Future Boston Alliance

Does anyone here have contact details for anyone involved in the FBA? Website is no help.
 
I've been looking to. they left a nice dead end.
 
For the price of a Boston liquor license... oh, never mind
May 27, 2012|Dante Ramos

According to political legend, a Yankee legislature in the 1930s didn’t trust Boston’s Irish politicians to regulate bars and restaurants — and imposed a cap on the number of liquor licenses in the city. Those limits, which require legislative action to change, now stand at about 350 beer-and-wine licenses and 675 full liquor licenses. The numbers have crept up a little over time, but not enough to keep up as Boston’s economy and population recovered from the miasma of the 1970s and as the American gastronomic scene matured.

These limits have bizarre results: Boston ranks only 119th among the state’s cities and towns in the number of liquor licenses per resident. In this regard, the center of New England’s convention and tourism industry — the third-most walkable major American city, and an economic hub whose population is said to double every workday — ranks just behind quaint little Ayer. The artificial scarcity creates a seller’s market for existing Boston licenses; buyers may pay $50,000 for a beer and wine license, news reports indicate, and from about $200,000 to as much as $450,000 for a full liquor license.

Not everyone views the licensing process as unmanageable; Darryl Settles, who owns a restaurant and club in the South End and founded the BeanTown Jazz Festival, maintains that the licenses and permits needed for bars, clubs, and public events are obtainable if applicants are willing to put in the necessary time and neighborhood outreach. But the numbers are too daunting for others; the acclaimed chef Jason Bond told the Globe last year that he started his whole Cambridge restaurant for what a Boston liquor license alone would have cost him.

Inevitably, licensing costs affect how bars and restaurants operate. If you paid $280,000 for a liquor license, you can’t open a 20-seat bar where cocktail nerds linger over moderately priced old-fashioneds. The scarcity also creates opportunities for political manipulation, as what should be a fairly objective review of license applications — are there enough fire exits? — in practice involves checking in with lots of politicians. This system reached an ugly nadir in 2007, when, according to a federal affidavit, state Senator Dianne Wilkerson cut a backroom deal with Senate leaders and Boston officials to steer a liquor license to a business in her district. Wilkerson later pleaded guilty to bribery charges in that case.

The benefits of a somewhat looser system are evident in Washington, D.C., which is known for rep-tie-wearing lobbyists in mahogany-paneled steakhouses, but where the reality today is a U Street corridor thick with music clubs, bars, small ethnic restaurants, and old neighborhood standbys. Even on a cold, drippy weekend night, it teems with life at 2 a.m. But then Washington, with slightly fewer residents than Boston, has over 10 percent more active on-premises liquor licenses. And according to that city’s Alcoholic Beverage Regulation Administration, there’s no legal cap.

**the other one is 4 pages long, and seems to be along a similar vein**
 
This:

If you paid $280,000 for a liquor license, you can’t open a 20-seat bar where cocktail nerds linger over moderately priced old-fashioneds.
Click to expand...

is why we can't have nice things.
 
^^^ Re: liquor licenses in DC. Popular areas in DC have moratoriums in place; i.e., no new liquor licenses can be issued for these areas, though existing licenses can be sold and transferred.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/local-opinions/2010/04/too_many_liquor_moratoriums.html

THE American Liquor License Exchange, Amlex it’s called, is one of a dozen specialists nationwide in the field of liquor license brokering — the buying and selling of licenses — according to its head broker, Jon C. Mejia.

“Most of our work is in California,” Mejia said. The company is in Santa Monica. “I’d say we handle about 150 to 250 licenses a year, 10% to 15% in San Francisco.

“Since I started 22 years ago, there’ve been no new hard liquor licenses in San Francisco, either on-sale or off-sale,” Mejia said. Half a century ago the state tied the number of liquor licenses to county population. San Francisco’s is relatively stable.

“That means anyone who wants a license has to buy it on the open market.

And as for how much it costs, it’s all supply and demand.”

An on-sale license in San Francisco is $50,000 to $60,000, he said, “pretty much middle of the road for California. In Napa County, with its low population and high demand, it can go as high as $250,000.”
Click to expand...
http://studycenter.org/test/cce/issues/53/cce_pp8_12.pdf
(San Francisco article is dated 2006.)

And California has a state law that says you can't serve alcohol after 2 AM. That law, of course, has greatly inhibited tech-related growth in California.
 
That's not really the question, is it. The question is whether San Francisco has better nightlife than Boston. Now I would LOVE to see someone argue no.
 
stellarfun said:
And California has a state law that says you can't serve alcohol after 2 AM. That law, of course, has greatly inhibited tech-related growth in California.
Click to expand...

CA has some outstanding advantage given that it's where the tech boom began and there's still critical mass there to make the advantages for anyone outweigh the disadvantages. Meanwhile, Boston's lost its status as second-in-the-nation startup hub to NY and there's no indication the growth of startups in NY is stopping anytime soon. In Europe, the lifestyle that's popular in Berlin is driving a similar boom there despite the lack of any preexisting tech assets or infrastructure.

Silicon Valley began at a time when sprawl apologists could still keep a straight face, but there's no question young people will drive the industry going forward and will take it to places where they prefer to live.

Boston is living on borrowed time thinking that MIT plus a dated-by-decades conception of Route 128 as a tech corridor is going to mean anything in a few years' time.
 
czsz said:
CA has some outstanding advantage given that it's where the tech boom began and there's still critical mass there to make the advantages for anyone outweigh the disadvantages. Meanwhile, Boston's lost its status as second-in-the-nation startup hub to NY and there's no indication the growth of startups in NY is stopping anytime soon. In Europe, the lifestyle that's popular in Berlin is driving a similar boom there despite the lack of any preexisting tech assets or infrastructure.

Silicon Valley began at a time when sprawl apologists could still keep a straight face, but there's no question young people will drive the industry going forward and will take it to places where they prefer to live.

Boston is living on borrowed time thinking that MIT plus a dated-by-decades conception of Route 128 as a tech corridor is going to mean anything in a few years' time.
Click to expand...

This recent spurt in start-ups in NYC is media and advertising oriented, areas where NYC already has a lot more talent and enterprise than does Boston or San Francisco. It will be interesting to see if this spurt continues given Facebook's less than inspiring debut on the NASDAQ.

IIRC, NY has surpassed MA for second place, only in the number of startups, not in $.

A glance at the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ most recent unemployment numbers bears this reality out. Despite nearly two decades of dot-com enthusiasm, the information sector is still quite small relative to other sectors of the economy; it currently has one of the nation’s higher unemployment rates; and it’s one of the few sectors where unemployment has actually risen over the last year.
Click to expand...
From a Douthat op-ed in the NY Times on the illusion of Facebook.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/opinion/sunday/douthat-the-facebook-illusion.html?_r=1
 
You can't leave out the number one advantage CA has over us: the weather. And since we can't change that, working on the things we can is an even bigger issue.
 
The NY Times has an article today about college graduates being concentrated in a few metropolitan areas. Below is a link to a chart with the rankings for the 100 most populous metropolitan areas, with the percentage of the population with a college degree in 1970 and in 2010. The Boston metro area is ranked 6th nationally, but has the greatest percentage growth in absolute terms of any of the 100 metro areas over the 40 year period.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/05/31/us/education-in-metro-areas.html

While Boston is ranked 6th at 43 percent, it is basically grouped with Stamford (44%), San Francisco 43.4%, and Madison 43.3%.

From a Harvard Crimson article on a survey of Harvard's class of 2012:
Boston, which typically attracts the greatest share of graduating seniors, is once more this year’s most popular post-graduate destination, with 21.4 percent of respondents saying they will stay in Beantown next year. New York will see 19.5 percent of graduates, and 14.3 percent of seniors will head to California.

Around 17 percent of seniors will be living outside of the United States next year, with 9.1 percent headed to Europe, 4.3 percent headed to Asia, 1.9 percent headed to Africa.
Click to expand...
 
Clearly that's wrong.

Boston's nightlife/weather sucks, ergo every graduating senior packs their bags and moves to New York/Cali the day after graduation.

Everybody knows that.
 
My issue with Boston is this; everyone that has come past the city limits sign only sees it as a period of transition. We have some of the best institutions in the continental U.S.A., yet after that what does Boston have to offer? I am still really trying to figure that out. Our weather, minus the summer, is horrendous. The cost of living is outrageous. There are no real places for people to hangout and do things that are really neat, unless you love to walk around the streets and see the same thing everyday. One plus is the Common, yes the Boston Common, but that too gets old.
 
pel_north said:
My issue with Boston is this; everyone that has come past the city limits sign only sees it as a period of transition. We have some of the best institutions in the continental U.S.A., yet after that what does Boston have to offer? I am still really trying to figure that out. Our weather, minus the summer, is horrendous. The cost of living is outrageous. There are no real places for people to hangout and do things that are really neat, unless you love to walk around the streets and see the same thing everyday. One plus is the Common, yes the Boston Common, but that too gets old.
Click to expand...

Our summers suck too, unless you enjoy massive amounts of humidity. Not to mention that its impossible to find a place to eat outside, or god forbid enjoy a beer on a patio. I've had more fun outdoors in the tiny citys in central PA then I do here.

The only thing that keeps me in boston is its location. I'm 2 hours from the mountians, NYC, really great beaches, and only a few more to Canada. The transportation options are (despite how much the t sucks) excellent for the US via every mode imaginable

However things like this make me want to leave. I don't even like clubs, but damn if that isn't the most retarded waste of resources ever
 
Beer/food on patio: Deep Ellum, Daedalus, Lower Depths, Charlie's, and I'm sure people can name much more.
 
pel_north said:
There are no real places for people to hangout and do things that are really neat...
Click to expand...

Could I trouble you to provide an example of "pretty neat?"

There are a lot of things to criticize about Boston, and I do it plenty, but a lack of interesting, worthwhile things to do isn't one of them.
 
^ Seriously. What a self-wallowing bitchfest this thread has become... jesus christ...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top