Here’s the NewTV/Newton League of Women Voters debate between incumbent Brenda Noel and Lisa Gordon for the Ward 6 City Council seat.
VIDEO: Ward 6 City Council forum between Lisa Gordon and Brenda Noel
by Village 14 | Sep 20, 2019 | City Council, Newton | 35 comments
At about the 26:00 mark, during a discussion about Riverside and Northland, Lisa Gordon makes this very true remark about Needham…
Gordon is right, Needham has done a great job growing its commercial tax revenue just on the other side of the river, attracting employers such as TripAdvisor, SharkNinja and Big Belly solar here.
But what Gordon, might not know is that Needham has also added hundreds of units of multi-family housing right next to those employers. Those businesses have said that locating this housing next to them is important to their decision to locate here. (And it helped the town meet its 40B requirement!) Newton can derive the same commercial tax growth by building robust mixed use projects at Northland and Riverside.
Too bad there was no discussion of single-use plastic in the “environment” segment.
I didn’t vote for Brenda Noel. She was a big charter supporter and then was running for a ward seat . Seemed a bit opportunistic/hypocritical. I also recall some there being some questionable tactics against Dick Schwartz. I don’t recall the specifics, just issues around gender and age. So I started watching hoping to like Lisa Gordon. And I did!. I found her much more credible and realistic. But that said, I know she was one of the founders of Opt Out Newton and I didn’t like their tactics anymore than the Pro Charter folks. So I may just sit this one out
@Claire, I also remember there were some underhanded shenanigans with Brenda Noel’s campaign against Dick Blazer. Does anybody remember? I vaguely think she got his website or Facebook page taken down or something like that.
@Laurie, yes that sounds familiar I was holding a sign for Scott Lennon at the Hynes Center on election day and Dick Blazer (sorry not Schwartz) wife and daughter were there and they were so upset
Well that sounds like an entirely baseless, fact-free accusation.
How can someone else take down another person’s Facebook page or website?
Let’s stick to things we know to be true, not vague fuzzy memories that also make no sense.
I think Brenda was fantastic!
One quick thing that stood out to me: Lisa Gordon said she didn’t have any proposal for addressing housing for people with very low income, but would learn.
Learning is admirable, but Brenda works with people with disabilities, many of whom are low income, and she knows their needs.
This is a stark difference between the candidates.
These comments about Brenda seem to me to be to be sexist, frankly. Local political contests are often tough. In most campaigns I’ve seen, candidates work hard and fight fiercely for their point of view. And that’s what Brenda has been doing and she should be commended for it. She hasn’t done anything underhanded at all. She’s vocal about her views and unafraid to challenge the status quo. And that’s fantastic. More of that please. GO BRENDA. I am grateful for all the time she has invested in this City and I know she will be re-elected this fall.
@Laurie, it is really flattering for you or anyone to suggest that those of us who worked tirelessly alongside Brenda during her last campaign had the ability or drive to do something as outrageous and (I assume?) difficult as take down a social media site. I can assure you that your irresponsible accusation is completely baseless and frankly, insulting given the countless hours put into the election. As a side, it’s fascinating to me that there needs to be some extraneous factors at play when someone loses – very Trumpian! I assume that her current opponent would like to participate in a race that is based on facts, policy positions and ideas, not lies, so let’s respect that Brenda’s capability, (and perhaps her actually connecting with constituents and, oh, I don’t know, engaging people along the way) are what won that race. She didn’t need to, nor would she ever want to engage in what you suggest so let’s deal in facts.
@Claudia, I should not have posted unsubstantiated, unprovable gossip
from 2 years ago. This election should be decided on the merits of the two candidates today. I apologize.
Thanks, @Laurie!
Greg – with all due respect, with all the development that Needham put on the Newton border I think they have made that area sufficiently dense that there really isn’t capacity remaining for the huge Northland proposed development on our side of the line, where Needham Street is already at capacity with the Avalon apartments and all the expanded businesses on the strip there. It’s very hard to traverse that street now. How could the street possibly handle another 855 residential units, plus the proposed businesses on the 22 acre site — plus the inevitable next chapter of an equally excessively dense companion development when Northland moves on developing the 17 acres on the opposite side of the street (where EMS was).
I know your day job leading the Needham/Newton Chamber is for you to represent business’ interests, but the residents of Newton need a break from all the clammering for densifying our City for the sake of developers, and business interests. On this subject you have your views but you also have a conflict of interests given who pays your salary.
BTW Bryan Barash — how about caring 1/2 as much for the people who have bought homes, put down roots, paid heavy taxes and want to raise their family in the Newton they invested their life savings in Newton as you do about people who do not live here and haven’t paid a nickel in taxes — but want to come to Newton to put their children through the schools we have paid dearly for?
And before you chime in, Brenda, with another essay on how single family zoning is a tool of racism, why don’t you love out of your single family home yourself it is is such an ugly institution?
Gimme a break!
@Abe – Clearly you haven’t been around Newton having the conversations I’ve been having.
How about the 50 year homeowners/taxpayers who are desperate to find a long term situation for their son who’s severely disabled and can’t live alone and Newton is all he has ever known?
How about the third generation octogenarian I met whose reverse mortgage is crushing her and doesn’t want to move out of Newton?
And honestly – how about the disadvantaged family of color in Boston who is just looking for a leg up to break the cycle of poverty?
If none of those people have a chance to live in Newton anymore, shame on us.
Right, Bryan – We seniors will sell our homes that we are being pushed out of by the increasing real estate taxes and will move into the 600-1,000 square foot apartments @ 28 Austin Street and pay $3,500- $4,200 – $5000 rents.
That will solve the issue — especially when non-Newtonians flock town and push the rents ever skyward and crush the housing market harder.
BTW did you notice on the 28 Austen leasing website that the rent rates they quote are already just “teaser” rates that are good only for 6 months? If you are bold enough to want a full one year lease, the fine print is that there’s an add on of $250/month to the advertised rent.
And don’t forget to add the $125/month parking fee in there too because we seniors all can’t bike around the City — not even if we cut the car lanes down so we can have a dedicated bike land for the 12 people who bike everywhere (and even they don’t do that in our hospitable New England winter weather….)
@Abe – You didn’t address anything I just said. We need at least some options for deeply affordable housing. What are people with a child whose disability prevents him from living completely independently supposed to do? What are seniors with a fixed income supposed to do?
Is your answer that they don’t belong in our city? We need more deeply affordable housing – through a variety of strategies – including accessory apartments, group homes, Newton Housing Authority properties, deeply affordable housing in for-profit buildings, and 100% deeply affordable non-profit housing at sites like the Armory.
@Bryan
It might be helpful if you could explain exactly what this deeply affordable housing concept is?
again, look at root causes. Illumina ( biotech company) recently opened an office in Seaport and is looking to hire 200 software engineers. Why did they move into Seaport? And where are the 200 well paid engineers going to live? They can probably afford the rents at Austin Street, a 1 bedroom is a good crash pad for a well paid engineer. So, Newton gets to build the workforce housing for companies that move into cool hip locations like Seaport, which we will have to bail out if floods over the next 30 years. Great planning.
Bryan – you’re making my point exactly. Those poor souls are not going to be able to afford the kind of housing that is being developed throughout Newton. Read the rent data — the new housing that is being built is vastly too expensive (and much more expensive than the existing rental housing stock in Newton). The minor percentage of housing in these projects set aside as “affordable” will never meet demand and accommodate all the poor souls who want to downsize and remain in the community. Nor will it help those with unfortunate situations of disabilities (who may need sheltered living vs independent living BTW). Nor will the percentage of housing in those upscale developments which will be “affordable” be reserved for Newton residents. (There may be a local preference for some of that affordable housing, but the rest will be allocated according to a lottery state wide. ) Nor do the people who need affordable alternatives to remain in the community necessarily qualify for the income criteria for the “affordable” housing anyway.
If by “100% affordable housing” you mean projects like the one which might arise on the side of the Armory, that might be interesting. But what we are talking about here is emphatically NOT that.
What Newton is being over-developed with our high-end, luxury housing development of massive scale that have a figleaf of a small percentage of affordable housing.
If somebody really wants to do something constructive, they would preference (or exclusively deal allow) nonprofit housing developers— like the Brown Foundation that is developing the alternative affordable housing for seniors and low income individuals in Brookline on Harvard Street— but this ain’t that. This is Mark Development and Northland taking over a vast swaths of our city, dominating our economics and politics for generations to come with their self-interested, profit-driven grandiose vision which produces huge profits for them and congestion and upward pressure on housing costs for us — and which, despite the Mayor’s misguided projections (which absurdly assumes swelling the City’s population by ~10% in ~5 years won’t will bring added demands for city services, particularly space in the schools) will place us in a perpetually escalating spiral of upward pressure on real estate taxes and rent rates, making it even more difficult for the current residents of Newton to remain here.
I beg my fellow senior citizens not to be mislead or drink the Kool-Aid — and to get out to vote come Election Day. You won’t be downing any time into the prefab “box farm” with fabulous rents that has arisen on Austin Street — and Washington Street and Northland aren’t gonna be for us either.
This Washington Street Vision and the Citywide rezoning proposal — and its ardent backers like Bryan Barash, Brenda Noel and the key architects of this sorry situation like Susan Albright and Her (wealthy) Honor the Mayor—do plenty of good for Mark Development and Northland, the zoning lawyer specialists (like Stephen Buchbinder— who reputedly has been Kathy Winters’s weekly tennis partner for years) and for themselves. But it just ain’t at all good for us poor sods.
Correction needed. I have been told offline that Brenda Noel returned the $1,000 donation that Robert Korff (Mark Development owner) gave her. If that’s true, then kudos to her for being strategically wise enough to try to remove the particularly black mark of accepting such a large and tainted campaign contribution from the public record.
But it sure says something that Korff (who has the perfect legal right to finance the candidates he likes and who do what he likes — such as Donald Trump) tried to lavish such a stunningly large contribution on Brenda Noel’s campaign before he realized it would be way smarter for him to lay low with campaign contributions.
Whether or not Opt Out has made any formal endorsements, reading this thread it’s clear at least some of its more vocal constituents are already in full attack mode.
True @Dulles. But I respect @Laurie for apologizing and retracting her baseless accusation. Here’s hoping that sets a tone for others this season.
Dulles- Surely you (who have regularly opined many times in many issues on V14) are not suggesting that people are allowed to have views only on one issue?
The fact that some
folks who backed Opt Out also are aghast at the pro-development lobby/Councilors actions is irrelevant to the merits of the question in the table.
I happen to strongly prefer Emily Norton over Bryan Barash — but as it happens Emily did not support the Opt Out position. To her credit, however, she took a stand for democracy and for getting a clear statement of voter sentiment through a clearly stated public ballot when Susan Albright and Joshua Krinzman worked their will and created a ballot that had multiple competing questions that muddied the waters.
There appears to be little discussion yet of the debate itself. Perhaps because it’s a beautiful weekend and the video is 40 minutes long! I just watched the whole thing and here’s a handy primer if you want to skip to the things that most interest you.
* I put a star next to the segments where I noticed the most differences between the candidates, in case you want to skip to those. The first three segments are mostly covered more in depth in later questions, so if you skip those parts, that lops off 10 minutes. And the closing statements are pretty skippable (vote for me!)
03:20 Opening statements
07:00 Top Priorities
09:00 How will you address your top priorities
10:30 How to improve city council *
13:30 Transparency *
16:30 City council raises *
19:00 How to handle conflict of city-wide and ward concerns
21:00 Income Inequality and Equality in general *
28:36 Environmental Sustainability *
31:20 Traffic Congestion & public transportation *
35:16 Closing remarks
I’d be interested in hearing what others have to think after they have actually watched the debate.
@Laurie, as someone who skipped around a lot in the video trying to find insights & differences between the candidates, thank you this index is awesome.
I’m in a similar boat as Claire. I live in Ward 6 and (to Abe Zoe’s point of having different views on different issues) I agree with some of Lisa Gordon’s positions. Last election, our household carried water for Blazar. But I also find Gordon’s past role with Opt Out troubling on a couple levels. If it weren’t for that history, it would be an easy decision for me.
Ditto on the praise for Laurie’s excellent index. Thanks, Laurie, for taking the time to provide everyone this helpful tool.
Dulles -Life is a mixed bag. I hope that the balancing analysis we all need to make helps us get a much better City Council than the one we have now following after Election Day.
@Bryan one has to look at root causes, not symptoms. Housing affordability is a symptom of systemic problems within our society that supply alone can’t counter. I know you think that it will, but it won’t. It may lower the prices some, but as Austin Street shows already, not much. Not enough to matter the way you would imagine it might. In law apartments are not going to cut it.
You have to look at the whole ecosystem to get at all the issues.
As I have pointed out, there’s at least one huge factor here- and I consider it to be the main factor – that is, the encouragement of high tech jobs / development in Boston. Companies like Amazon, illumina, Neutonomy, and many others are encouraged by various tax breaks and supply of office chic to move into downtown Boston. I did some consulting work ( I assisted them with some calculations for their autonomous cars ) for neutonomy and they had rented out a whole WeWork floor while they were waiting for their new Seaport office( or somewhere down there ) to be finished, so I’ve seen how the influx of these companies is driving the job market in Boston.
Ok so you’ve heard that. The next is pure income inequality. Wages have been flat for many ( if not most ) professions over the las 20 years. Only those who have been able to benefit from the rise in the market since 2008 – those already well off – are doing well. Some pay – engineers in some fashionable areas of tech like deep learning/python/machine learning have done well – most other STEM filelds the pay increases have been somewhat flat, and everyone else, your teachers, your firefighters, etc pay has been flat AND chewed up to death by increasing health insurance cost. This is the second biggest driver in lack of affordable “everything ” for most people.
Now, I have to bring up the fact that, if mayor fuller lives at 32 Suffolk in Chestnut Hill ( googling public information led me to this), that house is 10000+ sq ft, and Zillow says it’s worth 7.7 million dollars. What’s the carbon footprint on that? The satellite photo shows 4 cars in the driveway. An in ground pool – heated? Any solar panels? Didn’t see any.
That house does not directly back up on Webster woods, but it is contiguous with them except for Hammond pond parkway, pretty much to 32 Suffolk in Chestnut Hill, whomever lives there. It was purchased in 1995 for under 3 million.
People give Bernie Sanders a hard time cause he has two houses.
Now, I’ve got to say- it is a bit rich, pun intended, for the mayor to be pushing so hard for affordable housing from such a lofty perch. IF she lives there, of course.
And so, the PERCEPTION is ( recall my Steve Jobs quote ) that the whole thing is a farce for developers ( one of whom who lives on West Newton Hill ) to make money, and affordable housing is just a lip service thing, a feel good thing to get the public – and some of the councilors- to get on the bandwagon. I’m afraid you’ve all been duped. And we here in Newtonville are getting all this stuff piled into our neighborhood, and ultimately it won’t do much for the affordable housing you think you’re getting. It will be mostly expensive “workhouse housing ( what else can you call a 3000 a month 1 bedroom ) for the high tech business moving into the currently fashionable waterfront of a Boston.
And the building in Boston is questionable. If you go to the union of concerned scientists web site you can find their predicted flood areas, and ostensibly is in there. Does it make sense to build up so much in Boston? And will the public have to pay for whatever it takes to keep the buildings from flooding?
@ Abe,
What’s a carpetbagger ?
My concern is if Noel is re-elected and Barash is elected we are stacking the city council with pro charter folks who will try to take a other “stab at the apple”
Blueprintbill- what are your trying to say?
What Newton needs is work force housing for the teachers and city workers who are still without contracts as well as health care workers who cannot afford Newton prices. This is a huge middle class group of residents you are losing. Also seniors will not be able to afford any of these rents unless they are selling their two million dollars homes . We need dedicated senior housing, maybe next or near the dedicated Senior Center which we desperately need.
Here’s a link to what I’m talking about. Now developers may move the electrical up a floor and what have you, but that’s going to protect the buildings, what about the people walking the streets? Or the T? Guess what – we will all end up bailing out these companies by putting in huge pumps,berms, and seawalls ( at taxpayer expense ) because they want to be in the cool hip harbor-front location.
We have to think further ahead. The developers will sell the building and be done with it.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-06-18/boston-built-a-new-waterfront-just-in-time-for-the-apocalypse
Bad news for Claire, before the city election of 2017 the city
council approved 28 Austin St. Since 2018 the city council is now
overwhelming in favor of new development. Perhaps only 3
councilors now would vote in opposition to any of the proposed
developments citywide big and small.
The aim is to increase Newton’s population to 110,00.
Newton does not have a city council to represent the different
voices of a diverse population. Also, we do not have a mayor who tries to represent both sides on the development issue.
Our government is at war with its residents, very sad indeed because Massachusetts wrote the first constitution designed for representative government.
This upcoming election will do little to change this unfortunate
dilemma.
@ Colleeen, I didn’t make any comment about development, pro or con on this thread. Perhaps your comment is in response to someone else
Claire,
The Charter vote and housing development issue are
closely entwined politically.
However, I doubt the council will revisit the city Charter again soon. Barash and Noel were enthusiastic to eliminate Ward Councilors for several key city issues. The plan now is simply to unselect them. They succeeded with Dick. I hope Emily is not cast out too.
Rick hit the nail on its head. All this talk of affordable housing strikes me as pro-development agitprop disguised as virtue signalling.