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City plan would add dozens of new liquor licenses for small restaurants - and giant South Bay, Seaport projects
By adamg on Mon, 03/06/2017 - 10:59am
Mayor Walsh and City Councilor Ayanna Pressley today unveiled a proposal to add 152 new liquor licenses aimed mainly at helping out start-up restaurants in outer neighborhoods.
But their proposal, which would require approval by the state legislature and the governor, would also grant the city the power to give an "umbrella" license to any development of more than 500,000 square feet, such as the South Bay Town Center project now under construction in Dorchester and the Seaport Square development in South Boston.
The development owners could then dole out as many sub-licenses as they wanted - subject to city approval - without affecting the licenses available elsewhere in the city. This is currently how liquor licenses are doled out at Logan Airport.
Last year, the City Council proposed seeking legislative approval for 12 liquor licenses for South Bay and 3 for Seaport Square.
The new licenses would be on top of the 75 licenses the city won approval in 2014 to grant.
Under Walsh's and Pressley's proposal, 105 new licenses would be set aside specifically for Dorchester, East Boston, Hyde Park, Jamaica Plain, Mattapan, Mission Hill and Roxbury - with the provision that if any of the neighborhood-specific licenses went unclaimed after a three-year rollout period, they would be held by the Boston Licensing Board for the specific neighborhoods until they can be dole out.
Another 15 licenses would be available over three years in "Main Street" districts outside those neighborhoods, for example, Roslindale Square and Centre Street in West Roxbury. Some 30 more licenses would be available for the rest of the city - but only 9 could be used in the liquored up neighborhoods of Back Bay, Beacon Hill and the North End.
The proposal would also grant a liquor license to the Lawn on D and one to the Boston Center for the Arts in the South End.
In a statement, Walsh said:
This balanced approach to licensing ensures neighborhoods historically disadvantaged by the liquor license process will receive their fair share of licenses, while also providing an option for larger establishments to receive licenses without hurting our small businesses.
Neighborhoods:
Topics:
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Comments
Licenses
Should be available for any business, this sounds like affirmative action for select neighborhoods.
Don't blame the city
Blame the state legislature, which continues to insist it knows better than the city how many licenses Boston needs.
As for affirmative action, hah. The issue is that national chains with lots of money in the Seaport and Boston Proper were buying up all the liquor licenses under the legislatures quota. Maybe if the legislature stopped playing early 20th-century Brahmins, this wouldn't be an issue anymore.
What national chains
Maybe success restaurateurs and existing regional restaurant groups.
Really?
OK, maybe instead of "national chains," I should have written "national and regional chains." But have you been to Liberty Wharf, ever? And yes, I would include Legal as a "national" chain - they long ago outgrew their humble Cambridge roots.
The key thing is Legal and Del Frisco's and Eataly, etc., etc., have enough money in reserve for a $300,000 liquor license. Somebody trying to start up a small restaurant in, oh, Hyde Park, does not. Let the marketplace rule, yada, yada, yada, but we don't have a free market in Boston when it comes to liquor licenses, and until we do, our elected officials are doing something to try to spark some life in places like Cleary Square and Mattapan Square. And good for them.
What national chains?
Only including sit-down restaurants serving booze (e.g. not Dunks, Sweetgreen, Flour, etc.) let's find out how many of the restaurants are either:
Which restaurants am I missing?
I left off Whiskey Priest and Atlantic Beer Garden because they're on their way out (closed already?), but if they were included they're part of Cronin Group (Tony C's).
From my count 4 of 20 are standalone restaurants , meaning 80% of the licenses are held by restaurant groups and/or regional/national chains because they, like Adam said...
Of course, if you listen to
Of course, if you listen to the developers (esp. in Seaport Square), they will tell you they need these awful chains to commit to a high lease in order to gain financing to break ground—something a chef-owned spot can't do. Their prediction is that these places start out as chains and become more mom-and-pop over time. But I cant think of any spots that have evolved like that in the city. Can anyone else?
Rep. Michael Moran of
Rep. Michael Moran of Brighton has long been against letting Boston control its own liquor license. Without even the city's state legislators behind it, getting Beacon Hill to give up control of the licenses is a tough road. If you live in Moran's district and want this changed or find this issue important, vote for someone else. Or give his political donations a good scrubbing-over to see how he's benefitting from this seemingly anti-resident position.
You're stealing my bit.
but seriously, Brighton should get 0.0 new liquor licenses under any new system. After all, that's what the people in that neighborhood have clearly supported through their votes, right?
well, some of us have Kevin
well, some of us have Kevin Honan as a rep.
I wish the state legislature
I wish the state legislature would also let the city grant marijuana dispensary licenses.
Oh, wait.
If you give a license to any business
Boston will be like Cancun, where you can get a beer while buying jewelry.
Is this a feature or bug?
Is this a feature or bug?
And?
What's the issue with that?
Or worse
we can become like New Orleans.
Yeah...Cancun
Talk to me when we get a Señor Frog's.
Senor Frogs! Came for the weather,
Stayed because I got kidnapped!
Or it will be like literally
Or it will be like literally hundreds of cities in dozens of states elsewhere in the country - where you can go to *any* grocery store (not just 1 or 5 or 7 of a chain, whatever it is now) and easily pick up some wine for dinner. Where your last pitstop as you drive up into the mountains to picnic and camp, you can grab a couple sixpacks from the Quickimart while getting gas. Where it doesn't cost 300,000 dollars to start a new local neighborhood business - and that's JUST to serve alcohol, let alone the building and buildout and the rest of the regulation!
The northeast has the most bizarre love affair with government interference in drinking. (I'm counting New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania, and a dozen other "wait, I can't get wine here?" states).
The whole system should be
The whole system should be abolished. Licenses should be available freely for a nominal fee (<5000$) for any business that wants them. Most of the liquor regulations in this state are drastic government overreach, and have no business being in a "free country."
But, since that is not going to happen, with the system we currently have in place this "affirmative action" is necessary. I am normally a fan of the free market and against things like affirmative action, but due to the onerous regulations imposed by the commonwealth, there is no free market with the liquor licenses. What we do have, however, are entire neighborhoods largely devoid of places to get a drink due to the market inefficiencies created by the regulatory system. We need these neighborhood licenses so the outer neighborhoods once again have a decent amount of bars and restaurants where their residents can drink.
Actually, we need to abolish the licensing system
and replace it with "Here are the requirements to sell and/or serve liquor. If you meet them, we'll grant you permission to do so."
Almost
The government cannot in general grant permission to do something (other than to use publicly controlled resources for a private purpose); ageny is a fundamental right and such permission is not the government's to grant. Government has the option of either trying to prevent us from doing something, or standing aside.
Look at all the paragraphs
That Gaffin had to dedicate to this. Why is government deciding the total number of entities who can sell me alcohol to be consumed on site? What citizen asked for a limit?
Come now
Come now. We all know who asked for these limits. John Winthrop and Miles Standish. And they will see you to the stocks for tapping on your keyboard when you could be spending this time in silent devotion to the Lord (sinner!).
Not quite
More likely Patrick Lyons or whatshisname Glynn, I'd venture to guess. Always follow the money. This has nothing to do with Puritan morality, and everything to do with the large entertainment conglomerates making it hard for the little guy to get a foothold.
Linky
Puritans were huge fans of
Puritans were huge fans of beer, actually. Drank it as much or more than water. But then, dysentery used to be a much wider problem in the English Colonies than it is in the US.
Why: 1800s WASP fears of the
Why: 1800s WASP fears of the Irish after Boston elected a Irish Mayor
To be specific
To be more specific, wanting to deprive the Irish political machine of the graft opportunities associated with control over licensing. Whether that was done out of the Yankees' sense of good-government public-spiritedness, or out of their desire to keep the goodies for themselves, will be left as an exercise for the reader.
I was wondering this
Are there any states where liquor licenses aren't so sharply limited? Where a new restaurant can just apply for a license, and receive one if they meet the qualification standards?
So much complexity!
I have a feeling half the reason for all the complexity of the new licenses is to convince the legislature to give up state control of Boston licenses.
Actually, no
When Pressley first started on this particular crusade, she actually did call for a complete abolition of state control over Boston liquor licenses. And then she saw how impossible that would be, given that Boston only elects roughly 10% of the legislature and the rest of the state is not as fond of Boston as those of us who live here (and as noted above, some percentage of that 10% is quite happy to restrict what goes on in Boston).
So now she's chasing her asymptotic ideal with measures that gradually increase the number of licenses here (she was the driving force behind the 2014 licenses) while continuing to let the legislature happily tut-tut about how they'll never release their thumb on Boston.
Transferable?
Nobody's talking about the elephant in the room. Are these licenses going to be non-transferrable, or are we going to keep creating windfalls for the
lucky lottery winnerswell-connected, by issuing them a license worth $500,000 for about $500 in filing fees?Windfall?
I imagine a soaking of 150+ licenses is going to put a damper on the price tags of each license already in play. 150+ licenses would probably go close to market saturation (which is why they put in the clause where they hold onto the excess for the next time they run out). In which case, only certain neighborhoods will garner the rewards of limited supply like Back Bay and the Seaport,whereas restaurants in places like Dorchester that have a lot of stored value in their licenses are actually going to see that money disappear if this were to pass.
In fact, I think they may want to revisit this legislation to make sure that it is phased in appropriately. If places want to dump their $300,000 license to a location in a district that isn't getting new licenses in order to recoup that loss before this happens, then purchase one of the new 150 on the market, I think they could be given that chance.
Good question, will try to find out
If they do it like the 2014 licenses, then, no, at least the neighborhood specific ones won't be transferable - they'll go back to the licensing board to award to somebody else in the neighborhoods they were designated for.
There were a couple of cases of people who used this to cash in on their unrestricted licenses - one of them a South End restaurant just barely inside the border of a Roxbury Main Street district whose owner sold his beer/wine/cordials license to get one of the new all-alcohol neighborhood licenses (and made some money in the bargain), the other the new owners of a Lower Mills tavern (hmm, can you guess which one?) that transferred their existing all-alcohol license to the pricey new place they were opening in the South End, then got one of the new neighborhood licenses for their old bar.
I'm not sure this was quite what Pressley had in mind when she first came up with the idea, but, on the other hand, there are now a bunch of small restaurants in places like Dorchester, Roxbury and Hyde Park that have licenses they probably wouldn't have had otherwise.