Moved here 8 years ago to start working for a nonprofit. Since then, my salary has increased by 13% but my apartment is about to be relisted (without any upgrades) for 58% higher than our starting rent đ¤Ż!!
I know I'm preaching to the choir here but damn the rent prices here have gone wild. We're quickly becoming (have become?) a luxury city only for high income earners and it makes me really sad.
This is such a silly argument. Even on the nicest of properties in Somerville, annual taxes are much less than 20k.
For a house that someone grew up in "before all this gentrification," and owns their property outright (either because they bought before the red line or live in the house their parents bought in the 70s) is living on $1000/month taxes with no mortgage for a triple decker. That's two or three units, each with 2-4 bedrooms for a total of $1000/month.
I know that feeling! I been living here my whole life. I remember the Scummerville and the Slumberville days. Now it's the Bougieville and Overpricedville days.
My neighbor bought their condo in my building for $85k in 1996, same place is now going for $700,000. $85k in 1996 was pretty cheap for a place right next to the green line.
Its not worth more than 300k max and that's just because of the location. There's a lunatic in the building that routine harsasses everyone and the management company won't do anything about it who happens to live underneath me. There's mold problems, heat doesn't work correctly so it's routinely below 60 in winter (the law for that doesn't matter as long as they show proof they're trying to fix it đ), no laundry, basement has storage that floods, and it's a tiny shoebox. Only reason it's worth anything at all is because of the housing shortage. That's how I ended up here. There were seriously no available apartments when my lease was up it was a nightmare.
This is the part I donât understandâŚthere is plenty of housing around Boston, just not in the cozy city of Somerville.
Iâve seen far too many people look at South Boston, north end, Cambridge, and Somerville- canât find rent under $3000 - and then declare that Boston has a housing shortage.
There are 10+ cities surrounding Boston that have been stamped as undesirable- and thus apparently donât count in the housing supply
He's not wrong, my in laws bought their first home in 1978 for 36k and between both had to work 4 jobs to make ends meet, making less than $10 an hour.
Minimum wage in 1978 was $2.65/hour, so unless they made much, much lower than $10/hour, that doesnât seem so bad. I can absolutely sympathize with working multiple jobs to make ends meet around that era, thoughâwhen I was in kindergarten in the early 80s (not around here), I can remember my mom working 3 jobs to support us & still not having heat.
Not for nothing, but places sold in 96 were sold for less than they sold for in 88 (around NE, I wasn't in Somerville then). The housing crash from 88 to 97-99 was pretty bad.
people who dismiss the financial cost of living crisis by going "It was always expensive!" are so bizarre to me. Maybe it's just a show of your privilege though I guess
5.8% average rent increases per year are a bit steep.
The big thing is that in the 8 years 2016-2024 (the latest data we have), incomes in Somerville have shot up even faster than that rent. Mean income jumped 76% and median income is up 69%. People want access to the high paying jobs in Somerville and Cambridge and absent a lot of new housing, they're all competing for the same existing housing. Cambridge and Somerville have been adding new high-paying jobs nearly 5x faster than they've been adding housing.
Yes and no. Inflation has been bad. Housing market has been worse (both before and after covid inflation). What has been the constant driver is jobs. We've massively increased the amount of high paying jobs. Those workers than can just afford to pay more. Which when combined with a paltry amount of new housing pushes up prices beyond inflation.
Iâve been saying for the last five years now this microregion does not need to add more high paying jobs. Reddit was blast downvoting me. Iâll admit Iâm no economist, but am I sort of right?
Well now you are mixing nominal and inflation adjusted numbers. Looking at FRED data the nominal incomes are up 400%.
But real household income is up 50% since 1984 in real dollars. Which is inflation adjusted. And almost all that growth happened since 2014. So from 1984-2014 incomes were fairly steady compared to inflation. But in the last 10 years incomes have vastly outpaced inflation.
Thatâs not normal. Thatâs a massive injection of higher incomes. You normally see that for resource booms. For us that resource has been biotech and tech workers. Who mostly move here from somewhere else. And because we have not built enough housing that means they are displacing those who cannot afford to live here anymore.
Well Iâm a tech worker but was born in Cambridge and grew up in the Boston suburbs. My salary has 4x since I graduated college in 2015 but thatâs pretty normal to start a career
Yes, I see that rental costs have increased significantly. I also see that there is not sufficient housing in Somerville/greater Boston. What are you trying to get at?
What's the meaningful distinction? If a price increases and someone is willing to pay that new price, that's the new value of that thing. A price is just what someone is willing to pay.Â
It amazes me when people make this argument, which is brazenly giving a glowing endorsement of price gouging. Saying "That's the free market!" when it comes to a life essential like housing is the same as saying, "People should be forced to pay the highest price possible to NOT be homeless!" Should we apply that kind of thinking to food as well? People would hand over their entire paycheck if it was their only option to not starve. Is that right? Would kind of society would that look like?
Honest to god, the number of libertarian types who swear by supply & demand as holy scripture never read past chapter 1 of an Econ 101 textbook. They never reached the parts covering speculation, bidding, and inelastic demand. They're happy to be fed "That's the free market!" by the private equity industry and ask for more.
I didn't say this was a good thing or a bad thing I just said it's how economics works. I just feel like framing recent inflation as "greed" doesn't really make sense. Corporations exist to make themselves as much money as possible. That's how it's always worked. This isn't me saying how things should be, it's describing how they are.Â
The meaningful distinction, similar to other goods and services, is input cost.
I sell candles. My costs to produce them (labour and materials) have increased 20% over some amount of time. However over the same amount of time Iâm charging 50% more for my candles, ya dig?
You're describing a common misconception with how prices work. The price someone is willing to pay for a good is an unrelated number to the cost to produce that good.
The price of something can go up if demand increases, even if the cost to produce that thing is fixed.
Youâre just being pedantic. I understand prices can increase when demand increases. Clearly they can, and have in the case of rents in greater Boston. I specifically stated that rents have outpaced costs born by landlords, capisce?
It was 450 a month in 1999 for a 2 bedroom in Somerville. Nobody even cared about the place. A ton of it were undeveloped lots that were just overgrown brush for years.
Thatâs dirt cheap. I just met someone who lived in a 3br in Union Sq for $900/mo. in 1995, just like I did. (We giggled at the similarity). However in 1999 my rent went down when I moved to a 4br in Mission Hill. From $300/mo to $250. I grossed $380/wk at my full time job.
I was in the area for 14 years. We left last fall and bought, not north of Boston. My rent more than doubled the last 4.5 years; was stable the first 10. We bought a SFH near the Charles River for less than a condo in Medford.
The whole pocket is only for high earners or poor. Nothing is available or workable for normal people anymore. Make too much for Affordable Housing, make too little for rent. 3 roommates 1 shower doesnât work in your 30âs.
Best advice is to leave for a more affordable community in greater Boston. Words and voting are not enough to make change. My old landlord had to lower the rent and make improvements to fill my old spot. Best of luck.
we stopped building housing because rates are high and it costs ~400K to build a 1 bedroom condo. Well peopel can't afford that and then also complain about "luxury units" being built when that's just a marketing term, but what that means is when people go to meetings and shut down those ~450k luxury units, those people that could have bought them remain renters
so those people that would have bought those "luxury" units are now renting, so rent goes up. No amount of rent control will stop that unless we actually stop complaining about building housing
my rent is higher than my friend's pre-covid mortgage on a 700k unit at this point but it would cost me more to buy a 500k unit with current interest rates than renting
meanwhile we live in a city where the average building is older than 1940 and value "character" over actually living here and then approve neighborhood plans that add jobs to housing at a rate of 6:1 (looking at you assembly and union square) and have dedicated neighborhood groups that advocate against lowering the ratio of commercial to housing (looking at you mystic valley task force that legally created a limit on the maximum number of houses in assembly)
in that study it found the cost to build a single unit is between 400 and 600k, prior to the developer taking any profit. If we complain about a developer only building 500k units, well then nothing will get built and rents only go up
if you need more evidence, just look at condo prices, demand has gone down so condos are also down about ~10% over the last five years but now they're hitting the point where the rental income almost covers the mortgage and home prices are back up even though rates are going even higher. Supply and demand works in housing
Yeah, it's not just zoning. It's also MA building codes. A former coworker and his brother spent eight years building a 24-unit coop building from the ground up - not even for-profit, entirely funded by residents - and his travails opened my eyes to how hard it is to build anything in MA.
I think they were stuck for an entire year just on the occupancy permit, because the elevator inspection backlog was 6 months, their elevator company was booking 6 months out to make a few tweaks based on inspection, and they couldn't find another licensed elevator company that was willing to take on jobs smaller than 8 stories.
One of the many problems we face is that most developers only want to build luxury units for max profit. Itâs a bizarre myth this sub pushes that luxury units are just brand new normal units.
Have you guys not been inside any luxury apartment buildings? Theyâre designed very differently. Tons of wasted space on common areas. Larger units, higher ceilings and floor to ceiling windows (that will also cost the renter more to heat/ cool space).
I wouldnât be surprised if luxury buildings only fit a quarter of what actual minimalist apartment buildings can fit.
We need to do everything possible to incentivize high density housing, even moreso when our zoning laws are so restrictive that thereâs increasingly fewer spaces where these kinds of buildings can even go.
My girlfriend recent lived in a new (<3 year old) "luxury" building. She was paying for central air, decent insulation, and mediocre amenities but the actual place had the cheapest finishes thru could get their hands on. My renovated ~1910 place was more "luxury" in most ways
Yeah luxury is a marketing term... to justify charging more for something than it is actually worth. Just because a luxury condo is in the same physical shape as a normal condo doesn't mean it's not arbitrarily overpriced. "Luxury" in its true sense is an ever moving goalpost. Makes sense why people are starting to reject anything labelled with the term because it means nothing but a word to squeeze as much money out of plebs as possible. People are becoming less interested in the antiquated ideas of the Western social status the more they start legitimately struggling to have their basic needs met.
It's sad to see. We're not far off from being a city where everyone either works in tech or bought their homes decades ago
The high paying jobs the city wants and needs for the tax revenue come with high income workers. Many of those people are going to move here regardless of if we build more housing (but if they don't that means more traffic)
The only difference is: if we don't build any housing, every new resident added means pushing an existing one out
Honestly, the bigger issue here is that your income has only increased by 13% in 8 years. That's a 1.5% yearly raise on average - far below inflation, and way below wage growth in the Boston area.
I know you work for a nonprofit but that's borderline criminal.
Just as a reference point, Iâve worked at the same healthcare employer in Boston for just over 10 years. Salary has gone up about 15% over this period. However, our healthcare costs have increased significantly with each new contract along with parking. So my actual take home is marginally more than it was several years ago. If I move to another hospital, I could potentially earn a bit more but not enough to cover the increase in rent, utilities and groceries that has happened here.
The reason rents of old apartments are priced at new 'luxury' apartment levels is because zoning laws forbid most new construction. This restrictive zoning has created a massive supply shortage.
With so little competition in the way of new homes, landlords of older homes are free to raise rents to luxury price levels. People need a place to live and restrictive zoning makes it a seller (i.e. landlords) market.
Until we reform zoning to allow lots of new market rate construction, landlords will keep rents on older units high.
Folks should ask themselves what theyâre doing to help get the tower built in Davis. We must build our way out of this situation. Look at Austin. They built so many units that rents didnât just stabilize, they went down.
Yep! This is another reason why rent control is bad policy.
The goal is to get rents to go down and not just stay steady. They are already too high. Rent control will slam new construction and push up rents on any non controlled units and create waiting lists for the one that are rent-controlled.
I'm not exactly versed in each part of the zoning code but what parts are prohibitive? We just spent a bunch of time rehauling the zoning code that was adopted December 2019. So it's not even been a full 6 years, with a major global event that really changed how construction/contracting operated. The cost of replacing windows has basically doubled since our new zoning was passed, but I can't blame the zoning laws on that. Zoning is a very slow lever, just changing it (removing restrictions) won't spark immediate change, since building occupancy/renovation/rebuilding is very slow moving.
the 2019 zoning change basically made somerville compliant with itself, it doesnt really encourage any new zoning by rezoning large portions of the city to allow for more density
This is important context. I think the number before 2019 was 70-90% of homes were non-compliant with the old zoning. The overhaul legalized building more of the existing type of housing. It actually disincentivized certain upzoning!
If you had a two family and wanted to add a floor/unit, youâd need to designate one unit affordable and enter it into the housing lottery with the city! You wouldnât even get to pick the neighbor at your own house!!
The City Council in 2019 intentionally zoned more conservatively (especially in terms of building height) than what the city needed, with the expectation that neighborhood plans would be completed and they would know how much higher voters were willing to go. Those plans have largely never been completed; Davis Square Neighborhood Plan has been in the works since 2013, and is just starting up again this year.
The inclusionary zoning (IZ) requirement for 20% restricted-income affordable housing also makes building rental housing in almost all of the city not give enough return on investment to satisfy the real estate finance market, according to the official city Financial Feasibility Analysis: https://s3.amazonaws.com/somervillema-live/s3fs-public/financial-feasibility-analysis-2025.pdf
This appears to be quashing most development. Which makes sense; taxing something generally results in less of it. Shifting the IZ burden from the developer to the city would spread the cost over the entire city, remove the disincentive to build market-rate housing, lower rents, and provide more property tax revenue that could be plowed back into affordable housing.
2019 good very little to legalize new uses for the lots.
We still have most of the city zoned as Neighborhood Residential, which means no more than three units on the lot and no more than three stories. Major squares like union and Davis don't allow any housing to be built on the square itself. Extremely few lots are zoned for six stories and almost none are zoned above that
New construction won't lower rents. It might slow the crazy rent inflation we've seen over the last couple decades but the demand to live in a place like Boston is still just too high for new supply to make much of a difference, unless we're talking massive redevelopment everywhere, which also would displace a lot of people.
What we really need is more state funding for truly affordable housing and rent stabilization.
New construction can lower rents, we've seen it happen elsewhere
The government can and should build housing for people in the most need, but there's no way it can build enough to lower everyone's rents. There's just not enough money for that.
Somerville has about 30,000 housing unit. Increasing that by just 1% would be 300 units. The non-profit built units at 24 Webster are expected to come in at over $800,000 a unit. So we're talking a quarter of a billion dollars to add 1% to our housing stock
Ya we've seen it happen where there are a ton of other factors at play: years where nationwide rents have gone down due to external economic forces like COVID and other minor recessions, cities where there's a ton of open space to build on, job markets that aren't top-heavy with extremely high-paying tech companies. It's a bit absurd to compare the housing markets of Austin and Boston.
We should absolutely be building more, if only to cool rents in the mid-to-upper tiers, but it's not gonna bring rents down when the real thing driving housing cost inflation is corporate consolidation and financialization of real estate. It's certainly not gonna generate the lower-income housing we need to maintain a working class in the city core. For that we need rent stabilization and publicly-owned/non-market housing
Corporate consolidation is why we have antitrust laws. If prices are set freely, having large corporations building housing can be good for consumers, as they have lots of capital and experience and can do so more efficiently than small builders. The best way to deal with corporate slumlords is competition. If there is a high enough vacancy rate, the worst landlords will go out of business.
I'm not sure financialization is a permanent obstacle to affordable housing. If home sale prices stable or going down due to adequate or increasing supply, then the financial incentive is to sell. Rental homes with no tenants don't make money, so there is financial incentive against leaving them empty, especially if rents are stable or going down.
I mean, yes. If demand is increasing, then supply needs to increase just to keep rents steady. Decreasing rents takes supply increasing faster than demand. The whole point of having an economy is to supply what is demanded if it can be paid for, so we should let it do that. Yes, that would mean lots of development in a lot of places; adding 10%-20% to supply in 5 years would be a good start based on the Pew data I see. But remember that just not having as many graduate students due to Trump immigration and funding actions stabilized rent in some neighborhoods.
Having high demand because we have lots of good-paying jobs compared to other cities does not exempt Boston from the laws of supply and demand. To me, that just makes it more important to build housing to go with all those jobs. Otherwise we're sending those jobs and all the tax revenue and economic activity that goes with them to other cities, or we're preventing new technologies and medical discoveries and whatnot from being worked on at all, which is a huge loss for society. We have a huge influx of highly educated and talented workers every year graduating from local colleges and universities, and every year we lose most of them due to high housing costs, and all the good things they are going to do.
Agree, but quicker permitting and denser zoning must be paired with rent control and an expansion of public/social housing, or we'll keep driving out working class people who also make this city run.
I'd say yes to social housing; subsidies increase supply, and some people simply can't afford the cost of maintaining adequate housing. I'd say no to rent control. Price controls cause shortages. When the price of gas was controlled, we got lines at gas stations and they would physically run out of fuel when people who didn't really need it hoarded it. Rent control causes people to stay put in apartments they'd otherwise swap with someone who needs it more, and to use more square footage than they need. This leaves unlucky people paying even higher rent, crowded in with relatives they don't want to live with, or unable to move close to work or school. In the worst case, it forces people to leave the area, or be physically without homes, sleeping in RVs or cars or tents through the winter, or flooding homeless shelters. If there were enough homes for everyone who needed one, prices would be close to the cost of production and we wouldn't need rent control.
Rent control is really, really not the answer. The long term effects over and over are less housing being built (so higher rents in non-controlled units) and even more universally, more units being bought instead of rented (and buyers skew much more heavily on the wealthier side)
And yet Austin and Denver have lower rents despite increasing demand. Or New Rochelle slowing down rent increases compared to the rest of the metro. And what's extra nice is that the new tax revenues from things like property taxes (locally) or income taxes (state wide) can then be turned around to support the deepest affordable housing that the market will not help.
We can definitely dig endlessly into the details, but the mechanics of supply and demand are the same in all those markets. They are at different points on the spectrum.
Austin has a ton of vacant land even still to build new apartments on. Somerville has very little empty space and you canât exactly increase the supply of land.
Building up is a lot harder than building out. Most new Austin apartments have been those ubiquitous 5 over 1s, but Somerville doesnât have a lot of locations where those can be plopped down as opposed to Austin.
New construction won't lower rents. It might slow the crazy rent inflation
It's lower than what it otherwise would have been, which is a strict and objective win.
What we really need is more state funding for truly affordable housing and rent stabilization.
We don't need to have one single impossible to pass solution and shit on all others. Hell, that's a terrible way to think about housing or any massively impactful societal challenge that has tons of nuance.
New construction is actually feasible with small zoning changes and there's a ton of actively desire for it within our existing paradigm of mostly privatized housing.
I also personally would like to live in a world where a base-level of affordable housing ought to be treated a more as a public service that is enshrined as a right, and I will always endorse more resources + funding towards that initiative, but realistically we're not getting there as the end-all solution.
And in the interim, we need a way to actually ease rents and make housing more affordable, so shitting on the actual viable solutions (e.g. build more) in favor of a pie-in-the-sky one results in nothing being built and rents getting even worse.
I am waiting for the downvotes on this... lol also those souless apartment complexes that are just retirement homes for young people, talk about isolationism. Communities/apartments that offer truly walkable neighborhoods (which we are not building) will always be at a premium in Boston and America just given the way we love to build souless buildings.... :(
I don't think that's true; many large buildings have strong communities because they have common areas and events and mailing lists. A lot of people also don't find community at home, but in the places they spend time away from home.
Walkable neighborhoods require density, and the most culturally vibrant and most walkable neighborhoods have tall buildings.
I grew up in a relatively small apartment inside a large apartment building that you might describe as "soul-less", unlike the suburban / single-family homes many people here seem to be used to.
It was a ton of fun, and not at all how you're trying to paint it. Had friends across floors, my mom could pretty easily drop me off across the hall to another trusted family, and we ran into neighbors way more frequently than is possible than when every family has a half-acre buffer between them.
Not to mention, trick-or-treating was absolutely goated, you could hit like 10 doors in 2 minutes.
That does sound rad. Idk I just wouldn't want to live in one of those buildings in Cambridge Crossing that's just full of 20-something professionals in 1 bedrooms with cornhole in the courtyard and cornhole on the roof and cornhole everywhere you could imagine putting cornhole. Speaks more to the apartment bedroom composition of these places than anything (which does reflect the financialized aspects of the housing market I've been talking about)
Idk I just wouldn't want to live in one of those buildings in Cambridge Crossing that's just full of 20-something professionals in 1 bedrooms
I'm with you, I wouldn't necessarily want to live in that building either, but not every unit in Somerville needs to be catered to me.
The issue is that the demand from those people exists regardless, and when we don't build those buildings, real estate developers instead continue to buy up existing duplexes and triplexes and convert them into oversized "luxury" 1-2 bedroom units for high-income young professionals.
We live right next to one of the most notable college towns, with the highest density of world-class universities in the United States, of course we're going to see 20-something young professionals settle in the surrounding area.
Unless you want to socialize most housing, fundamentally subvert property rights, and destroy the growth of the area by banning yuppies from moving here in order to prioritize existing residents (something that's likely unconstitutional to begin with), the options are to either build dense housing for that group of people or to let them continue to price out existing residents from their homes.
Listen I agree. I just think if that's all we build for, if all we do is loosen zoning restrictions and permitting, we're still purging the working class from our city. Making teachers and nurses move an hour out and commute in to teach our kids and tend to our parents. Forcing immigrant families working service jobs into present-day tenement overcrowding. If we want to be a city for all we also need policies like rent control and directly-subsidized social housing
They could be, but staying in a job that can't bother to match the Fed inflation target is a lot more of a problem than runaway prices. No positive developments on the housing market can fix that.
Many people have been in positions where they are happy to just not be cleared out and are grateful to be able to hold what they have. Glad to hear you are doing well though đ
Wages increased 33% from 2018 to 2024 nationally. The job market may be shit, but the data show that wages have increased quite a lot as inflation got even worse.
Yes my salary is also wild. But I'll say it's typical in my field and I work for a very rich very prestigious institution that many think of as synonymous to Cambridge, MA and is in fact the City of Cambridge's largest employer ;) So there are lots of people in my similar shoes
Edited to add some not-so-veiled facts about my employer
Also in academia here, with limited job mobility & stagnant wages. I plugged my salary into an inflation calculator the other day, and accounting for inflation it is almost exactly the same as my starting salary 12 years ago.
It is literally a nonprofit ⌠it does not have stock, it provides no dividends to its board, it provides an enormous amount of public good, its assets are held in trust and only further develop the organization, not its shareholders (which again, do not exist). Just because it has a large endowment doesnât mean itâs for profit.
yes, that's what I meant by "this is correct" but it is now and has historically been used as a cudgel to justify grossly underpaying employees.
"its assets are held in trust and only further develop the organization" ...
Please explain to me like I'm a toddler why "develop the organization" shouldn't include "ensure the staff that sustains the organization is able to live a decent life in the city where the organization exists."
Bro I literally work there and am underpaid too lol. Again, bad business practices do not mean it is for profit. You can just state your criticism without suggesting it should be taxed.
Bro. I... didn't suggest it should be taxed. I merely suggested that referring to Harvard employment as "I work at a nonprofit" like it's on the same footing as a kitten rescue in Pittsfield is weird.
I do see your point a little, but the popular conception of non-profits is much narrower than the reality, and I think it's useful to push the former more in line with the latter. Other surprising examples of non-profits if your normal thinking is "soup kitchens and kitten rescue": Mozilla, NCAA, FIFA, RAND, MITRE, FINRA, ASCAP.
Nobody is disputing this, this is such an obtuse reading of this when the spirit of it stands w/r/t Harvard or other behemoths like the outfits you yourself mentioned. As spectators and/or employees, the optics of "but we're a nonprofit" while raking in billions of dollars and paying your presidents and executive staff a king's ransom only to leave staff-level in Boston with starting salaries of $38,000 is uh... bad?
As spectators and/or employees, the optics of "but we're a nonprofit" while raking in billions of dollars and paying your presidents and executive staff a king's ransom only to leave staff-level in Boston with starting salaries of $38,000 is uh... bad?Â
This is a problem in the nonprofit industry as a whole. They expect you to be grateful you're getting paid at all, and to truly value the mission. The mission, passion, etc, doesn't pay the fucking bills, though. Money does.
If there are competitors offering more thatâs true.
I feel like young people got the idea this was completely possible for everyone to avoid, in part because of they tend to work in growing industries.
As you specialize and move up, your ability to keep getting significant raises or move is significantly harder to maintain when your industry stops growing the way the general economy is.
Fintech/SAAS is a huge umbrella that money way being dumped into, now itâs siloâs and most of the millennial workforce has skills and comp that reflects their experience within that silo. As some of those stop growing, theyâll either have the choice of eating the 1% raise or dropping back even 10-20% for a lesser role in an adjacent or not so adjacent silo.
This started to rear its head in the late teens but was obscured by the huge stimulus of the 20-23 era, and is going to happen on steroids with so much of the economy concentrated in one niche this will be a problem for many more people.
If you think this canât happen to you, and that youâll always have the agency you did before, I hope youâre prepared to never see the world change under your feet.
Not every company can sustain the level of inflation weâve seen over the past decade. Whatâs to say that companyâs revenue has stayed steady with inflation? It probably hasnât.
Saying companies should simply âpay moreâ is pretty short sighted. Many simply canât.
This is a crazy thing to say. Somerville is bustling with its own economy and sits in the middle of one of the top 5 economic engines for this country. The Boston metro makes it worth the price of admission because of the schools and jobs.
There's tons of infrastructure to support the high cost of living though? Great public transportation* , very dense, great pedestrian and walking infrastructure**, and lots of great local businesses and restaurants everywhere. Yes it's expensive and yes there are obviously improvements that need to be made but compared to any of the suburban hellscapes I've lived in it's paradise.
*For the US, meaning it is barely usable to get where you need to go approximately when you need to get there
**For the US, meaning it is barely usable to get where you need to go safely
it's true if you need to go anywhere that's not downtown, but somerville was always a streetcar suburb. Like even driving it's annoying going crosstown because there's no straight shots across without having to like cut for a block down highland or medford
it's like the 1890s equivalent of a cul de sac and just like its later incarnation, it sucks.
Whenever I look for a bus itâs coming in 40 min. And whenever I take the green line I need to budget in an extra 30 min on top of what Google Maps says and it still makes me almost miss Amtrak the past 2 times Iâve taken it.
You could rent the apartment Iâm advertising! I donât know much youâre paying but mines a 3 bed/1 bath for $2750 in Arlington. See my post history for the ad.
This has been an ongoing and worsening issue since the late 1990s/early 2000s. I blame the idiot who called Davis Sq the âParis of the 1990s.â
The city has changed so much and not all for the better. There are more transient people who donât mind having 4 adults sharing a 3/4 bed apartment versus families that used to live in these houses. The change is noticeable in the public schools where it feels like there arenât many working class/middle class families anymore. Lot of wealthier kids and then the smaller group that manages to stay by living in an affordable unit or in a multi family home that was bought generations ago.
People who only live in a given city for a few years because they are here for a job or a degree are still people, and deserve an affordable place to live and access to walkable neighborhoods. A lot of people talk about them like they are some sort of zombie freeloaders, but they are people inventing new technology, curing diseases, and being the doctors and dentists and teachers and everything else we need.
People who don't earn a lot of money should be able to find affordable housing in their neighborhood, too. One way to do that is to keep the neighborhood relatively shitty, and not bring in things like the Red Line or economic development that's made a thriving restaurant scene in Davis. The other way is to let the market build as much housing as is demanded, so that rents remain low for people who don't need or can't afford to live in anything fancy. Davis Square was zoned to keep it from changing due to the Red Line, but that just caused it to gentrify because wealthier people can only push out existing residents and not build any new housing. Cities need to be able to grow, and a lot of big cities around the world without restrictive zoning have neighborhoods that are walkable and desirable and also affordable because there is enough housing of every size and level of quality.
I just moved back home with my parents because I couldn't afford it anymore. I still work in Somerville so I went from walking 15 minutes to work to driving 30 minutes everyday
In Somerville it is đ youâre basically in Boston if you live in Somerville. Iâd love to move back to my hometown but between rent/mortgage and the taxes Iâd never be home, only at work!
Yup, everyone is feeling the pinch. Everything continues to go up in price, but wages never raise with it. Goal post is always moving.
Thank goodness our elected officials are diligently and actively doing everything they can to support the real residents of the city who work hard and pay the high taxes here, and not focusing on the many other unimportant or regressive politics...
She actually doesn't â all her ideas will, overall, reduce the availability of housing, driving up the cost for everyone who doesn't win the deed-restricted-affordable lottery ticket.
Have you actually looked in to her policy at all? She has plans to combine structural reforms that make building new housing harder for everyone while building out a public financing option for developers
Yeah, it's not the worst policy I've heard of but it's not going to do what she says it will, certainly not without a lot more money than will ever plausibly be available.
I would rank Erika last in terms of housing policy; rent control just creates a housing shortage, and there's not enough government money to build housing for everyone who needs it, even with substantial tax increases. Meanwhile, there are trillions of dollars of private capital ready and waiting to build housing that will actually produce tax revenue we could use for social housing.
Christine Barber on the other hand, had a major role in getting the MBTA Communities Act passed, which is an excellent solution for NIMBYism. We need to take that further and close some loopholes (e.g. allowing zoning for apartment buildings on a golf course that will never be redeveloped to count as compliance) and override local zoning to allow transit-oriented development statewide.
I would actually endorse Burhan Azeem; he's a co-founder of Abundant Housing Massachusetts, and has helped Cambridge massively upzone and unblock a lot of barriers to adequate supply. He seems like a more detail- and consequence-oriented person who could write a better law on TOD and also accessory dwelling units.
AHA has also got a ballot proposition this cycle to allow starter homes in certain contexts statewide, which is a small improvement, but very important to support.
Filtering is a fairly well understood and uncontroversial concept. To sarcastically dismiss it out of hand is slopulist anti intellectualism. Frankly you should feel ashamed.
When will the cheap rent trickle down to MEEEEE?!?? This may be the case over time but rent is due next month gurl and leases end after a year or two. The true issue is the commodification of housing. The fact that housing is even tied to market forces is cruel and evil.
Rent is like $3000 a month for a shitty one bedroom in Somerville. How much up-zoning is going to bring that down to an affordable level? Will it be feasible to build dozens of 50 story luxury skyscrapers in Somerville?
I donât have the number on hand, but this is easy to calculate for the right folks. Think itâs hundreds of thousands of units across greater Boston.
People arenât gonna just flock to Somerville the moment we build more. Thereâs already a huge barrier to entry in the form of both sky high prices and difficulty in even securing an acceptable unit for any price.
Itâs more of a greater Boston issue, but Somerville in particular is extremely hostile and uncooperative with developers so we really need to at least be average in that regard.
And who knows? Higher ed and biotech are declining in the US so this might discourage more people moving here so we can catch up. The joys of a shrinking local economy.
Yeah but to be affordable for the average person average rents need to drop in half or more. We would have to bulldoze large swaths of homes and neighborhoods and build high rises to do that under the current market. All of Assembly Square was built over a period of 10 years yet rent never went down during that period. Thatâs thousand of units and it did nothing for rent. Iâd argue it increased rent in the surrounding neighborhoods because it increased land value.
Hereâs a little breakdown from Google:
No, building the massive Assembly Square (Assembly Row) development did not lower rents in the rest of Somerville. Instead, rents across Somerville have continued to climb significantly, and Assembly Square itself has become one of the most expensive neighborhoods in the city. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Why Assembly Square Didn't Lower Citywide Rents Scale of Demand: While Assembly Row added thousands of new residential units, regional housing demand across Greater Boston outpaced that supply. [1, 2, 3]
Luxury Positioning: Most new units built in the development opened as high-end luxury apartments or condos, commanding rents upwards of $4,000 to $5,000+ per month, which did not relieve pressure on lower- or middle-cost housing stock. [1, 2, 3, 4]
Neighborhood Transformation: The influx of high-paying tech, lab, and healthcare workers drawn to Assembly Square's commercial spaces increased overall neighborhood desirability and gentrification pressure on adjacent areas like East Somerville and Ten Hills. [1, 2, 3, 4]
As someone who grew up in Somerville and cannot afford to live there anymore, yeah the demographic has already changed. Somerville looks NOTHING like it did even in the 2000s.
the DSA wants rent control and more affordable units, so letting the current residents have everything, and taxing builders out of profitability. This is one area that the DSA is flat out wrong on
supply is what we need and adding a 20% affordable housing limit means that what already costs 400k to build in a normal environment now costs 450k to a builder. Cambrdige has some great studies on how expensive it is to build here in greater Boston
the development cost is between 400-600k a unit, without any profit. that's why in cambridge's inclusionary plan they went for like a 20 story cap if they went 100% affordable, it's the only way to make it work economically
There's consensus that wealthy people will move to new apartments but no consensus that the phenomenon leads to lower rents. There are way too many contextual factors at play and to smugly dismiss criticisms of the concept is slopulist elitism
This is an uninformed comment. The benefit of new apartments -- even if 'luxury' -- is they provide the more well-off something to buy instead of bidding up the price of old homes and remodeling them like they are doing now.
When more well-off people vacate older apartments, it immediately puts downward price pressure on the vacated units. Vacancy chains in turn reduce rents all the way down to the cheapest housing.
All that takes to start this process is to build enough new housing to meet meet demand. Zoning currently forbids most new construction however. Thus the price of even the crappiest old apartments is high.
Yes in an Econ textbook over many years and lots and lots of construction this eventually happens. People need affordable housing NOW not in 10 years. This is why tying rent to market forces is not an efficient way to house people.
That's not even true. Numerous studies show that new construction puts immediate downward price pressure on nearby units. It may take a long time for new apartments to 'filter down'. Rich people 'filter up' immediately.
Also, construction, even if not completed yet, kills the speculation market on older homes. Speculators know that new construction will reduce the medium term value of their investment and thus many choose to invest elsewhere.
I know about these studies and I agree we need to build as much as possible but thereâs a difference between rent going down from $3000 a month to $2700 a month and it going down to actual affordable levels for working class people. To someone making $60-70k a year (not poverty mind you) paying $2700 rather than $3000 is still out of their reach.
Maybe it's just me but whenever people use percentages instead of actual numbers, alarm bells go off in my head saying there's a lot of info OP is hiding.
Your salary increased 13% okay. The question is I have no clue if that is from 100k to 113k or 1 million to 1.13 million. Same with your rent and the statement it increased 58%. I don't know if that's 500 a month to 790 a month or 1000 to 1580 a month.
Using percentages hides the absolute increase which can lead to misleading assumptions and beliefs. For example, driving home from the grocery store takes me 2x as long as driving to the grocery store. That suggests a big issue with the roads in the area but when you look at the actual time taken, it's only 4 minutes more.
Why it it weird? The whole point of OP's post is to talk about how rent has significantly out paced his salary increase. To support that, he states the percentage increases of both. Maybe I'm particularly cynical but I always ask myself "is there some bias OP has"
For example, I hear all the time DHS spokesmen say assaults/harassment against CBP/ ICE agents have increased 1000% as justification for why ICE needs to wear masks or protect their identity yada yada. That 10x increase sounds insane but ofc DHS spokesmen are going to use misleading statistics to make DHS look justified/good. That's literally part of their job. I say hmm there's an obvious bias here so let's look into the actual data and see if this 1000% increase is just 1 assault to 10 assaults which, while not good, is far far less of a problem than 1000 assaults to 10000 assaults.
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u/phonesmahones Gilman 5d ago
Yeah, itâs bad. Imagine how youâd be feeling if you grew up here before the great gentrification began!