There will be. Towns are being stupid filing plans, but considering zoning changes in most towns have to be approved by super majority at town meeting, this shit ain’t going to get any traction just about anywhere

I absolutely plan to vote No on the zoning changes at the town meeting if my town doesn’t reject it before even trying (and absolutely failing miserably) to have the zoning changed at town meeting.

It ain’t the 40’s anymore where the rest of the world was rebuilding so America had hurricane force wind at our backs and Government regulations didn’t add 25+% to cost to build back then. That government housing may have been ok 80 years ago, many recent decade have shown the government is a terrible manager of housing.

Ah, yes, let the state, who can't keep the trains running, or not have massive Statie fraud problems, make the same regulations for every city and town, whether it's Pittsfield or Boston.

Where oh where could that go wrong?

Maybe we could go full on Russian concrete monstrosities from the harbor to the western state line. That'd solve the housing problem easy right? Ooh, maybe have the state own alllll the land, that'd work right? I mean, with your idea, fuck what the owner of the land they bought wants right?

The STATE knows all and will provide all /s

What? Many long-term residents in these areas are RENTERS.

Did you reply to the wrong comment?

Philips puts together a pretty good 3 legged stool analogy: supply, stability, subsidy.

Supply: Unless there are enough homes for everyone, people will get priced out. The region has added jobs faster than housing for decades, and we have a serious supply problem. Adding to the total quantity of homes is necessary but not sufficient.

Stability: tenants need protection. Even when there's enough supply, people can still get screwed by landlords, and we need to have good protections.

Subsidy: even when there's lots of homes and tenant protections, not everyone can pay market rent. So we need subsidies.

Now, the subsidies go further when there's more supply. The tenant protections are bolstered by the ability of tenants to go "f this I'm moving" and find another apartment.

All three reinforce each other.

That completely goes against the whole purpose of rent control. People who need it, need to be able access it.

I currently own an affordable-income condo, through the BPDA, and while I don’t need to prove my income anymore, after purchasing it, anybody I sell it to, or leave it to in my will, needs to submit their income to the BPDA for approval.

Subsidized housing is a scam. Landlords are incentivized to raise rents because they get automatic payments subsidized from the state. Luxury apartments lol. Yeah so they jacked rent up and get those subsidized units in there so they get your tax dollars while you pay more in rent.

1. High-quality studies—including one on Cambridge’s rent control—show that while remit benefits existing tenants, it has large negative effects on other people (including those who are also low-income). It reduces rental supply, which in turn exacerbates the affordability and accessibility problem it intends to solve. Summary of academic literature: https://www.brookings.edu/research/what-does-economic-evidence-tell-us-about-the-effects-of-rent-control/

2. It can be helpful to frame this in causal terms. What will happen to existing residents of mixed-income neighborhoods near Boston if additional housing is built? Now suppose everything else is identical, except you do not build additional housing. What will happen to the residents of mixed-income neighborhoods? Middle and high-income demand to live in the Boston metro area is there in either case. Therefore, relative to the counterfactual of building more housing, restricting new supply increases rents and leads to more displacement of existing residents. Sources: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094119021000656, https://direct.mit.edu/rest/article-abstract/doi/10.1162/rest_a_01055/100977/Local-Effects-of-Large-New-Apartment-Buildings-in

3/4. As you can see by looking around town, it’s currently more profitable in many places to build lab space than new housing. The policies you’re suggesting make housing relatively less attractive to build, so they would likely hurt housing supply and increase prices that most people pay. These do benefit the low-income beneficiaries lucky to get them, so it’s not entirely unreasonable to do this in conjunction these with other policies that make building more housing feasible and attractive.

5. Policies that make building more housing feasible and attractive include zoning predictability and greater density. Zoning predictability means laws with clear requirements that allow developers to quickly break ground without costly delays and litigation. Greater density can be achieved by relaxing various zoning requirements: allowing taller heights; larger floorspace-area ratios; fewer minimum parking requirements (both for residential and commercial properties; smaller minimum lot sizes; smaller setback requirements, allowing accessible dwelling units; and allowing duplexes, triplexes, or other forms of multi-family housing rather than mandating single family homes.

I think the government needs to be more directly involved in the construction and ownership of housing stock. There's a proven track record in this country of rent control in combination with heavy public investment in housing, we did it during the Truman administration and it helped unleash decades of abundant, affordable housing. I'm honestly amazed at all the anti-rent-control people on here who aren't aware of that history. Unfortunately state and federal government began neglecting public housing in the 60s which has led to their current decrepit state and notoriety for crime and whatnot. I encourage people to read up on the wonderful communities that flourished between 1935 and 1960 in public housing complexes when we actually invested serious money in them. They are not lost causes in the way most people have been made to believe.

The city of Vienna has one of the most successful public-housing-and-rent-control systems in the world and it's been going strong for almost a century. The majority of units there are publicly owned and the competition with the government helps keep the market-rate stock relatively low-priced. You can rent spacious, borderline luxurious apartments in the public stock for under 1000 euros a month, many as low as 600. We'd do well to emulate them.

We have to stop building out and start building up, no more sprawling suburbs which promise a mix of city and country but deliver on neither (there are so many "quiet" suburbs outside 128 that are just choked with traffic from 7am - 7pm every day).

The suburbs.

Have you ever been inside a “luxury apartment”? I assure you they are not very nice.

And the poster you are replying to is correct. City housing values were massively depressed by social, cultural, and economic forces in the 1950s-1990s.

Cities became desirable to live in again and prices went back up, but they kept going up because the population increased but no homes were built in the interim.

“Luxury” condos are the only condos built here since, oh, 2000 anyway. It’s a meaningless word - marketing bullshit.

Maybe don’t make sweeping assumptions about people then?

Rent control is the worst possible course of action. It discourages new development which is what we need the most, and it leads to subpar maintenance, black markets and corruption.

Feast and Fettle delivers fresh meals.

And even then, there is a whole bunch of asterisks attached to owning property.

>I disagree because those that have been living there for, say, 20 years get priced out.

no, they get PAID OUT when they move.

You can only redeveloped after someone SELLS and then VACATES, riiiight?

Quick , move the goalpost again!

I hear everyone's angry there.

That’s not even what they said. Do you know what a subsidy is? A change in zoning restrictions is not a subsidy.

Gentrification = money. Both inherent and disposable in that area. Case study: Southie. When I was younger southie was mostly known for murder and being on fire. Now, not so much at all.

That is so pathetic

Last summer I was driving thought Charlestown and watched a guy consoling his girlfriend who was screaming and crying watching a triple decker being demolished. She screamed "THIS IS SO FUCKED UP I GREW UP HERE!!! THAT BUILDING WAS ALWAYS THERE! NOOOOOOOOOOO!!!"

There is a new triple decker there now that looks almost exactly the same lmao

Lots of pharma and biotech workers end up settling down in greater Boston, because many of those jobs simply don't exist in LCOL areas. College and grad students are often transient, but most of the people I know who got their first real grown-up job in the area are still here. They do almost always move to the suburbs once they have kids though.