I'm Tori Bedford tonight on Greater Boston Skyhigh rents and home prices are driving bostonians out of the area we'll hear from one of them plus why are the 80s and 90s still so impactful in 2024 we'll take a stroll down memory lane with the co-host of the in retrospect podcast and finally a performance from the nearly 50-year-old teish quartet now on tour with their latest work nearly $125,000 that's an annual salary you need to live alone comfortably in Boston factoring the rising cost of livi
ng plus money for savings and a few nights out that's well above the median household income in Boston at around $90,000 and that Gap is forcing a lot of people out according to a new survey from the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce an alarming 25% of residents between the ages of 20 and 30 plan to leave the area over the next 5 years ESV yanor is one of those residents he joins me now along with Steve meum Boston lead organizer with City Life VA Urbana thank you so much both of you for being
here so esin can you just Begin by sharing your story you were living in East Boston and you started to feel a lot of the pressures around the cost of of just being here right with with your family correct yes um I was living in E bostom probably about more than 20 years but uh um on the last apartment that I was living um I was living about 17 years and um we were paying our rent on time everything was fine even in Co times we uh never failed to pay on time and then um things started to happen
um the the landlord um first uh told me that they were going to increase the rent but uh my my worry was they they were going to increase it too much like they did the last time they did like about 35% and then then after that they say they will not increase it but they send me an eviction notice oh wow and then after that that's when I I was able to to contact City Life V orbana and then they helped me through all these trouble times uh to try to get an agreement with uh with the landlord and e
ventually we got to an agreement and and I I had to move out and literally out of the city so where do you live now um first we moved uh uh to Lin now I'm living in Malden but uh at that time we they literally uh we were literally displaced because we're a family and then uh we had to go to different places yeah you're talking about your wife and your son right my uh my son uh and my um my mother oh your mother okay my mother and and um my niece and so are you together now in Malden no literally
we're displaced because we have to find um rooms on different places in order for us to to be able to to live uh but we still uh trying to uh get an apartment so you're all living in single rooms in different places correct yeah do you miss what you had in East Boston oh of course of course it's uh because I've been there for more than 20 years and uh uh everything was pretty much closed um my work was closed and uh it was it was is we consider a very safe place for us but uh unfortunately righ
t now it's is we we need we need uh rent control rent control for so that to keep families together that's that's because they literally displace one family right now and no is it's not just only us it's more than I would say hundreds of family that have be in this place especially from the Boston area yeah a lot of people are being pushed out this um yes this study this survey from the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce foundation's young residents um survey it was released earlier this month i
t they asked people about the factors in their decision to leave the area and 66% said the cost of rent uh 66% said job availability and 55% said ability to buy a home I think for a lot of people the home buying part it just for young people especially just does not seem like a possibility in this market and with this current housing crisis that we're facing across the state um the same report said that if uh they asked Young Greater Boston residents if they would be willing to stay or leave the
area 25% said they would be likely to leave 65% said likely to stay and 10% said unsure are you surprised at all by those results Steve not surprised at all I mean we have had a chapter in East Boston I mean asin's story is one of hundreds and hundreds that have come in come through our chapter in East Boston and they're all examples of breakup of families breakup of the community and all for you know basically the speculative role of the market as uh debt is added to buildings you know it's no
t like your water and sewer builds is going up that's not what's causing the rent increases it's the accumulation of debt and so it's it's it's the question that you raised of can you find affordable housing but in our efforts to keep people in the housing they're in is becoming increasingly difficult and and that's affecting not only the individuals who are being displaced but the community too yeah it's changing the whole scope of the community I mean you were living in East Boston for 20 year
s you said in that same apartment for 17 years you had developed a relationship with that landlord right I would I would think so yeah and so I wonder if you within that two decade span witnessed the neighborhood changing in a way that you felt was oh maybe we're getting priced out or there are more de the demographic is changing things around the area are changing oh definitely um because you see new buildings coming up you know and and then and then probably about four or five years that's whe
n the prices starting going up and every I've seen I I have heard stories of all some people that they literally did like three or four years ago what they did to us uh uh our last landlords in East Boston uh because they think that just because the new buildings are getting like a um a higher price they think that the old buildings are also going to get the same price so they they are going by by the market price is but it's is uh from my point of view it shouldn't be like that because the buil
dings are already there all they have to do is maintenance and some sometimes they don't even do maintenance too you well that's something that V abana has been dealing with not only with fighting to keep people in their homes but also with the maintenance of these old buildings which has been cited in multiple reports that Boston Foundation came out with one recently that shows that um home home ownership you know the people who actually own the homes that demographic is aging but the the homes
themselves the infrastructure is also aging and requiring a lot of Maintenance you've been at V orbana for 24 years what do you make of this shift just in the last few years you know this has been a long time coming but I think the housing crisis now has reached this point where the state has taken some actions to address it because it has become such a huge issue as homelessness is rising and as more and more people are at risk of homelessness or displacement Within These communities yeah I me
an one thing that's happening in our organizing is that we're no longer just in Boston we're organizing tenant associations against displacement in Malden where Asin is now in Medford in Arlington and Brockton Lawrence and basically in some ways the crisis in Boston is kind of like migrating and encompassing all the nearby suburbs and so we're trying to organize to protect people in those suburbs now and what do you see as the solution here I mean you been doing this work for a long time I don't
know if in the last few years you feel like you're drowning in this crisis but what are you hoping for as you continue this work um you know there's three things that we could do sometimes a displacement crisis is presented as intractable you know unsolvable just something that we'll live with but it's not true it's really a human-made thing if we had rent control which would go to scale topa tended opportunity to Purchase Act which allowed tenants to buy buildings at the point of sale and the
transfer tax which provide the money to do that we could make a serious dent in the displacement crisis and in the process of doing that we would be restoring and protecting a lot of workingclass communities of color are you asine you work you know on this larger goal as well you do advocacy are you hoping to get to a place where you can move back in with your family and reunite with them of course yes that's that's has been after we were place that has been my main my main goal to get back toge
ther but unfortunately at the moment I haven't been able but uh let's let's hope they uh we pass a strong r r control at an affordable price that not even the professionals that are making more than 100,000 like people like like like me and everybody that's being this place can afford it how do you feel that your life would be different in this you know if you were able to stay with your family it would be a hollow different because because it will be less stressful right now we're not living to
gether but I hope that we eventually get a another apartment where we can all live together and it will be less stressful more en judgeable because uh families are being displaced it's real it's not not something that someone say oh someone it's it's it's it's being done as we speak as at the moment families are being in this place and and and it it gets really stressful believe me it gets very stressful because you start thinking a lot of things you know you you even think about being homeless
and even when you've been paying on time the rent and and then that comes up and it hits you like a break literally because you never thought you doing everything correct and something like that will happen in your conversations with how old is your son he's about 25 okay and so in your conversations with him and and then with your mother do you talk about getting back to a place where you can be together yes all the time all the time yeah because right now we live in different parts so we we do
we do get together and then we visit each other but uh and you've applied for one yeah and well keep us yeah keep us posted let us know how that goes thank you all right as yanor and Steve meum thank you both so much thanks for the invitation thanks for being here pleasure next up with Mom Jean's back in style and Tracy Chapman's fast car topping the charts it seems like America can't get over the ' 880s and '90s and neither can the hosts of the podcast in retrospect who look back on all the po
p culture Trends scandals and questionable fashion choices that Define the era one of them Susie bakaram joins me now Susie thank you so much for being here thank you for having me so I love this podcast it's so much fun but I also think there's a couple of threads here that I think are so important it's really important vital reporting I mean you have a long history in news and journalism and you bring all of that into this and I guess I just wanted to ask you you know you talk at one point abo
ut this pop pop culture being seen as low culture or gossipy or sort of like trivia you know and and the way that you're looking at it and addressing it I think you raise a lot of really important issues of kind of analyzing the past what do you make of that I mean why did you decide to do this podcast about low culture um well you know I think my career has been very focused on hard news so for me this is getting an opportunity to look at issues that I've always really cared about and love I me
an I grew up on pop culture I'm Iranian I was born in Iran and came to this country when I was three so I think like a lot of immigrants I learned what it meant to be an American from pop culture you know this is how I learned about the country that I came to be part of so for me you know I think we often dismiss pop culture because it's seen as for girls or seen as you know silly or low brow but it is the way we tell our stories to each other and the stories we choose to tell and the way we cho
ose those stories they tell us a lot about the time we're in and also about what we care about you know so that's why we wanted to explore these issues and so many of these episodes are are just about iconic images or themes or things that like I G this is you're talking to to my generation as well growing up and just taking these things you know at face value right like P Anderson's red swimsuit or Monica Lewinsky or Anita Hill or you know you talked about 1992 as the year of the woman while al
l of these horrible scandals were going on that were extremely sexist um I want to play this clip from the podcast where you talk about you're talking about Britney Spear's Memoir and I thought so much about this lens as well where you know during her period where she shaved her head everyone was making a big joke out of it and now years and years later you know we see this her struggle really right like through her own work or at least the words of her and her Ghost Writer but let's let's hear
this clip um just about you you're kind of analyzing the media coverage of her at the time if there's one thing in the book that becomes very clear it's really how afraid of them she was how aggressive they were with her how much of her life was controlled by their presence and how much she had to evade them and I thought that was interesting because it's kind of changed so much like now there are more safeguards in place especially with children but she was before any of that occurred so they w
ere building the narrative that we were absorbing at the time and I think we were really young so that for a lot of us was just we were like okay this is what it is you know this is the tabloids are telling us what it is and this is how it is yeah I mean I think what happens is especially with women in media is that they sort of become characters and it's very easy to forget that these are people right because we start to consume them as media as stories and even as journalists I think this is s
omething that we have to really be vigilant about in ourselves and Britney is a very clear example of that for many years she just became sort of this character and she was talked about in these really sort of egregious ways right she was clearly having a mental health struggle but instead it was she's out of control she's partying she's drunk and then when she does this thing which is she shaves her head it's really in response to the fact that she's being hounded by the paparazzi she's despera
te to get away from them and there's this moment where they're hounding her and she goes into this like Diner and she's trying to like find just a moment to herself and finally she can't and she does this really dramatic thing and the assumption is that you know she is suddenly doing this crazy thing because she's on drugs or whatever the sort of narrative is but in some ways the media is creating the narrative it themselves because they are hounding her to the degree that she cannot find a way
to function in this world she is with her children often when they are hounding her so I really developed such an empathy for her that I didn't have you know at the time because at the time I consumed it like everyone else consumed it right sort of the way that people are consuming this Kate Middleton story right I wanted to I want yeah because Princess Di like fun goth but this is like a person right this is a person's life and I'm not saying that I don't indulge in that sometimes but it is imp
ortant when it's happening to sort of ask yourself what would this be like if this was a man like if a man needed to take a couple months off for a surgery would the reaction to it be the same would they be treated with the same sort of intrigue and this idea that they're like being hounded and then this thing where she had to put out the statement saying that she does photoshopping in her spare time I mean it just seems there is like a real gender equality to the way people are obs in about her
and we see that over and over again in these stories in the podcast it is interesting now though because you know what's been said is that the British media actually has been like yes she's getting hounded and of course we all have conspiracy theories about it but the British media has been better about it I think now than they were about Princess D right and so I would love to hear your thoughts about just the comparison of then versus now I do think they've gotten better but in general I thin
k there has been more backlash to Paparazzi so there is an improvement to some degree and the laws in England are really different so they do have to be a little bit more careful around the Royals like I think a lot more speculation is happening in the US media than it's happening in the British press because they have a little bit more um guard rails around the kind of rampant speculation that we do here um that our first amendment laws really allow so I think you know there is some improvement
but what happens is is that even with those improvements ments there are these moments in culture where people still get their narrative flattened in ways that we don't always realize we're doing right I mean Megan Markle is another example of this I think in a lot of ways people see Megan Markle as a character and they have a hard time seeing her as a person who was actually trying to navigate this very complicated family and so when they talk about her they talk about her sort of as this like
character as a opposed to a person who is flawed you know who is going to make mistakes but we all make mistakes right I mean that's sort of what we're looking at in the podcast it's not just to look at what happened to these other women but to sort of ask ourselves why they resonate with us like for me I feel a lot of empathy for a lot of these women because I've made a ton of mistakes myself and they weren't in the glare of a national Spotlight imagine being Britney's age and having that kind
of attention on you it would be you know really overwhelming and I'm glad I got to make all my mistakes in the shadow of darkness and you mentioned like you mentioned growing up and absorbing culture and not always having C you didn't have cable so you're watching a lot of like the WB and CW and really just this like gutter television that I also love um and I think I still love by the way I I'm not above like a real housewives Marathon I love all those things because you know I have a theory a
bout the Real Housewives which everyone dismisses as just like trash but it's really a women's workplace drama how many other shows do they gather five very strong opinionated women and then just give them the hour to do whatever they want like we just don't have that many spaces for women like that so it's not all just trash there are trashy elements to it I'm not going to deny that but there are things to learn about the world from these shows and these things that we consume well I can't wait
for the real housewives episode and for the royal family update episode comparison Susie V carum thank you so much for joining us thank you so much for having me finally tonight the Grammy winning teish quartet has been performing for nearly half a century currently comprised of violinists Edward dusenberry and her roomi rhods chist Andre fa and violist Richard O'Neal the band recently joined Jim Browdy and marjerie Egan on Boston Public Radio at the BPL to share the physics behind their music
and a sampling of their new work now joining us is Richard O'Neal one of the four members of Tash and harumi rhods welcome to you both it's grous that was beautiful truly beautiful thank you can I say one thing is great as the sound is I say this all the time about live music watching you play is almost as wonderful as listening to you play it's so different when you're in the presence of the musicians so Richard I think we learned that andr and Edward have been playing together 31 years how lon
g have you two been part of this I'm the newest newbie new is new June of 2020 and I think heri was in uh 2018 2018 so it how long does it take for new players to mesh as beautifully as you just did with two people have been playing together for a long time for I mean there's so many ways to answer that question um I think we had kind of a whole um mixture of of things going on Richard and I been playing together for for also over 20 years we've known each other for a long time we were classmate
s and and um where uh we both went to juliard um and we also um spent some summers at the malor music festival and toured together and did lots of fun projects together so it's a small classical music world in case you didn't notice and we've all intertwined and played together in the past but but to to Really gel together as a group um you know it takes time on one hand but uh on the other hand you really learn on the job you learn on stage and so that's what makes it so fun I think so tell us
Richard about flow I this is supposed to be something about what it sounded like at the beginning of the universe like big bang and and before and right after the Big Bang Yes um Tula has a Divinity degree from from Harvard um and she has a lot of um amazing interests um and she spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out that I think the assignment was the natural world um what we're going to play for you today is um the third movement so the first movement deal deals with the big bang mhm t
his third movement is a quark Scaro I'm sorry I'm going to explain to the non-physics people what cork is well a viola trying to explain physics how about two radio talk show host trying to understand physics the literal translation of a Scaro was a joke so let me go ahead um uh in physics I believe um a proton is made up of a two up quirks two positively charged quarks and one down quark and a neutron is uh made up of two down quarks and one up quarks so what piece of flow are you playing for w
e're going to play the third movement the quarks scar oh great fabulous it's great to meet you both you want to rejoin your [Music] colleagues [Music] n [Music] [Music] [Applause] la [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] that's it for tonight come back tomorrow for talking politics Congressman Seth Molton on his new call for a ceasefir
e between Hamas and Israel plus what separates the personal from the political as Governor Mora hey faces criticism for keeping the details of some out of-state travel private that and more tomorrow at 7 thanks for watching I'm Tory Bedford good [Applause] night [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] on cool
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