17 ms·

We're talking about this a lot in Cambridge and I'm hoping to put together an analogous map for us. For example, here's a map of parcels where the floor-area-ra

• thenipper 10y ago
  Seriously. I manage a building in Cambridge and get notifications about zoning changes all the time. And definitely can't afford to live there any more.
  • bhickey 10y ago
    The city council is currently considering an expansion of inclusionary zoning. The gist is that 20% of new apartments in buildings with six or more units will be reserved for people earning between 50-80% of median income. Put concretely, a school teacher with a stay at home spouse and two kids would be ineligible for one of these units. Since there's no concomitant increase in density, we should see two things: 1. Overall construction should decrease relative to where it would have been. Projects that were previously viable are now underwater. Even worse, if the cap rate fluctuates entire classes of projects become nonviable. 2. Market rate housing will become more expensive at a faster rate. The market is clearing at levels that people at 50% median income can't afford, so setting aside units strictly reduces the market rate supply without any demand reduction. The Terner Center at Berkeley has an interesting policy tool that simulates the impact of various policy choices: http://ternercenter2.berkeley.edu/examplecities/index.html http://ternercenter2.berkeley.edu/examplecities/index.html
    • scythe 10y ago
      >The gist is that 20% of new apartments in buildings with six or more units will be reserved for people earning between 50-80% of median income. Put concretely, a school teacher with a stay at home spouse and two kids would be ineligible for one of these units. Are these developments really as "welfare cliff"-y as they seem? As in: if your income goes up, are you kicked out of the house? Although, most of what I've read suggests that laws which increase cost (such as affordable housing requirements) have a tiny impact relative to laws which increase development time (such as the Telegraph Hill Dwellers calling for a stay of ~everything at council meetings); the latter are far more damaging. On your tool: if you move the affordability requirement from 10% to 25% and reduce the time to approval from 6 months to 4 months, you still build more housing!
      • rspeer 10y ago
        > As in: if your income goes up, are you kicked out of the house? I went to a City Council debate where this was a big issue. Theoretically, yes. But the city doesn't actually want to kick people out of their houses. But there was some concern that people had already pulled some shenanigans to make their finances temporarily suck so that they could get a house in Cambridge.
        • scarmig 10y ago
          Friend of mine did something similar in San Francisco. Got a low-work part time job that paid in the affordable housing range for a year or two; he had accrued a large down payment; and he managed to win the BMR lottery. Bought a place in North Beach, tripled or quadrupled his income the following year. That makes it sound a lot more cynical than it actually was--he originally chose the badly paying job for the lifestyle it allowed him--but it's definitely an abuse of a system that doesn't even function well when it's not being abused.
        • rspeer 10y ago
          I should clarify: I used the word "house" sloppily. We're talking about renting apartments here; no subsidy would get you an actual house.
      • 10y ago
• vkou 10y ago
  The only thing I wish on NIMBYs is for them to spend a decade in a Soviet queue for apartments. This shortage is man-made.
  • bhickey 10y ago
    I have a handful of friends who left Russia in the early 90s and the pictures they paint of the USSR are highly unflattering in this regard. One, the daughter of Lenin Prize winner, grew up in a cramped two bedroom apartment. My guess is that things were much worse down the social totem pole.
    • scarmig 10y ago
      Well, part of the Communist marketing brand is that everyone equally gets a cramped two bedroom apartment, so it'd be useful to get hard evidence one way or another. From what I've read about Soviet housing in the Krushchev era, though, you were very lucky if you got a cramped two bedroom. Not sure about the 70s and 80s.
      • vkou 10y ago
        The Communist marketing brand is that everyone would eventually get an apartment. Once communism is achieved, that is.
        • eli_gottlieb 10y ago
          That sounds more like capitalism, which says that you might someday earn a one-bedroom condo, if you're innovative enough to start a company and get a good exit.
          • eru 10y ago
            Marketing isn't very creative.. Christianity and some other religions also promise some utopia in the future.
          • 10y ago
• Spooky23 10y ago
  My sister lived in Cambridge for awhile. What a shitshow. They wanted to add a second floor to their home, which would have basically made it look like the rest of the block. Some neighbor raised a stink, because they had built a potting shed on my sisters land, and the shadow of the higher roof would damage the plants in the shed!
  • nsajko 10y ago
    Wasn't it your sister's shed then?
    • bhickey 10y ago
      Depends on how long it was there. Adverse possession takes 20 years in Massachusetts.
      • _acme 10y ago
        There are many requirements other than simple time to successfully adverse possess property, such as the possession being open and notorious. Also, adverse possession as such applies only to real property; analogous concepts may exist with respect to personal property depending on the jurisdiction.
    • Spooky23 10y ago
      5 feet of it was :) The city made it clear that they didn't give a hoot about it. So she would have to litigate. Fortunately, the market is insane and they sold the place sight unseen to some Chinese dude for a significant profit.
      • ascagnel_ 10y ago
        > Fortunately, the market is insane and they sold the place sight unseen to some Chinese dude for a significant profit. That's one of the larger issues with the housing market: it's seen as an investment tool by foreigners (especially in hot markets where prices are rising like crazy), so you end up with tons of real estate that's not on the market but also not being used to actually house anyone.
• vacri 10y ago
  In an upper-middle class leafy neighbourhood in my hometown of Melbourne, there's a retirement home run by a charity, for people with special needs. They wanted to expand to double capacity, and the complaints came rolling in. The usual to be expected "The expansion is ugly, and will bring down the tone of the neighbourhood" (read: lower house prices with more homeless retirees around), with the best being "The expansion will need to cut down a beautiful 100-year-old tree" Getting services for underprivileged people in a wealthy neighbourhood was always going to be tough, but the kicker for me was this - the residents against the expansion were clear to state "We're not NIMBYs!". Really? What kind of things do you think NIMBYs complain about, if not exactly what you've just said?
• _-__--- 10y ago
  Hey, my apartment is on there! Maybe this is just the fame going to my head, but I sure would like some semblance of a yard.