[jhallenworld]

When Boston ended rent control in the late 90s, all of the sudden the landlords invested in their goldmine buildings and generally improved the city. It sucks for those trying to rent or buy (including me, I paid 60% more for a house in 2002 than what it was worth in 1996), but the city has certainly had a renaissance.

IMHO, the problem now is bad zoning. The rich car-centric suburbs are preventing denser housing- to their own financial detriment. A recent fight is that the state has forced them to allow higher density housing around commuter rail stops. Similar fights about rail trails, future abutters are afraid of change but they are valuable everywhere they exist- in that they are a desirable feature and raise your house's value.

Another problem is that they overbuilt $100/sqft bio-lab space. These are sitting empty, and the owners refuse to lower the rent.. I don't understand how the owners remain solvent.

[hnav]

The funding for the types of infrastructure that is made less efficient by sprawl needs to come from property taxes. Those taxes should then be scaled appropriately to reflect the amount of extra spending on sprawly infrastructure.

[cwnyth]

This is why you need a two prong approach: city-led redevelopment or redevelopment incentives on top of rent stabilization. Boston is not rapidly growing new housing relative to the number of people who are trying to live there. The median rent price per capita of the Boston metro is much, much higher than NY metro, nearly 4x in fact.[1] Boston should not be as expensive as New York, when the latter has rent stabilization (and even some old apartments still under rent control) and the former does not.

> I don't understand how the owners remain solvent.

I think that tells you everything you need to know about who's renting them out.

[1]: https://constructioncoverage.com/research/cities-with-the-mo...

[cwnyth]

I also happened upon this discussion, which claims the exact opposite of the original claim: Massachusetts, despite not having rent control, is dead last in building new housing.

https://www.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/1tc7fqz/yes_we_are_...

[jghn]

Also, when the topic of rent control, sorry, rent stabilization, comes up here in the Boston area now people won't allow for inflation adjustments. I'd be okay with a scheme that allowed for automatic inflation adjustment plus some float. But instead they're always proposed in a way that has a max cap. This means that an owner could potentially start losing money. And leads to the flip side of what you describe.

When I point this out in r/boston, cambridgema, and somerville I get downvoted to oblivion because obviously fuck the landlord class. But why on earth would anyone start renting a place if they know they could get soaked over time?

[rickydroll]

The Massachusetts law requiring cities/towns to build high-density housing around commuter rail stops neglected one thing. There's no open space. To build high-density housing, the city or state would have to buy out the existing landowners, demolish the existing property, and then build anew.

They also neglected the effect of travel time on behavior. Back in the day, I was commuting from a rich suburb to Cambridge, and to get to work on time, I had to get up early to accommodate a 30-minute commute to the train station, wait for the purple line and the red line, and then walk three-quarters of a mile. When I saw how little traffic was on the road, I said, "F it," and drove to work in the same amount of time as it took me to get to the train station.

In the Biolab space, it was a little overbuilt, and now it's tremendously overbuilt because of the killing off of NIH grants and subsequent reduction in investment in the biotech sector. I suspect the reason they don't drop the rent is that it would cause a bit of unraveling. You drop the rent; that changes the valuation of your building, which may mean you're underwater on the loan, the bank calls the loan, et cetera, et cetera. Then, similar properties would suffer devaluation and a similar unwinding. And if you agree with the contagion theory of deflationary environments, it'll all unwind all the way through your 401k and other investments. Sadly, the billionaires would be untouched.

[ianm218]

I think your model is off. If single family homes got rezoned to allow large complexes near trains, those plots of land would be worth more and it would likely be worth it for the people living there to eventually sell to developers. This doesn't require the city or state buying anyone out.

In the greater boston area NIMBY's are incredibly effective and will pull out every stop. I.e. instead of designating normal areas as multifamily, they will designate a portion of a golf course as multi family so you'd have to buy out the whole golf course [1].

It really is sad MA is 50/50 in housing produciton per capita [2]. Despite being severely under built and very desirable place to live, and then everyone pretends to be progressive. Michelle Wu in Boston uses "affordable housing" to bring all residential construction to a halt.

[1]. https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/marblehead-david-modica-...

[2]. https://x.com/JohnEDeaton1/status/1988753789076062606

[rickydroll]

Thank you. I hadn't even thought about the prices of property. To get an idea of what property costs would be in an area I'm familiar with, I looked on Zillow at properties around a couple of train stations in Weston.

Looking at one of the train stations in a lower-priced section of Weston, properties within walking distance of the stop go for roughly $2 million per acre, according to Zillow. Given what happened to the properties around the Green Line extension, I would expect those properties to sell for at least twice their Zillow listing price.

I thought about what it would take to get me to sell. I think it would take multiple millions, with a sub-5% mortgage, to get me to sell. It is kind of hard to put a value on it because I have established mini-orchard and berry patches.

How many housing units and parking spaces can you fit into two acres? Unless the units are heavily subsidized, I don't think any of them will be considered "affordable" because condos in the area sold for around half a million dollars seven years ago, and so I'd expect these to go for at least $750,000 to a million.

[ianm218]

The point is just to increase housing supply not create “affordable housing”. Right now there is massively more demand than supply, so any incremental unit is still very expensive. We’ve strangled housing supply for so long that it seems like the only way is for the state to come in and do rent control.

We start allowing supply again and the less desireable places on the commuter rail i.e: Brockton/ bridgewater/ Randolph get truly affordable over time, “top” destinations like Weston housing price growth stalls out at least.

I’ve never seen an area more adverse to economics 101 than Boston.

[mikem170]

> To build high-density housing, the city or state would have to buy out the existing landowners

Couldn't they just change the zoning to allow for greater density?

The properties become more valuable, some would want to develop, and some would sell to those developers. Moreso over time.

[WalterBright]

> Sadly, the billionaires would be untouched.

Why would you conclude that? Billionaires have their money invested in the same things as your 401k, etc.

[rickydroll]

When you have billions, you have so much margin for loss that it would not materially affect your life; if you lose 80% of your wealth, you can still survive and continue rebuilding it. Whereas if you've got 1 mil in your 401k and you lose 80% of that, well, you're f-ed for retirement.

[WalterBright]

Nobody is making you invest in the market.

[twoodfin]

Indeed, stock market crashes are the greatest tool for reducing wealth inequality. We should want more of them, surely!

[dmurvihill]

Sure, when you kick out all the poor people, the city definitely does look richer.