bostonbubble.com

[Greater Bos]

Just like to know when there is so much demand in greater boston area why the land is not been used to make new constructions? Towns such as weston, lexington, wellesley and some part of newton has plenty of land where new houses can be constructed. That will make it more affordable housing.
How come so many highly educated people living in this area make their life as well as next generation life harder and harder?
Look at the trend at all other places. Housing prises changes with economy. new houses come up as per demand but not here in greater Boston.

[Kaidran]

Most likely because the people making those decisions dont want prices to come down. A lot of them probably feel quite smug that they did not allow construction like other parts of the country and dont see Boston as being in the same sort of mess.

[Greater Bos]

but the number for ppl who are looking must be much more higher than those decision making. There has to be way s to put pressure on them. it just cant go on and on.... and everybody just keep quite

[balor123]

I also noticed this problem and pointed it out in another thread. The number of people looking certainly is much higher but because they don't live in those towns they have no way of applying pressure - they don't get a vote. They act this way in part because of the baggage that has collected over the years (people can't afford to let prices go down at this point) but also because coordinated action is impossible. For example, in a well planned city like San Antonio you find shopping centers littered throughout the city. Generally, new ones are put in parts of town where there is a shortage, resulting in only local traffic which no one objects to because then you don't have to drive so far. In Boston, however, there's a general shortage of shopping everywhere so when one town proposes building a center the residents get angry because it will attract traffic from all the surrounding areas. With a common authority doing the planning, it could choose to build shopping centers in all the towns and then the concern about extra traffic is moot. Multi-city projects are almost impossible to plan here because every town gets a veto and they will veto for a number of reasons: some towns suffer more misery than others, some view it as an opportunity to be greedy and get something from others, some are just incompetent, some just don't care.

In short, Boston have a very dysfunctional system of government combined with historical baggage.

[balor123]

A conservative friend of mine also likes to point out that the existence of these problems has also resulted in a shift in the politics. People who dislike these policies vote with their feet and the only ones who remain are those who stand to benefit from the status quo. Inevitably, there are some who can't vote with their feet for one reason or another who are milked by the others.

For this reason, I would love to see national housing policies that discourage milking and instead promote national values: Congress should punish towns that make life miserable for immigrants to the benefit of incumbents. And punish could mean simply not providing the same subsidies provided elsewhere. Cheap loans, for example, only serve to make incumbent homeowners wealthier rather than, as intended, improving the quality of housing available to buyers in places like Boston, as opposed to Texas where it gets a family into housing suitable for a family.

[Greater Bos]

Reasons that you mentioned looks very true.
But because of this most of the ppl who are already occupied these houses are mostly very dirty 90% housing is real shit and I just dont get that ppl want to continue to keep this shit flowing from one to another. Some one has to take actions. Just how long it will go? If u r rich ready to pay 1M then you get the decent house other houses are just ready to scrap.

[balor123]

Sorry but you can't win this battle. Your best option is to vote with your feet - move to another state, thereby perpetuating the problem for others unfortunately. I'm still hopeful that something will change in the economy or politics that will finally break the camel's back. I mean - worst recession since the Great Depression - housing should be a super bargain now.

[JCK]

A lot of this goes back to who votes and shows up for meetings. Older folks who want low taxes, don't care so much about schools, want their real estate to be worth a lot vote early and vote often. And retired folks have a lot of time.

People who benefit from low housing prices, want good schools, are generally younger and vote at much lower rates and don't show up for these meetings.

Who do you think is showing up at the town planning meetings? Younger students/professionals/parents or retirees who don't want that condo building or shopping mall because it will bring "traffic" and "the wrong crowd"?

[Greater Bos]

I agree youg ppl should spend some time in these meetings and or collecting similar minded ppl together. If we thing we do not have time then actually we spend time in making few $$ and giving up thousands of $ on housing which is not worth.
By actually making this change we would save much more on housing and better future for us and next generations.

[balor123]

It's worse than you think. The demographic of voters in these towns by policy isn't allowed to change so you can make all the statements about young voters that you want but you won't find them in those towns. Many of those prospective voters don't even live here yet. For example, someone may get a job offer requiring a move to MA but the time in which a housing decision needs to be made is ~1 year before they move there. Now you can make the statement all you want about how people everywhere should attend housing related meetings everywhere but it just isn't practical. A much more efficient approach is there for the be high level housing planning and support. And there sort of was but they all failed. The state has this section 40 housing and nationally we had subprime and FHA loans. The solution wasn't to increase the supply but instead to increase the demand. To the average American, they see homes they can't afford and so the solution to them is naturally for them to have more money so they can afford those houses. They don't realize that the goal is ever elusive since giving everyone more money means that they still can't afford those homes. Politicians reflect the will of the people and the people are weak in economics so housing policy is constructed poorly (I suspect most politicians are also weak in economics and also are forced to think in short term).

[GenXer]

Exactly. Stop the easy money. Require 50% downpayments. Give lower loans for shorter time periods, and raise the interest rates up high. Prices will plummet very fast. We can learn a lot from the Asian culture of saving. It doesn't matter how lowly a job you have - anybody can save if that's the only way they can afford a house.

[guinea]

Overdevelopment is a bane of most suburbs and metro areas, with it comes traffic, overcrowded schools and illegal immigrants and crime.

The low density around Boston makes the whole area attractive and different from other metro areas. It's part of the New England character and what separates it from Mid-Atlantic states.

If you want high density housing (concrete to concrete from the city into the suburbs) and malls on every other subdivision, you ought to move to Houston, LA or New Jersey.

[Guest]

[john p]

Most of Boston and right up to route 128 was developed with the assumption that there would be one automobile per household. So as you had two earners and teenagers with cars, the streets go really congested. Add to that, many homes got converted to multifamily so back and side yards turned into parking lots and in areas like Waltham, many park on the street. Basically, metro Boston was developed prior to the automobile age.

Beyond that, people did not like the City and fled the City because cities were corrupt and had a lot of crime. Many suburbs fought the extentions of the MBTA and commuter rail coming to their towns. In the 1960's towns like Lexington implemented "Snob Zoning" where they increased lot sizes so they wouldn't have a lot of density. They also fought the implementation of city sewers in the right of way of the street because if you had a city sewer you could have the houses closer together. If you don't have a city sewer you need a septic tank in your yard which needs a certain distance around it, which forces larger lot sizes. Towns were fighting growth and had anti-growth policies.

In 1969 they implemented Chapter 40B or Anti-Snob Zoning Laws.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Massachusetts_Comprehensive_Permit_Act:_Chapter_40B

http://www.boston.com/realestate/news/articles/2007/08/13/one_reason_to_like_anti_snob_zoning/

The details of these laws made the legislation pretty ineffective. The rules were easy to get around. Mass Housing, an agency which administers a lot of this has its own formulation as to what is considered "Affordable" or not. The way they do the math is kind of ridiculous because you can see how they consider extremely wealthy towns like Duxbury as being more "affordable" than many of the more inland blue collar towns. Basically the ultra liberal and conservative rich don't want to live with poor people or minorities and they have fought legislation and after they lost, they just made the administration and enforcement so ineffective that they circumvent it by declawing it.

The snobby way to keep the poor out is to make it too expensive to let you in. Even in Boston, they are pushing out the poor... In the poorer areas if anyone started to get ahead, they would decide to move to a nicer town before they remodelled their home in a poor neighborhood. Also, many of slummy areas are owned by people who live in the rich towns and they hike the rents up as high as they can and don't bother spend money in their buildings unless there is a chance that a more wealthy person might be interested in renting it for more money or buying it. This is why decade after decade you see more and more neglect in the poorer areas. It was during the peak of the Bubble that you were actually seeing yuppies buying condos in some of the depressed areas like areas of Somerville, Cambridge, Jamaica Plain, Brighton, etc. that yuppies wouldn't go near a decade or so prior.

I went with someone over this weekend to a neighborhood near NorthEastern University where they bought units for like $150k each about 12 years ago and now rent them for like $3k or so a month to white college students. He showed me with his hands how they are pushing the poor people out of these areas; I felt kind of bad that they are pushing out the poor from the foot of Mission Hill.

They do have to let things naturally progress because when they start to get into the business of making "developments" for the poor, they end up being "Projects" and they have historically been breeding grounds for gangs (although I think Mayor Ray Flynn came from one of the Southie Projects). When they build the buildings similar to the housing stock in the surrounding area they blend in and you have less problems.

I think what you're seeing is the poor moving outward to Brockton, Worcester, Lawrence, Lowell etc. Many are moving to beautiful places like near Keene, New Hampshire or Groton, MA, and just forgetting about the City altogether. I mean the young white collar people in Boston are living in overpriced hovels so for the working class, it must be real crap; I'd get the hell out of there because the quality of life would be pretty bad for me.

[guinea]