengthened the city law, creating the Boston Residency Compliance Commission. He appointed McGonagle, his Hyde Park neighbor, as chairman, a post he has held as an unpaid volunteer for two decades. The get-tough-on-residency push grabbed headlines. In one instance, a blind man with cerebral palsy who had worked for the city for 10 years was forced to resign.
After nearly a decade, the Menino administration softened. The residency requirement became a bargaining chip to help settle labor contracts. Now, all of the city’s unions except one have secured the right for employees to move out of Boston after 10 years on the job.
The commission has one paid investigator, and in the last 20 years, 150 employees have been forced off the city payroll for living in the suburbs. That includes 69 employees caught living outside of Boston; 81 others resigned before they could be fired. The commission is reactive by design and only responds to complaints, McGonagle said. It does not proactively hunt for violators.
The senior members of many city departments live outside Boston. Take the Boston Fire Department. Of the 65 highest-ranking members, only 14 live in Boston. With the exception of the fire commissioner, all top members of the department are members of the union. The union contract allows them to move to the suburbs after 10 years on the job.
Then there’s the police command staff. All 22 of the top-ranking officers worked their way up through the union, meaning they could move out of the city after 10 years. But because they moved into management, they are out of the union, and therefore no long covered by the 10-year exemption in union contracts.
McGonagle described the police command staff as a “gray area” unique to the police department.
Amazing how the Globe steered your outrage and anger at the teachers and schools first, no
Boyle, another member of the residency compliance commission, said she thought any nonunion employee “should be living in the city.” Vivian Leonard, Boston’s human resources director, agreed that nonunion employees must live in the city.
“You need to move back in,” Leonard said. “If you’re in the union and you get promoted to a nonunion position, you have to. Absolutely.”
Walsh said having members of the command staff live outside Boston was “a concern of mine.”
“If they are actually not in compliance with the residency requirement, I am not going to change my command staff,” Walsh said. “But I am going to fix the problem.”
All right!
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Also see:
Walsh's World
Walsh Takes Up Residency
I'm dropping it.
NEXT DAY UPDATE: Residency requirement is a joke
So is continuing to $pin my wheels doing this.
