About Town

Update: Home Sweet Concord Home/An Exhibition of Life

This may be where you get your mail.

Good morning! Happy middle-of-the-week Wednesday everyone. Great news yet again! Tomorrow night, Aug. 18, the Emerson Umbrella Center for the Arts will host an opening reception for its annual Exhibition of Life Drawings. This curated exhibit has graced the walls at 40 Stow St. since last Thursday, but tomorrow night, from 6-8 p.m., you will get to admire the drawings in the company of other art aficionados, and best of all, you get to mingle with the artists of the Figure Drawing Collaborative. The artists and models are what make this exhibit especially interesting. There is a gamut of artistic ability, from the seriously established, to the casual hobbyist, to the "I-think-I’ll-give-this-sketching-thing-a-try" type, who all dropped in …

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About Town

UPDATE: Take A Hike Around Concord/Concord is Home Sweet Home

Take a stroll around town.

Good morning! Happy Monday everyone! It was a busy weekend, but I had a lot of fun. I sure hope you did too, in spite of all that rain yesterday. I’m sure our lawns appreciated it. This is a brand new week of summer — not too many left — that culminates with my son’s birthday, so this is a special week for my family. Of course, I’ll go crazy this week trying to find my teenaged son the right gift. Once they reach a certain age, oh, about the beginning of their teens, they get fussier and fussier each year, and getting the right gift becomes a challenge. Well, this is my son’s last year as a teenager. (sob, sob) I hope it gets easier in the twenties. Affordable Housing Available Today I’d like to share some good news on the moderately …

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Better Not Bigger Challenges Chapter 40B

Chelmsford group drew up petition to put repeal on November ballot.

Chapter 40B is the regional planning law of the Massachusetts General Laws, and has been on the books for over 40 years. But a Chelmsford group is seeking to repeal the affordable housing law at the ballot box in November. 40B's purpose is "to permit a...town to plan jointly with...(other) towns to promote the...orderly development of the areas within their jurisdiction," or informally to allow a developer to build housing at higher density than a town requires if the development includes affordable housing units. However its repeal may soon be put to voters thanks to the efforts of Better Not Bigger, a local advocacy group from Chelmsford. Better Not Bigger describes itself as "a statewide program dedicated to...promoting sustainable …

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Housing reform advocate

6:30 pm on Monday, August 16, 2010

In actuality, virtually every other state uses a mandate approach to building affordable housing while also not creating incentive programs for for-profit developers. Contrary to Holly's posting, the reverse would be true in Massachusetts. If 40B were repealed, several existing MGL statutes would resume primacy for building affordable housing and the huge amounts of money that private banking …   more ›