Letter from the Executive Director for August 2017

In August we took two important steps, one related to events, another related to policy machinery.

On our events page, we rolled out a new calendar view. This shows at a glance all the great MassLandlords events happening around Massachusetts. Under the hood, we have also identified a shopping cart feature that should streamline ticket sales at some point in the future.

We had hoped to roll out the shopping cart for September, but our early testing indicated that it wasn’t going to tell us who had bought which ticket. We have abandoned this for the time being; we will pull in more programming horsepower soon.
Our policy machinery has been activated for the first time in a big way. By now, if you are not already a Property Rights Supporter, you should have seen a letter about Fred Basile. Fred is a Springfield owner whose eviction case is before the Supreme Judicial Court.

We need to defend not only Fred, but also other owners around Massachusetts who are singled out as targets. In other places where pro-owner legal funds are available, e.g., Pittsburgh, there are almost no housing measures enacted without landlord input and buy-in in advance. (Pittsburgh may be a special case, since it appears that there has been only one housing measure enacted in the last 60 years.)

Despite this being a summer edition of the newsletter, this month we have important pieces of news from Cambridge, Somerville, Waltham, and Springfield. We also have an in-depth article on climate change. This would be a great edition to share with a friend. Our newsletter is free to share, please do. We have over 2,600 on our mailing list, but with 70,000 owners in Massachusetts, we have a long way to grow.

Thank you for your support.

Sincerely,
Doug Quattrochi
hello@masslandlords.net