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Ready to dig in? Well, we hope you’ve brought your appetite!

With Thanksgiving just days away, it’s time for our annual Turkey Awards.

As the name suggests, this is one award you don’t want to get. A “Turkey” – and no, I don’t give out actual golden gobblers, thanks for asking – signifies that something has either gone terribly wrong or simply defies common sense.

Without further ado, here are this year’s “winners”!

The Punchline that Is the MBTA

The T made my list last year as well.

At the time we thought things couldn’t get any worse – after all, the summer of 2022 gave us that indelible image of a woman diving into the Charles River to escape a fire on an Orange Line train.

That was followed by a month-long shutdown of the Orange Line for a repair blitz that was supposed to finally fix everything, and which of course, failed to do so.

But who in the world could have anticipated that the rails on the brand-spanking new, $2.3 billion Green Line Extension would turn out to be too narrow and would have to be reset?

It’s not just the old stuff breaking down – the new stuff doesn’t work either.

The Boston Globe

A big swing and a miss from the “Biggest Newsroom in New England” certainly merits a “Turkey.”

That would be the third installment of the Boston Globe’s new Spotlight series on the housing crisis, “Reckoning With Boston’s Towers of Wealth.”

The story casts a handful of luxury condo towers in Boston, like the Back Bay’s sleek and soaring One Dalton, as the bad guys in the region’s housing crisis that has seen condominium and home prices soar to unsustainable levels.

The Globe’s crack investigators would have us believe so-called “greedy developers” could have built middle-class housing next door to the Prudential Center, like One Dalton, or over South Station, yet chose not to.

But the cost to build on these prime downtown sites – we are talking hundreds of millions of dollars or more – is such that you are looking at either very expensive condos or apartments, an office tower, or a lab complex being built there.

Or, simply nothing.

Those Stubborn NIMBY Whiners

We are in the middle of the worst housing crisis in generations, yet the anti-housing crowd just doesn’t get it.

“Developers are just greedy profit machines that must be opposed at every turn,” they howl.

Suburban NIMBYites continue to try and undermine the state’s new MBTA Communities law, even as they formally pledge compliance.

Candidates from a group called Save Newton’s Villages ousted a slate of veteran members of the City Council who had been strong backers of efforts to pave the way for thousands of new housing units near the city’s T stations through a sweeping rezoning plan.

Meanwhile, Boston has more than its share of anti-housing grumps as well. Catherine Vitale, who ran unsuccessfully for City Council, offered an unusual take at a candidates forum on what’s driving the housing crisis in Boston.

“I think we actually have too many people here,” Vitale commented recently at a candidates forum organized, ironically, by Abundant Housing Massachusetts, which campaigns for increased construction of all types of housing. “I think we should stop bringing in new people.”

The Offshore Wind Industry

We have been hearing for years now that the offshore wind industry is just about ready for takeoff. Yet the big day is just always round the next bend.

Most of these huge oceanic windmills – and their promised mega-loads of clean electricity – remain stuck on the drawing boards, their financial projections in tatters after the big rise in interest rates and the surge in construction costs.

Now some ancillary businesses that had hoped to service the new industry, such as a wind turbine blade factory in North Carolina, are starting to go under as well.

Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey

Massachusetts’ two U.S. senators went to bat for Sudbury homeowners looking to kill a key underground powerline project – and the bike path built atop it.

In a letter to the federal Surface Transportation Board, Warren and Markey backed a legal ploy aimed at stopping the Sudbury project while amplifying the environmental fear mongering by opponents.

The senators repeated claims that burying a transmission line under a now-defunct rail line and topping it off with the extension of a popular rail trail would trigger some sort of ecological catastrophe.

Maybe they thought they were doing constituent service. If so, our state’s two senators should do a little more research before jumping on board a dubious local cause with all sorts of NIMBY overtones.

Scott Van Voorhis

Well, I don’t know about you but I’m feeling stuffed. That was a whole lot of turkey and then some. See you again next year and as always, remember to bring your appetite – and your sense of humor.

Scott Van Voorhis is Banker & Tradesman’s columnist; opinions expressed are his own. He may be reached at sbvanvoorhis@hotmail.com.