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I certainly don’t want to minimize the tragedy of yesterday’s fatal stabbing on Felker Street, but when I read the small piece in the print edition of today’s Globe, it seemed something was missing. Here it is, from www.bostonglobe.com, under the headline “Stabbings leave one dead, two injured.”

Three people were stabbed, one fatally, near Felker Street and Commonwealth Avenue around 10 a.m. yesterday, the Middlesex district attorney’s office said. Timothy Lewis, 34, of Chelmsford, died of his wounds. The other two victims were treated for injuries not believed to be life-threatening. Local and State Police are investigating. The district attorney’s office said the stabbings did not appear to be random. No arrests have been made, prosecutors said. No further information was immediately available.

If you read the piece carefully, you will find that the word “Lowell” is omitted entirely. That’s fine with me. I’ve frequently commented that regional reporting of Lowell criminal events severely undercuts our efforts to promote the city in a positive light. Too bad other media outlets won’t report the crime stories without identifying the place in which they occur. (Note: A companion story on boston.com is not shy about identifying our city – “One person dead, two others wounded in Lowell stabbing”)

Monday night (February 6, 2012) from 5 pm to 7 pm at the City Council chambers at Lowell City Hall (375 Merrimack Street), the MBTA will hold a public hearing on the fee increase and service cutbacks to commuter rail that have been proposed to help balance the T’s budget. The proposal would increase the one-way train fare from Lowell to Boston from the current $6.75 to $9.75, a jump of 44.4%. Perhaps more damaging to residents of Lowell will be the complete elimination of all weekend service which would wipe out a total of 16 trains, 8 in each direction, which run every two hours on the weekends. Also eliminated would be after 10 pm weekday trains which would eliminate the 10:40 pm and 12:10 am Boston to Lowell runs and the 10:35 pm Lowell to Boston train. Today’s Globe has an article that analyzes the reasons behind the financial shortfall at the MBTA.

The proposed service cutback will be devastating to Lowell. Many of our residents work or go to school in Boston and not necessarily at 9 to 5 weekday jobs. While we have excellent hospitals here in Lowell, many of our residents take advantage of the best-in-the-world health care available at some Boston hospitals and while normal appointments might not be late nights and weekends, some are and there’s always the need to visit hospitalized relatives and friends. The best way to get to and from an event at Boston Garden (or whatever it’s called now) is by train and the elimination of after-10 pm trains would erase that as an option. This doesn’t even consider those from greater Boston who come to Lowell (or who we want to come to Lowell) for education and cultural activities.

In an age where more people are (or should be) returning to cities and cutting back on the use of personal vehicles, making such a drastic cut in the level of public transportation service seems incredibly short-sighted. Please consider showing up at the hearing, even if you do not wish to speak on the issue. Numbers count.

Yesterday I joined a tour of the still-under-construction Western Avenue Lofts at 150 Western Avenue in Lowell. Adjacent to the better-known Western Avenue Studios, Western Avenue Lofts is a two-story brick building bordering the Pawtucket Canal that is being transformed into 50 rental live/work spaces for artists. The building is long and narrow and so each unit gets a huge 22 feet wide by 7 feet high window that faces either north (Western Avenue side) or south (Pawtucket Canal side). Because the building’s footprint is not strictly rectangular, the size of the units vary but most are about 1500 square feet in size. To maximize the ability of occupants to customize their individual spaces, only bathrooms and kitchens are being installed in a uniform way (they are all along the wall that borders the central hallway). Other than that, the artists can subdivide (or not) their spaces, carving out bedrooms, storage areas, raised floors, whatever.

The second floor spaces are dominated by the high “sawtooth” roof that raises the interior ceilings, already a high 14 feet on the first floor, up to 22 feet in some of the second floor units, providing the opportunity to construct in-unit lofts or to leave open and as spacious as any living quarters in the city.

Unlike most rental units, these are designed and intended for the tenants to customize the appearance, particularly the paint scheme and wall treatments. The developers clearly understand and embrace the creativity of the artist-occupants. Other interesting amenities include roof-top solar panels that will provide part of the building’s electricity and a common garden stretching along the bank of the canal.

It’s my understanding that commitments already exist for more than half the fifty units of this building which is to be ready for occupancy this May. More information is available at www.westeravenuelofts.com. The video below contains pictures I took during the tour.

The Western Avenue Lofts concept is an intriguing one. Many of those on the tour were tenants-to-be who proudly showed off their as-yet skeletal units, speaking with pride and enthusiasm of their plans for their respective spaces. That many already knew each other well gave it a college dorm for grownups feel in the best sense of that image. With all the recent talk of unruly late night visitors to downtown, the relative isolation of the Western Avenue space seems like an asset. As our country’s living patterns undergo a shift away from suburbia and back towards city-living, and away from universal home ownership to more varied and flexible rental arrangements, the Western Avenue Lofts project could serve as a model for future developments in the city’s neighborhoods.

A recent post by fellow blogger and downtown resident Kad Barma which showed fragments of a broken beer mug in a downtown doorway got me thinking about a book called “Ghost Map” by Steven Johnson. Subtitled “The story of London’s most terrifying epidemic – and how it changed science, cities and the modern world”, “Ghost Map” tells of an 1854 outbreak of cholera in London that killed more than 600 people and terrorized the population. At the time, top medical authorities maintained that cholera was spread by “miasma” or unhealthy air. One doctor, John Snow, suspected that it was a water-borne disease and set out to prove his theory by plotting on a street map the place of residence of each person who died from the disease. The completed map showed that most of the deaths were clustered around a single public water pump located on Broad Street. Although not fully convinced of Snow’s theory, the authorities removed the handle from the pump and the disease soon abated. Through this statistical and visual analysis, Snow was able to localize the problem and appropriate and effective action was taken.

Which brings me back to Kad Barma’s photo. In a recent post I advocated the widespread use of video cameras as a deterrent or at least as a way of identifying those who misbehave in downtown after dark. Nothing like that happens quickly, however, so why not create a “Ghost Map” equivalent in the meantime. Each morning following a night of street-level carousing, residents could roam around and photograph the damage – the broken glasses, puddles of vomit and all the other leavings of the problem-causers. These photos would then be plotted on a Google map (of the type I created last year for “The Fighter”). Perhaps the Downtown Neighborhood Association or some less formal coalition of residents could create the map and oversee its updating. Such photographic evidence would not only bring more attention to the situation, but the plotting on the map might tend to identify those establishments whose patrons are the biggest offenders.

At the end of each month on the LowellDeeds blog I do a post that compares that month’s recording statistics with the same month a year earlier. Today’s post shows that January 2011 was a better month than January 2012 for deeds, mortgages and foreclosures. But today I also looked at the figures in a slightly different way: I combined the last three month’s statistics and compared them to the three prior months, reasoning that this might identify trends over time. Here’s an exerpt of what appeared on LowellDeeds on this topic:

Now for the three month comparison. I took the same document types for the last three months (January 2012, December 2011 and November 2011) and compared their totals to the totals for the prior three months (October, September and August of 2011). Here’s what I found:

The number of deeds recorded in the last three months was down 6% from the prior three months (1354 to 1273); the number of mortgages recorded was up 20% (3129 to 3753); the number of foreclosure deeds was up 5% (111 to 117); and the number of orders of notice was up 8% (154 to 167). The total number of documents recorded rose 12% (15015 to 16742).

While deeds are down and foreclosures are up, those changes are only slight. The positive number that jumped out at me was the 20% increase in the number of mortgages recorded. This suggests that more homeowners are refinancing which would be a huge benefit to the economy. Interest rates are so low that anyone who can refinance now will probably save herself a couple of hundred dollars each month in lower mortgage payments. That money will almost all be injected right back into the economy in a type of non-governmentally funded stimulus program. Because interest rates have been low for a while, this recent increase suggests either that prices are starting to rise somewhat, thereby allowing previously underwater homeowners to now qualify for loans. It could also mean that lenders are becoming more liberal about who they’ll loan money to. Either way, it’s a positive development.

The behavior of (some) late night occupants of downtown Lowell has been a trending topic in Lowell’s blogosphere with kad barma writing about it here and here; Left in Lowell here and here; and our own post here. The police have increased their presence which is a good thing; a high density of officers in uniform creates a deterrent and making arrests where appropriate at least might keep those defendants under control for a while. But the police can’t be everywhere all the time.

Is it time for the city to bring video surveillance cameras to downtown? I’m not sure I like the idea because it would be a bit of an invasion of privacy of the vast majority of law-abiding citizens, but life is all about trade-offs. If cameras could help apprehend those who destroy property and soil our sidewalks and doorways and provide the police with a valuable tool in enforcing the law, then might that level of intrusion be worth it? I’m guessing that the acquisition costs for such a system would be tolerable, certainly within the budget of a typical regional public relations campaign that gets washed away by a single widely-covered crime.

Perhaps the time has arrived to have a public discussion on video surveillance cameras for downtown Lowell.

John Edward, a resident of Chelmsford who earned his master’s degree at UMass Lowell and who teaches economics at Bentley University and UMass Lowell, contributes the following column.

The story has been around so long it is hard to know if it is a myth. A little old lady walks into a bank to open an account. She has only $100. The bank treats her very well. She walks out satisfied. She returns later that day to deposit her life savings of a million dollars.

Could that happen today? I decided to put banks to the test.

In my most recent column, I talked about low savings rates among low-income households. One reason they do not save is that with small balances they often lose money.

The Boston Globe recently reported on banks raising fees on accounts that drop below minimum balance requirements. One example they gave was Citizens Bank. They have a monthly fee of $50 on a money market account when the balance falls below $1,000. Money market funds are not earning much interest right now. The fees will wipe out the account in less than two years.

The profit model for banks has changed. They used to follow the 3-6-3 rule. Pay 3 percent interest on savings, charge 6 percent interest on loans, enjoy the profit on the difference and be on the golf course by 3:00 P.M.

A few years ago, a Federal Reserve study reported “fee income has more than doubled as a share of commercial bank operating income since the early 1980s.” Interest is now only about half of bank income.

I visited nine banks with local branches. I told them I wanted to open checking and savings accounts with a low balance. read more »