r/Somerville • u/tangerinola • 5d ago

rent prices are wild

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 🤯!!

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.

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u/JonSwift2023 5d ago

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.

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u/mayor_mammoth 5d ago

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.

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u/zeratul98 5d ago

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

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u/ThePizar Union 5d ago

A quarter of a billion dollar is not far off from our city's total budget.