My friend Richard Hurtz is from there

That's a lie. Housing in cities is vastly more expensive than outside of them.

OP has made several posts in the past few days (under different accounts, since he keeps getting banned) all about the superiority of suburbs over Cambridge/Somerville/Brookline. He's specifying this suburb because I think he's living in Worcester and either just bought, or is considering buying, in Holden. His trademarks are being obsessed with how the city is both a ghetto and full of $2mil homes, and SUPER concerned with how many people are driving a brand new sports car

Nope. But thanks for speaking for all of us just because it fit your viewpoint.

Not everyone who is disabled qualifies for a handicapped placard. It's generally reserved for people with more severe disabilities. I've said this over and over again, but it doesn't seem to diffuse into the conversation because people legitimately do not care.

Also, we could easily even run out of those spaces if we put up a bunch of 30-story housing towers with no parking.

>It's so infuriating to me that the only time I see people onBoston/Cambridge/Somerville subs give a shit about people withdisabilities is when it's an excuse to oppose reducing driving andparking.

🙃 I am disabled and I actually got upset over this.

The general demographics are that car owners are the wealthier people in this area. Removing parking mandates allows for more housing, particularly housing that caters to people who don't own cars (who tend to be poorer)

You can just have parking spaces only available to people with the appropriate disability placard. Somerville is converting some of their street parking to these with the restriping projects. You don't need to give everyone parking spaces to ensure that those who actually need them get them.

It's so infuriating to me that the only time I see people on Boston/Cambridge/Somerville subs give a shit about people with disabilities is when it's an excuse to oppose reducing driving and parking.

Yes. The companies have lower costs, the government has to build the parkings. More profits for companies, at the expense of taxpayers' money.

Congrats, a huge victory for gentrification!

Its also a part of a popular recent meme about Holden vs Cambridge

I don’t know what you even mean to say. My point is that, although we need more housing, this policy is not going to create anywhere near enough new housing to have a perceptible effect on housing prices. It’s a step in the right direction for sure. We should be moving on from car dependent urban planning anyway.

WTF is up with the Holden posts. Are they trolling us? Are we trolling them? I'm so confused. Live and let live, Holden!

I didn’t say it wasn’t a solution, you are arguing with a straw man. I said that the amount of increased housing development that this individual legislation will create is not going to be anywhere near enough to make a meaningful difference in housing affordability. It’s a step in the right direction but people in here are acting like this will cause rents to drop. It won’t.

Sanest Cambridge commenter

Okay I’m ready to ask, what’s up with the Holden memes? Is the choice of Holden just an arbitrary MA town?

Have never been there. Seems a bit remote for me. The fact that you're listing a Dollar Tree as one of the main amenities of the town is not a good sign though.

Weird - I saw a meme about this just yesterday...

Right, and decades of NIMBYism has led to the need of a “enormous influx” of housing.

The need for housing isn’t a very good argument against policies they make it easier to build housing. In fact… it is just confusing.

I don’t know how to argue with someone who believes increasing housing supply isn’t a solution to a housing crisis. Every other town every where says the same thing you are saying, so no housing is being built anywhere.

Cambridge has a tremendous amount of opportunity for growth in terms of 4-6 story multi families being allowed City wide, but it is impossible to build that and mandate everyone home must have a parking spot.

Having a roof over someone’s head is more important than your right to store your car on public streets. If you don’t agree then we will never see eye to eye and this discussion is pointless, sorry.

>You don’t have to play the race card every time. Not everything is about race.

You're correct that not everything is about race, but this is America, a lot of things really are about race.

I think you'd be really hard pressed to find a working class person who can live and work car free. Public transit only goes to really high end businesses that can afford the expensive boston/cambridge office space, and doesn't run at all for people doing shift work. People who work at building sites, do in-home work (cleaning, trades, etc.), or who work in warehouses will need a car.

Traveling outside the city without a car is also basically impossible, so you have to live your life inside Boston and Cambridge, or pay thousands of dollars in rental fees to use a rental car when you want to leave.

The people I know who are car free in Cambridge are overwhelmingly high income and spend a lot more on transportation than I do.

Whenever I have a package mis-delivered, it is always FedEx ground

The market has an endless supply of people willing and able to pay current rates. Developers and investors frequently hold firm on pricing and let places go unoccupied for long periods of time before lowering prices, which is only done as a last resort and rarely happens. There would need to be an enormous influx of housing to make a dent in a market where there are millions of people willing to pay out the ass to live in a closet in Cambridge.

Car free households are overwhelmingly lower income. The higher your income, the more likely you are to own more cars and drive them more.

You’re assuming that removing parking mandates will increase housing supply enough to meet or exceed an ever increasing demand, which I think is a massive, massive assumption. You’re also assuming that building more would saturate the market such that buyers and renters will have enough leverage to send prices downward, another massive assumption. The most likely scenario is that roughly the same number of housing is developed, or a little more, but the prices are set at market rate and developers hold firm on pricing because they know eventually someone will pay it. Developers and real estate investors would rather and often do have places go unoccupied for months or even a year before they’ll lower prices. It’s naive to think otherwise.