Boston's Leaders Want More Oversight Over Lab Development Amid Building Boom

NEW YORK CITY — At first, brothers Frank and Shawn Gorelik were fixing guitars as a side hustle out of the back of their two Upper East Side hardware shops. But as the coronavirus pandemic wore on through 2020, guitar sales soared with the quarantine-weary searching for something to fill their time at home. The Goreliks' guitar repair demands began to pick up so much they realized that side business needed its own location.

By November, New York City retail rents had fallen so far in tenants’ favor, they considered it time to strike and find a brick-and-mortar space.

“It seemed like everything was half-price,” Frank Gorelik said in an interview. “The key for us is no overheads and no credit. We don’t want to smother ourselves.”

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Modular construction is increasingly popping up in the Bay Area and elsewhere as a sustainable, lower-cost, quicker way to deliver affordable housing, but unfamiliarity and misconceptions are curtailing its use.

Although some aren't ready to think outside the stick-built box, certain commercial real estate companies, tech companies and those fighting for affordable housing creation are pushing for a modular approach to at least be considered across the board.  

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MIAMI — On Feb. 25, 1964, 22-year-old Cassius Clay defeated Sonny Liston at the Miami Beach Convention Center and became boxing’s heavyweight champion. After the fight in racially segregated South Florida, Clay went to his hotel, the Hampton House, where he celebrated with activist Malcolm X, football star Jim Brown and singer Sam Cooke. In the ensuing days, the fighter announced he would change his name to Cassius X, then Muhammad Ali.

Decades later, author Kemp Powers imagined what the four stars had talked about at their hotel and in 2013 developed a play, One Night In Miami, which was made into a movie that is now streaming on Amazon Prime and garnering Oscar buzz while spotlighting the Hampton House and the working-class, predominantly Black neighborhood of Brownsville in unincorporated Miami-Dade County.

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State lawmakers concerned over their inability to control Twitter, Google and Facebook's suppression of certain speech are dangling a new threat in the face of social media giants: a promise to end coveted state tax abatements and incentives if tech giants limit speech online for any reason other than violence.

Alabama state Rep. Chip Brown, a Republican, proposed such a bill last month in his state's legislature, and fellow Republican Oklahoma state Sen. Nathan Dahm introduced similar legislation, which would issue fines and terminate state tax incentives for companies that unfairly censor speech, KFOR-TV in Oklahoma reported. 

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