A plan to convert a vacant Brookline office building into four luxury condominiums has raised concerns among local housing advocates who want the project turned into smaller, affordable housing.

The building, at 1093 Beacon Street, had contained offices for decades, but the pandemic lessened the need for office space. This pushed the owners, Lloyd Rosenthal and Mark Blotner, to propose converting the space into 18 apartments – mostly studios or one-bedrooms around 500 to 600 square feet.

After...

Federal funding for heat assistance has been restored after a 43-day government shutdown, but money won’t arrive in Massachusetts for another four to six weeks, leaving many Waltham residents wondering how they’ll heat their homes in the meantime. 
Massachusetts received $144 million for the program last year. More than half of the 159,000 residents who received assistance last year were seniors. Ten percent of families had a child younger than the age of 5.
Ann Sirois, chief planning and...

Brandeis University junior Alanis Gonzalez comes from a family of creatives.
Not only is Gonzalez’s mother an artist, but her grandmother is as well. In Gonzalez’s youth, her grandmother collected discarded items from the streets of the Dominican Republic — think coins, keyboard keys and paper clips — to create a collage of trash on canvas. Gonzalez considers this piece of art to be something from nothing. It’s her favorite. 
So when Gonzalez got the chance to coordinate the painting of a...

Ten-year-old River Bernstein owns a car. 
It’s a classic 1906 Orient Buckboard – manufactured by the Waltham Manufacturing Company under the leadership of Charles Herman Metz – and a recent gift from his grandparents, Frank and Linda Bernstein. 
But the sixth grader at Gideon Welles Middle School in Glastonbury, Conn., says his classmates are skeptical of his story. “So I say, I have a car. They say, ‘No, you don’t, you’re too young to have a car.’ And I say, ‘Look, I’ll show you a picture...