The Dig - Boston's Only Newspaper
The vast majority of those 153 licenses will be restricted to seven historically underserved Boston neighborhoods: Roxbury, Mattapan, Dorchester, Hyde Park, Jamaica Plain, Mission Hill and East Boston.
This is what happens when you mess with the Mass service industry
Almost every new restaurant built in Boston is enormous. The number of seats is outrageous, the number of servers needed to cover them ridiculous.
I have been wanting to share thoughts along these lines for weeks now, but it’s never the right time. Either white supremacists are rumored to be coming into Boston, or President Not-See himself says something insanely hurtful or ignorant. Or both.
If you think Boston has enough liquor licenses, you must live in a neighborhood that has a bunch.
As of today, Boston is the only city in Massachusetts that cannot decide for itself how many liquor licenses shall be in circulation within its borders.
This is what happens when you give the neighborhood what it needs
Has the city’s complicated, problematic, and historically corrupt liquor licensing process guaranteed that Boston will never have a normal or equitable social life? Could lifting the cap on the number of licenses fix it?
Boston’s liquor licensing quota was born out of elitism and has fostered a poisonous disparity over the past century. Can lifting the cap break the cycle?
