In this Berkshire Argus Podcast episode, a conversation with Steven Pedigo, a professor of urban development and director of the LBJ Urban Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. Pedigo, who is also a part-time Great Barrington resident, has worked with dozens of cities and communities around the world on leveraging their assets to meet their challenges.

Earlier this year, the consumer advocate, public-interest lawyer, and (still controversial) former presidential candidate Ralph Nader turned ninety years old. In this Berkshire Argus Podcast conversation, we discuss the American Museum of Tort Law that he established in his hometown of Winsted, Connecticut, his faith in the jury system, and his belief in the ability of citizens to successfully organize and influence their government.

A companion profile of the Tort Museum, “The Unlikeliest Museum,” is at https://www.berkshireargus.com/the-unlikeliest-museum/

The Berkshire Argus: Important stories fully told.
https://www.berkshireargus.com

In this episode of the Berkshire Argus podcast, Bill Shein speaks with Matt Tannenbaum, proprietor—since 1976—of The Bookstore in Lenox, Massachusetts, and subject of the 2022 documentary, “Hello, Bookstore.”

Tannenbaum recalls learning the book trade as a stock boy at the storied Gotham Book Mart in midtown Manhattan and working for a book distributor in Washington, D.C., before following some artist friends to the Berkshires in 1975. Dreams of becoming a writer took a back seat when he purchased The Bookstore in 1976, just days before his 30th birthday.

You’ll also hear about the making of the documentary—which was well underway when COVID-19 arrived—and Tannenbaum’s philosophy of curating a bookstore for an engaged community in the era of discount stores and Amazon.com.

(A free screening of “Hello, Bookstore” will be held at 7:00 p.m. on Saturday, February 3, 2024, at Mason Library in Great Barrington. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. for refreshments. A talk-back with Tannenbaum and director Adam Zax follows the film.)

The Berkshire Argus: Important stories fully told.

www.berkshireargus.com

There’s no discussion of the economic future of the southern Berkshires that doesn’t have the cost and availability of housing at its center.

Trends well underway in the last decade were accelerated by the COVID19 pandemic: The cost of houses to buy or rent has skyrocketed, fueled by an increase in properties acquired by part-time residents and others used exclusively for short-term rentals, a failure to keep up with demand via new construction, cash buyers who snap up properties before local working people can assemble financing, and a zero-percent vacancy rate for rentals.

The result of these and other factors has been an unusually large percentage of full-time residents spending more than a third of their income on housing costs, considered the standard for affordability. That’s pushed them further away, geographically, from jobs and family as they seek housing that’s affordable. It’s meant businesses of all kinds are struggling to attract and keep staff, from the service- and tourism-industry jobs critical to the region, to higher-paid health care workers who simply can’t find a house to buy.

This episode of the podcast is a conversation about the current housing landscape with Bill Cooke and Ananda Timpane, two members of Great Barrington’s Affordable Housing Trust. It’s an appointed municipal board, made up of volunteers, and focused on securing funds and investing in housing solutions, from down-payment assistance, to subsidizing affordable units built by private developers, to advancing proposals for accessory dwelling units that can house more people and help those already living here afford to stay.

The Berkshire Argus: Important stories fully told.

www.berkshireargus.com

Is it possible to have a thoughtful, constructive conversation about important issues, including politics, in a social media comment thread? About any issue?

In 2016, Jon Rosen, fresh off his Ph.D. studies in philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, started a Facebook discussion group called Fair Game, where members engage in conversations about a variety of subjects, from politics, to religion, to arts and culture, to just about any topic at all. He hoped it would provide what the group’s guidelines describe as “a forum for genuine inquiry and respectful dialogue.” And it’s fascinating to hear what happened—and what he’s learned.

At a time when nearly a quarter of Americans believe that violence is an acceptable strategy to advance their political beliefs, it’s worth trying to understand this breakdown in communication that many feel is a runaway train that can only lead to disaster for American democracy. It’s unclear if it’s the technology that’s driving what’s happening, or those who populate our public sphere, or some combination. In the worst case, the two are locked in a feedback-loop death-spiral.

As Rosen says during this episode, “Once we’ve given up on discussion, we have given up on the greatest gift of humanity, which is our capacity to reason and our capacity to understand each other.”

The Berkshire Argus: Important stories fully told.

www.berkshireargus.com

When residents of Great Barrington, Massachusetts learned that a movie theater central to their community’s cultural life and a key component of their downtown economy might close for good, they quickly organized to find a way to save it. In just a few months, volunteers formed a nonprofit, raised $800,000, and purchased the theater. They’re now making plans to reopen this fall and chart a path through the challenging and choppy waters of the Covid/streaming era.

In this episode of the The Berkshire Argus podcast, Bill Shein talks to Nicki Wilson, whose quick action and leadership rallied the community, and Ben Elliott, the theater’s recently named managing director — who credits the Triplex with setting his life’s direction.

The Berkshire Argus: Important stories fully told.

www.berkshireargus.com

When news headlines refer to “the Housatonic River clean-up,” some assume that the GE-funded and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)-approved remediation work will remove all PCB contamination and return the river to a safe, healthy state.

But as Bob Jones, chair of the Select Board in the Town of Lee, Massachusetts, explains in this podcast conversation, that’s not the case. The “Rest of River” cleanup agreement approved in 2020 by the Select Boards of Lee, Lenox, Stockbridge, Great Barrington and Sheffield will not remove all of the PCBs. Jones argues that perhaps as little as 30 percent of the contamination that makes the river and surrounding area unhealthy for people and wildlife will be removed.

As a result, he told me, “You and I will never eat fish out of the Housatonic River.”

The Berkshire Argus: Important stories fully told.

www.berkshireargus.com

With available and affordable housing remaining a top regional and national issue, last week I had a wide-ranging conversation with Patrick White, a member of the Stockbridge Select Board. White was recently re-elected overwhelmingly to his second three-year term on the board, where he has made housing proposals central.

More than half of the homes in Stockbridge are owned by part-time and seasonal residents, contributing to both escalating prices and limited housing supply for working families. The challenges created are similar to those faced by neighboring communities like Great Barrington, where high prices have impacted, for example, the ability of businesses to attract and retain the service-industry workers who power the region’s tourism-based economy.

In Stockbridge, White says that’s led to a declining number of students in local schools, dwindling volunteers for the fire department and other municipal roles, and concern about maintaining what he describes as “a well-rounded community.”

In his first term, with an eye on both lower-income seniors and local-workforce needs, White advanced a proposal to cut real-estate taxes for full-time homeowners, sparking a heated debate over both the idea’s fairness and efficacy — and whether it was “divisive.”

Called a “residential tax exemption,” it allows a community to exempt anywhere from 10 percent to 35 percent of a property’s assessed value from real-estate taxation if the owner is present for at least 183 days a year. It has been adopted by 16 Massachusetts communities since the legislature authorized it in 1979. They include housing-challenged resort communities like Nantucket and several Cape Cod towns, but none in western Massachusetts. The proposal wasn’t successful.

My conversation with White took place on July 13, a few days before Stockbridge held the first of two planned community meetings about its changing demographics and its housing needs. We spoke at length about the impact of housing-affordability challenges and his vision for a thoughtful, collaborative, inclusive and productive discussion about policy ideas he thinks can help Stockbridge move forward.

We spoke for a little under an hour.