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If all theee of you are part of an active lease, then everyone is still liable for the rent. Even if they no longer physically live there.

It should be up to them to find suitable subletters to fill their spots in the lease and remove their liability.

If they signed the lease then they are responsible for finding sub letters for their rooms or they still owe rent . If they have co-signers the landlord/management company will come after the either the tenants or the co-signers to pay the missing rent.

They're not perfect, but community land trust programs have been a successful way for communities to pool resources and work within the market framework to improve ownership and stability that mitigates the effects of gentrification without the negative effects of blanket rent control. This site has some Boston specific examples. https://www.solidaritymass.com/greater-boston-community-land-trust

So many people will look down at anti-immigration conservatives and then say that an ethnic group or community basically "owns" a neighborhood through some amorphous moral right. At the end of the day, free movement of people had pros and cons, but it's the same basic principle at stake.

And escaping capitalism doesn't solve the scarcity issue either. It just leads the distribution of resources to be according to some other criterion. Sometimes something fairer... sometimes not. Ultimately the solution is abundance.

Yeah, I agree, it's pretty rough.

OP has some concerning post and comment history to say the least, so I'm not entirely sure what the true intent of this post was.

Okay, OP, I'm not sure what you're trying to start or prove here with this post about Gentrification in the Boston area and it seems like you're very new here on r/boston .

Your post and comment history, including a strong hatred of cats and posting in a sub with discussions about killing cats, and posts and comments about harming yourself are very concerning.

Have you sought counseling or professional help for these issues?

Honestly, talking with someone in-person would likely be a lot more helpful than posting about Gentrification and posting really critical comment replies to other people.

What do others think? Honestly, this person's post and comment history are really disturbing.

You can take your roomates to housing court. They signed the lease. They owe money whether they choose to reside there or not.

https://www.mass.gov/orgs/housing-court

https://www.mass.gov/info-details/remotevirtual-court-services#housing-court-virtual-front-counter-

Anyone remember when the giant “new” BU dorms went in? Anyone?

After hearing nothing but how “the students” were ruining the neighborhood, thousands of them were gone. Into the dorms. Rents in Allston and Brighton held steady, or even fell. Suddenly all of the news coverage switched from “wild house party ruins everything” to “how is this poor mom’n’pop landlord going to be able to pay off the mortgage (on their investment rental property)?” The sky was falling.

Too tired/late to look up citations, but if you build a ton of housing that existing residents move into, it depresses the prices of the vacated housing.

I don’t know who to ask, though. My landlord is a shitty management company.

Anyone that uses town character for more housing as an argument is just a racist that doesn’t want people of color in their town prove me wrong

I’m not sure these are questions for total strangers who aren’t your terrible roommates or your hopefully less terrible landlord.

I've enjoyed reading through this thread, but your attitude is just insufferable.

You fucking NIMBY

To your second bullet, I don’t think it’s accurate to say all market rate housing is luxury housing. New housing that is built tends to be tagged as luxury house for a few reasons 1) it actually is luxury 2) it’s not, but needs to be branded/market as luxury because otherwise they wouldn’t be able to get the rents needed to make a project financially viable. Both of these stem from housing construction costs in Massachusetts being incredibly high, making them more difficult or non-viable with high rent.

It’s not MWRA region, that’s for sure.

This could be anywhere.

This could be everywhere.

Which ones?

We are in a sinking ship. Rent control is filling a bucket and throwing it overboard into the ocean. Increasing supply of market rate housing is patching the actual hole that creates the problem in the first place. Cities that do that do not have housing crises in the first place, because they are meeting the actual demand for housing that exists.

Rent control prioritizes current residents at the expense of new ones, by disincentivizing housing construction. It does not stop displacement. It changes who is displaced. Instead of the people who currently occupy the housing, it’s the people who are looking for a place to live, broadly, in the metropolitan area. It is the “fuck you, I got mine,” of housing policy.

Massachusetts attracts the brightest, most talented people from around the world every single year who come to attend one of our many world-class universities. It is where many come to escape from places where their civil rights are substandard. The idea that newcomers are less valuable, that we should close off to anyone who comes after us, is not a great value system. If you think those people should be priced out to other, cheaper parts of the country, where abortion is restricted, where lgbt people are villianized, where there is rampant racism, you cannot claim to care about groups facing those issues.

We can accommodate pre-existing populations while also adapting for growth in the future. It’s by increasing housing supply to meet the demand that exists for new homes.

I will concede, the problem you describe relates to the trend that new housing only seems to get approved in low-income communities. Thus, they face an overwhelming portion of the burden in accommodating new residents. The real solution is to permit housing at a large-scale, which is predominantly what motivated the state legislature to require 175 Boston-area municipalities to ALL relax zoning conditions. Because when every rich, small town is so heavily incentivized to block any development, we have seen that nothing gets done to address our current housing crisis.

So instead of thinking less needs to be built in any particular neighborhood/town, it’s important to realize that more needs to be built across the entire region, and that each community needs to do their part to accommodate growth.

Luxury housing is just new housing. It has to be built. You don’t expect new cars to be less expensive than identical used cars. As that new housing stock becomes older, it BECOMES more affordable. With “affordable housing,” market rate units subsidize the income-restricted ones, causing the very problem you mention of middle-income people being too poor to afford market-rate, but too rich to qualify for the subsidized homes.

We need to do whatever it takes to have more housing be built. Housing doesn’t have to be this zero-sum game that we have created in MA.

That's wild. I didn't know you no longer need to provide income once you purchase one of those units. You'd think they would do checks every 2-3 years. Sounds ripe for abuse but I guess they are hard to get so not like there are many opportunities

THANK YOU. Many of these other commenters already have their beliefs and are unwilling to have them challenged by deflecting or posting one (1) study that aligns with their beliefs. I will look into Vienna!

Elaboration on creating jobs, thought that was an easy connection that more money lends itself to more jobs in the area, as fires and murder do not.

Luxury apartments are very new money. I know.

You must live near me