I don’t have a lot to say about either of these news items, but I just wanted to note them on my blog for some reason.
First: There was a huge fire on Friday at a new apartment building here in town. (The building wasn’t yet complete, and no one was living there yet.) There’s been a lot of new construction in town over the last few years, including three or four big new apartment buildings/complexes. They’re all “luxury” apartments that go for around $2000 per month for a one-bedroom. Here’s the site for this development. Fancy. I couldn’t find any prices on the site, but I found a mention on another site that indicated that it was $1950. I really don’t know where they find people who can afford that. Maybe some of them are people who think it’s OK to spend a much higher percentage of their salary on rent than I do. I wonder if these high rents are going to hold up post-COVID, or if a lot of people are going to wind up in positions where they can work from home and don’t need to be so close to the train into NYC.
Second: There was another BLM protest in Somerville on Sunday. It wasn’t a big one, but it was still big enough to drown out the cartoon I was watching on Netflix at the time. I should probably feel bad about binge-watching cartoons while there’s so much bad stuff going on in the world, but honestly I’m exhausted. I need cartoons to keep me sane. And I’m still not sure it’s safe for me to be out in a crowd of strangers, even if they’re all wearing masks. Young healthy folks can go out and march. I’ll make a few charitable donations and do what I can in the voting booth. (Well, not actually in the voting booth this year, hopefully, but you know what I mean.)