On a positive note, check out Jimmy's Halal Fried Chicken. It's great, inexpensive, and usually open.

This thread from a month ago in r/Boston talks a bit about some of the challenges.

r/Boston thread

I think a lot of the challenge is that there's not enough people with disposable income that find Downtown Lowell a competitively convenient place to get to or live in. The walking infrastructure is terrible in many places with missing crosswalks, unreliable lighting, broken / missing sidewalks, large roads + highways with fast vehicle traffic (including lots of commercial trucks), insufficient market rate housing, and limited canal crossings which limit the pedestrian catchment area / market.

Lowell is also not ever going to be a competitive place for people to drive any distance to for simple things because the road network is poorly connected for actually visiting the city, in terrible physical condition, and poorly marked (they can't even manage to reliably paint lane lines). There are much easier places to drive and park, like Nashua. I can't imagine many people drive in to Downtown Lowell for casual discretionary errands / activities more than twice a week from anywhere really beyond the Lowell city limits.

I think comparing median per capita income - median rents also might help explain why Downtown and Lowell in general's commercial footprint is heavily focused on non-discretionary services like healthcare, social services, military recruitment, rehab clinics, and money transfer / cell phone shops. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/somervillecitymassachusetts,mobilecityalabama,lowellcitymassachusetts/PST045222

I don't think Lowell's business environment will change significantly without a massive influx of market rate housing inventory + some infrastructure improvements, or (regrettably) a wholesale gentrification of Downtown + the Acre.

I don't see any real political commitment or money going into market rate housing at scale in walking distance of Downtown Lowell.

Massachusetts is going to set up concentration camps for homeless people within a decade, given the current political trajectory. They won't have that name but they'll serve the same function.

They export most of their gas as LNG which has to be chilled to -254 F. That's where almost all of their emissions go.

Yes, expanding nuclear production at existing brownfield sites makes sense. To clarify my earlier comment, greenfield = new location currently not permitted for nuclear power.

Some political hardball with New York State might be necessary. Here's my speculative take-

Congress could pass a law to force it. It's interstate commerce. The MA congressional delegation + Republicans is sufficient to pass in the house. It probably gets through the Senate without needing Warren's vote because there are some Democrats in the Senate who would vote for a bill due to the geopolitics w/ Russia & Europe.

Lol I was trying to be generous. It also seems like the Merrimack Valley is a somewhat politically convenient dumping ground in MA, with a river for cooling.

There is more abundant supply of natural gas in Pennsylvania / the Marcellus basin, available at lower prices, that cannot economically get to New England without more pipeline capacity*. The New England utilities must import liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the winter to provide sufficient energy to meet demand in the region. It is not infinite, but it's better. There's also room to drill more in the mid-continent or displace industrial demand by price sensitive consumers (like petrochemical plants and aluminum smelters).

Piping in gas also is more energy efficient and cost effective, because it doesn't have to be chilled to a liquid at -254 F and kept at that temperature for ocean or rail transport.

LNG prices are going to the moon because Europe has replaced most of its pipeline imports of gas from Russia with ocean borne LNG since Russia invaded more of Ukraine this spring. French nuclear production also under-performed this summer, due to weather and technical issues, and this caused Europe to burn more gas than forecast over the summer.

LNG export capacity (and shipping capacity, to a lesser extent) is constrained over the short to medium term. Adding capacity / building terminals takes several years at best. More gas from the mid-continent would be liquefied and shipped (likely to Europe) if the capacity existed today.

The short term impacts of more pipeline capacity into New England would do the following:

• significantly reduce energy prices here,
• slightly increase them in the mid-continent
• might make a significant dent** in global LNG prices which would help importers like Europe and Japan while costing exporters like Qatar and Russia

Not adding more energy supply to New England quickly, whether through pipelines or transmission lines is not just a regional political / economic blunder, but an unforced geopolitical error by the United States. The region skated by on cheap LNG prices for a while after decommissioning a lot of coal power plants, but now that gamble isn't working out.

I support more renewable energy in New England. I'm more skeptical on any greenfield nuclear expansion because there's not a good track record of building nuclear plants in this country that don't require massive bailouts / have cost blowouts in my lifetime. I'd be surprised if a nuclear power site could be agreed upon in less than a decade, given local politics.

I think that the MA political leadership needs to cut a deal with Maine to make the whole transmission line project from Quebec more appealing. Seriously, let anybody with a Maine license plate park at Logan for free, get free Red Sox tickets, let them redesign the MA state flag, or whatever....

I also think the congressional delegation might need to cut some kind of deal to force some more pipeline capacity through New York.

*This might change if gas prices double or triple... then you might see more rail cars and possibly trucks carrying LNG.

**This is due to the extremely tight market for LNG driven by the Russia / Ukraine war and related sanctions.

Even with LNG, a ton of energy consumption and emissions are involved in chilling natural gas to -260 F and maintaining that temperature in transit.

This is really a massive failure of federal policy that might freeze some people to death in the winter.

The Jones Act requires the ships be built in the US. There are no shipyards in the US that currently build LNG tankers. This might be a solution on a timeline of a decade at significant and likely uneconomical cost vs. building pipelines or transmission lines + increasing renewable generation in the region.

I have worked with Eversource as well as many other utilities and I echo these sentiments. They're one of the worst in North America, in my experience. That being said, there is legitimate risk of an energy crisis in the region because there are limited ways to get usable energy here in the short term. Energy infrastructure is fragile (even more so when it's managed by idiots like Eversource) and the combination of a surprise cold snap and some other disruption might be enough to trigger severe rationing or outages.

Read up on jury nullification

Jurors have the power to check overzealous prosecution https://fija.org/

So, there was a flurry of Verizon trucks along Nesmith a few weeks ago as they set up the main line, and everything is attached to the poles above ground. I think more of the wiring downtown is underground so it probably isn't economical to dig up streets just to run fiber unless it's to a large complex. Your best bet is probably nagging some combination of building management and city government to try and facilitate the build out.

I thought some of the buildings around downtown like Mill No 5 had FiOS for a while, but I'm not sure.

This is real fiber / FiOS. A nice tech named Frank from Verizon drilled a hole in the wall, ran a small piece of fiber through the wall, set up a fiber optic jack, connected it to an optical network terminator in my office and I plugged my router into the ethernet jack. I'm getting IPv4 and IPv6 via DHCP (no need for PPPoE like some other fiber networks I've used).

If you get service, make sure you have a reliable power source for the optical network terminator... you don't want it on a light switch.

The optical network terminator (ONT) is pretty small- about the same size as a cable modem.