“We’ve seen so many wars in that country. … This has been something that’s been part of my life ever since I was a young boy,” he said. “It’s very personal, and it’s very sad.”

Farhat’s concerns are echoed by others in New England, where more than 55,000 Lebanese people live, including some 31,000 in Massachusetts. They fear relatives will be caught up in the conflict and are concerned for the future of Lebanon amid an escalating war that has forced people to flee their homes and claimed the lives of hundreds.

Many of them who Farhat has spoken with at his century-old parish in New Bedford, which serves the Lebanese Maronite community, say their biggest concern is the escalating humanitarian crisis the country is facing, Farhat said.

“You can see the sadness, the concern,” Farhat said. “Many of us have family over there, and it’s been a very difficult situation to see and watch unfold.”

The latest fighting intensified in early March, when Israel launched strikes in southern Lebanon after the Iran-allied Lebanese group Hezbollah fired rockets into northern Israel. This came after the United States and Israel killed Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Israel has accused Hezbollah of supporting Iran, according to The New York Times.

Israel and Hezbollah had been under a cease-fire since November 2024, following another war between the two sides, though Israel had been hitting targets in Lebanon since then, according to the Associated Press.

Israel has said even after the war with Hezbollah, it plans to occupy part of southern Lebanon, setting up a buffer zone inside the area and keeping security control over the territory. Some analysts say that the move could lead to the permanent displacement of communities from the region.

“The fear then is that the whole map of the country is being transformed,” said Ibrahim Warde, an adjunct professor at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Warde said there is panic among Lebanese people that the attacks have extended beyond just the southern part of the country, Hezbollah’s stronghold.

“That has created a sense of panic everywhere else and that no one is off-limits,” he said.

Since March, more than a million people have been displaced from the southern part of the country and at least 1,200 have died in Lebanon, the Associated Press has reported.

“They’ve left everything, left their homes, their livelihood,” Farhat said. “There are people who are sleeping on the streets because there’s no place for them.”

The Lebanese community in the US is also torn about speaking about what they are going through, said Matthew Thomas, a Lebanese American attorney based in New Bedford, and a longtime member of the Our Lady of Purgatory Church.

Those with immediate family in Lebanon are living with constant fear that the violence and the war might come for their relatives, Thomas said. At the same time, they are protective of their community here in the US; it’s where they feel safe. They don’t want to bring negative attention to the rest of the diaspora by articulating their concerns about the war, he said.

Over the last century, Lebanon has found itself embroiled in conflict in one form or another, Thomas pointed out, leaving generations who have known nothing but war.

“You have children that have grown up through nothing but war, and if a child grows up learning how to survive through a war, it’s amazing that they can lead a productive life,” he said. “It just amazes me, the resilience of the Lebanese people.”

Lara Jirmanus, a Lebanese American physician in Greater Boston, said that part of her fear is that Lebanon could experience similar devastation that Gaza has gone through over the last two years.

“It’s hard to imagine where it begins and ends,” she said. “So it’s really heartbreaking.”

Jirmanus said she feels luckier than the people in Lebanon caught in the middle of a war who are denied a chance at a normal life.

She had planned on taking her two children to visit family in Lebanon over the summer for the first time. But now, she does not feel like it will be safe for them.

“I’m just feeling really heartbroken at this point,” she said.

Omar Mohammed can be reached at omar.mohammed@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter (X) @shurufu.

“What makes the project relevant now is the need for housing,” he told the Globe.

Projects such as these are far from new, but the repurposing of vacant mills into residential properties has taken on a fresh urgency. Massachusetts needs to build nearly a quarter of a million new homes over a decade to address a severe housing shortage in the state, developers and municipal leaders say.

“The housing crisis is increasingly acute. It’s bigger now than it was five, 10, 20 years ago. So we have a capital C crisis,” said Larry Curtis, chairman of Boston-based WinnDevelopment, which has converted nearly two dozen mills in Lowell, Holyoke, and elsewhere in Massachusetts over the last four decades.

Old mills, though difficult to develop, have some built-in benefits. They offer available building stock, in a state where land for big, new projects can be hard to come by. And repurposing long-vacant buildings into residential or commercial properties can skirt the kind of NIMBY community opposition that can sometimes derail new construction, according to Curtis.

Jessica Rudden-Dube, executive director of Preservation Massachusetts, said that some of the easier mill projects have already been converted. But improved incentives from the state have encouraged developers to repurpose those that still remain.

For her organization, the projects are a way to preserve history and build new housing at once. “It’s sort of a no-brainer if that space is historic and can be preserved in its historic character but serve a new purpose,” she said.

Two decades ago, New Bedford conducted an inventory of about a 100 of its mills and changed zoning laws to permit their development into housing or mixed uses, said Jennifer Carloni, director of city planning. A lot of them have found new uses, such as the Kilburn Mill that overlooks Clarks Cove. It’s now home to artists, antique vendors, a cafe, and a bookshop, along with yoga studios, gyms, and other small businesses.

But a few New Bedford mills remain untouched, awaiting builders with enough wherewithal — and deep enough pockets — to tackle challenging environmental conditions.

“We have the policies and the procedures in place that are ready to go when any one of those properties wants to be developed,” Carloni said.

The housing shortage in the state is making some developers take on even complicated projects, according to Quentin Ricciardi, CEO of real estate firm Acorn Inc., whose company has repurposed mills in New Bedford.

“With so much demand, some of these mill properties are now coming back into focus,” he said.

Glassman bought his power plant building in 2019 for $350,000. It will be, to put it mildly, challenging to make apartments out of a boiler room at the back of his building, a turbine room in the middle, and office spaces at the front. But there are high ceilings and wide windows that open up to the view of the Acushnet River.

Glassman and his partner in the project, Lisa Serafin, are looking into state and federal tax credits for historic rehabilitation projects, and will take out a loan against expected rent revenues. They hope to secure financing and permits soon, then begin construction next year.

Glassman owns two other former mills in New Bedford. An old leather lamination plant now houses Darn It, his apparel repair business, and a warehouse operation. A few minutes away is Hatch Street Studios, a 130,000-square-foot old yarn-spinning mill that has become a working space for sculptors, painters, woodworkers — even a clown school.

“There’s so much history with these buildings and in the city of New Bedford,” Glassman said, ”it would be a shame if people started knocking these down to build up something else.”

“We’re a community that is ever changing, always taking our assets and making the most of them,” New Bedford’s Carloni said.

WinnDevelopment has completed historic reuse projects across Massachusetts. They include the repurposing of mills in Lowell, such as at the historic Boot Mill Complex, that have created nearly 600 units of housing in all. In January, the firm finished transforming an alpaca wool mill in downtown Holyoke into 88 units of senior housing.

The largest such project in Taunton, the Whittenton Mills, involves 42 acres that was vacant for more than a decade. Work has finally begun after years of trying to attract developers, said Jay Pateakos, executive director of the Taunton office of economic and community development.

The plan is to create 390 apartments, as demand has grown with the arrival of a new commuter rail and new residents relocating to Taunton, after being priced out of elsewhere in the state.

“Housing is number one, especially affordable housing,” Pateakos said. “A lot of these mills make excellent apartments, so we look at it, and we try to create some housing opportunities.”

In Fall River, officials say renovating the old mills can have a multiplier effect on the local economy by creating jobs for people working on the projects and by attracting deep-pocketed new residents to live in the city.

Mayor Paul Coogan acknowledged that it is tough work. But developers regularly come to the city inquiring about them.

“They’ve had good success here, and they come back and they [say] ‘Look, what else do you have?’” he said.

“Some people that are holding on to these old mills want more money than I think they’re worth, and that a developer is willing to commit to,” he added. “But if we can put together a deal … it turns around a neighborhood.”

Omar Mohammed can be reached at omar.mohammed@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter (X) @shurufu.

A pair of brothers, who are former cops, convicted of a bribery kickback scheme that netted them millions of dollars in Mass Save contracts have lost their appeal.

Christopher and Joseph Ponzo — ex-Stoneham police officers — defrauded a company to obtain tens of millions of dollars of Mass Save funds through paying bribes and kickbacks to company employees.

Mass Save is a state-mandated program that’s funded by surcharges on utility bills — supporting energy-conservation programs and initiatives in Massachusetts.

The Ponzo brothers pleaded guilty to felonies arising from the bribery kickback scheme, and a district judge sentenced both of them to 27 months in federal prison. The judge also ordered Christopher to forfeit $13.2 million, and Joseph to forfeit $3.6 million.

The brothers then appealed the sentences and forfeitures to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit — which has affirmed the punishments across the board.

“How the Ponzos became crooks and what they want from us is kind of a long story,” the appeals court wrote in its ruling.

The brothers paid tens of thousands of dollars in cash bribes, kickbacks, and other in-kind benefits — including a John Deere tractor, a computer, home bathroom fixtures and free electrical work — to a company’s employees in exchange for the employees’ help in getting the brothers millions of dollars in Mass Save contracts.

Christopher owned CAP Electric, Inc., a business specializing in energy-conservation work. In 2013, he began bribing people at CLEAResult, a firm that picked and oversaw contractors on Mass Save projects.

He later pulled Joseph into the scheme, with Christopher and CLEAResult employee Eric Darlington helping Joseph set up an air-sealing shell company called Air Tight Solutions, LLC as a Mass Save contractor.

Doing next to no work for the company and without telling CLEAResult, Joseph subcontracted the air-sealing projects to Chinasa Construction Services, Inc., and falsely claimed Chinasa employees were Air Tight employees. The Ponzos even created fake email addresses for the Chinasa staffers to make it look like they worked at Air Tight.

To cover his share of the payola, Joseph sent money from Air Tight to Christopher and CAP Electric and labeled it “subcontractor” business expenses. Christopher then bought off CLEAResult employees.

From 2013 to 2017, he gave Darlington $1,000 cash every week and bought him expensive things like an Apple MacBook, a John Deere tractor, bathroom fixtures, and outdoor lights.

And after CLEAResult fired Darlington in 2017, the brothers began bribing CLEAResult employee Peter Marra — sending him cash and gift cards for special favors like getting heads-ups on inspections and audits.

All told, CAP Electric took in about $36 million from CLEAResult, and Air Tight received about $7.4 million.

During the course of the bribery-kickback scheme, Joseph aided in the filing of false tax returns by claiming hundreds of thousands of dollars in false business deductions.

To disguise personal expenses as business deductions, Joseph used his company credit card to make hundreds of thousands of dollars in purchases at Home Depot, Lowes and Staples, claiming to his tax preparers that charges at those establishments were business-related.

In reality, he used the company credit card at those stores to purchase gift cards that he and his spouse then used to make thousands of dollars in personal expenditures.

“Life was good for the millionaire brothers,” the appeals court wrote. “But the government eventually caught on. And arrests, indictments, guilty pleas, sentencings, and forfeitures followed.”