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Yet another data point showing why we need more housing and better public transportation in coastal cities. Boston's immediately adjacent suburbs like Cambridge

Yet another data point showing why we need more housing and better public transportation in coastal cities. Boston's immediately adjacent suburbs like Cambridge and Somerville are filled with crappy run down houses converted to apartments serving 2-3 users or groups. No one likes them besides the landlords, they are generally of shitty quality / falling apart, and they are extremely expensive. If they were bulldozed and replaced with high rise apartments, costs would greatly fall. Similarly, if the T didn't suck so much and serviced outlying communities, people could more easily live farther away from the city proper, which would also reduce pressures on the city and proximal suburbs to support everyone.

existencebox 9y ago
Out of personal curiosity: I was in Boston for a while maybe 10-12 years ago, and remember thinking that the T was so far beyond what most other cities had, and served even the outlying areas well enough via the bus connections. (And I was previously from Philly, so no stranger to decent public transit) In that context I'm surprised to hear you say that the T sucks. Is it that my memory is far out of date with respect to how the city grew? Or are my standards very low? (Also viable is that I was lucky in that the routes I needed to take were well served, usually starting from Cambridge) To give another point of comparison, in Seattle now, I would give an arm and a leg for something even roughly comparable to my memory of the T, let alone SEPTA/subways. Baltimore was similar, in having little to nothing outside of unreliable and sparse buses, and token light rail only along 1-2 "primary" corridors.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- nostrademons 9y ago
  (I grew up in Boston but now live in Silicon Valley.) The T has great coverage but shitty service. Boston is second only to NYC in terms of the fraction of the city that you can get to via public transit. The Red Line covers most of the densely-populated Arlington/Somerville/Cambridge neighborhoods, runs straight into the heart of the city, and then services even the lower-income neighborhoods in Roxbury/Dorchester/Mattapan/Quincy. The Green Line covers the whole Back Bay and Brookline area. Orange Line will get you up to Tufts & Medford, and Blue Line covers North & East Boston. All of these except the outer reaches of the Green Line have reasonable transit times. By contrast, SF has good public transit if you happen to live in the BART corridor through Mission & Market streets, or around 4th & King or Potrero. But if you're in the Sunset, Presidio, Pac Heights, North Beach, Twin Peaks & highlands, Excelsior, or really anywhere else - you can forget about it. It takes as long to get from the Outer Sunset to Downtown as it does to get from Mountain View, 50 miles away, to SF. However, BART runs on time, as does Caltrain. To the minute, unless somebody kills themselves on the tracks. You know exactly when the next BART train will arrive, and when it will get to its destination. By contrast, when I took the Red Line to work I would frequently find myself sitting stopped outside Alewife or Harvard Square for about 20 minutes for track maintenance, or because they lost the third rail, or because there was another train in the station whose doors were jammed, or any number of other reasons that a well-maintained public transportation system shouldn't have.
  - sokoloff 9y ago
    Or the “every 10 minutes #1 bus” wouldn’t come for 40 minutes, at which point 4 of them would arrive, nose to tail, as if they were drafting each other on a NASCAR circuit.
    - seltzered_ 9y ago
      The term you're looking for is bus bunching: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching Anecdotally, it seems to happen more on longer routes into a city center, and gets worse if there's traffic / bridge opens / etc. along the route.
  - burfog 9y ago
    The MBTA's T, Red Line, in Boston around 1995: At the train approaches the station, people in the station hear an announcement and see it on a lighted sign. It is something like "Braintree train approaching", letting you know the direction and final destination. Inside the train, they see and hear something like "Approaching Park Street. Next Stop: Downtown Crossing. This is a Braintree train.". When the train stops, there is a similar announcement, again both voice and lighted display, both inside the train and on the station platform. People inside the train can read the brightly-lighted station sign through the windows, and people on the platform can read a brightly-lighted sign on the train itself. Another announcement is made just before the doors close, and another one right after. The other lines were about as good, with a few oddities like a human announcer on the Green Line. San Francisco's MUNI, around 2015, two decades later: There is no voice announcement or message display when I board the train underground, either in the station or in the train. Gee, I hope I'm going the right direction. The train pops out of the ground and runs down the eastern side of the city. It stops only when there is a person waiting at the stop or when somebody in the train pulls a cord, there are no station announcements in the train, and the signs on the stations are unlighted and/or hidden. There is simply no way to count stops to determine where you are. You have to truly recognize the city (for me: in the dark, as an out-of-town visitor) or stay focused on a GPS-based map display. I obviously couldn't do the former, and my phone battery was dying so the latter was a problem as well. So it looks to me like SF in 2015 can't match Boston in 1995.
- maccam94 9y ago
  The MBTA has suffered from funding issues, and it was saddled with billions in debt from the Big Dig. Many of the trains and track infrastructure are old and in need of replacement, but without the funds the MBTA has been forced to repair old equipment at higher cost. This article has more info: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/11/04/what-the-heck-is-wrong-with-bostons-mbta/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/11/04/what-the-heck-is-wron...
- lovich 9y ago
  For the last few months at least the stickied post on the Boston subreddit has been "Is the T fucked today?". The system aged without improvements, and currently keeps actual blacksmiths on the payroll to make parts for the ancient cars that are no longer supported by the manufacturer. I believe they've been dropping a few billion on new cars/improvements but someone from Boston would be better able to report on that
- Amygaz 9y ago
  If we had to give grade to the MBTA, we would give it a D (passing grade), because they deserve a large area. However, everything else is bad. On top of that, all the improvements they are making are things that were needed 10 years ago, not things we will need over the next 10 years and onward.
- lsllc 9y ago
  The T is great -- if you live near it, otherwise it may as well not exist (otherwise walk/bike or maybe bus route if lucky). Trouble is, as the city has expanded massively in the last 20 years the T has stayed static. Even the Somerville/Medford-greenline extension has been watered down/will it ever happen? Cambridge, Somerville, Medford seem to have been instituting 25 mph limits and swapping out road-space for bike lanes. Seriously, who's going to try biking in 20" of snow. Or in the dark (Nov-March). I'd rather they just ripped up some big streets and replaced with green-line style light-rail as they have done in Manchester UK (metrolink?). For example: Rt 99 through Chelsea, Everett-Malden. Medford St / Rt 38. Mt Auburn/Rt 16/Watertown Sq. Fellsway/Rt 28 into Stoneham/Reading. (sorry, don't know much of south of the city but I'm sure there are equivalents). It just isn't possible to have such a densely packed city, constrained at the east by the Atlantic and allow one person-per-car ... not sustainable.
deevolution 9y ago
Alot of the shitty apartment buildings have been bulldozed, but they've been replaced with giant biotech buildings in kendal sq... I agree tho, the majority of housing is absolute shit. No insulation, old, worn down 100+ year old buildings everywhere. Way overpriced to live in 19th century log cabins.
- Thriptic 9y ago
  Wasn't most of Kendall warehouses prior to the original felling of buildings 10-15 years ago? That was a bit before my time but it's the narrative I've heard. The newer buildings put up in the last 5 years or so exclusively replaced disused or low value commercial spaces. Same with the biotech buildings in Central.
  - lsllc 9y ago
    You are right -- 3rd St from Broadway to Binney is all new in the last 10 years, previously was dead space or old industrial (i.e. not housing!). Even the old OSF building on Broadway is now gone. However on 2nd street, between Hampshire and Binney, there are a lot of commercial buildings that I think used to be housing. 1st Street (Hampshire to Land Blvd) is also seeing a lot of regeneration (mostly old retail into new mixed development).
- onlyrealcuzzo 9y ago
  I left Boston for LA exactly for this reason. 4 years ago, I could rent a place in some of the nicest luxury apartments in LA for the same price a shitty, run-down place with no amenities cost in Somerville. I loved that town, but I'm really happy I left for LA, even though it's not as much of a deal these days, the weather is pretty nice...
  - labster 9y ago
    Wow. I'm trying to square your "not as much of a deal" with the phrase we use here, "statewide housing crisis". Are things really that crazy around Boston?
autokad 9y ago
> "Yet another data point showing why we need more housing and better public transportation in coastal cities." most big tech companies force people in these areas, and it doesnt have to be that way. furthermore, big tech company hiring practices ensure that qualified people could never make it by their interview process. How can a developer with a family 'implement a tree in python along with breath first search to solve a specific question in a google doc' when that skill seems to me as not generalizible to the industry. for someone to get past this gate keeper, they have to spend many hours outside work preparing for it by doing leet code questions, etc. instead of trying to build more houses in places that dont want to build them, why not force the companies to spread.
ef4 9y ago
Yours is a pretty weird description of the current real estate market here in Somerville. It's a pretty even mix of owners and renters (about 40%/60% last I checked). Because of all the factors in the article, huge amounts of money are flowing in and they're being spent on upgrading the housing stock. Far from "shitty and falling apart", you see gleaming post-restoration projects everywhere, at astronomical prices. Maybe I'm biased toward the west end of the city because I live there and the gentrification is furthest along here. But "it's extremely expensive" and "no one likes it" are really not compatible statements. The market remains extremely hot, and it's being fed by people with money who want to buy and live here, not absentee landlords. There are still some of those, but it's a shrinking group because the overwhelming financial incentive is to gut-renovate and sell as condos. As for increasing the density, I'm all for it, but it's worth pointing out Somerville is already the densest city in New England. Denser than Boston proper, despite all Boston's own high rises. You don't find a denser city until you get to NYC. People underestimate how effectively you can pack a city even at three-to-five stories tall, if you actually stick to that height _everywhere_. We were lucky to be built in the streetcar era, and then ignored through the incredibly-dumb architectural trends of the second half of the 20th century. If the rest of Greater Boston was merely as dense as Somerville there would be no housing shortage. My favorite strategy for getting higher density here is killing all the parking lots, along with simply getting our transit system back to the scope and quality it had in 1930, with streetcar lines all over the place.
- jon_richards 9y ago
  >"it's extremely expensive" and "no one likes it" are really not compatible statements I don't know much about the situation, but these are easily compatible statements. People might be trying to live where their job is or near the city they like or grew up in. Quality of the building you are living in is usually not the #1 concern.
- lsllc 9y ago
  concur, most of the 2-3 family rentals are shitty and very expensive.
clairity 9y ago
building more housing has a lot of hurdles to overcome. first, because we're close to full employment, it's hard to find skilled construction workers. we need to establish more and better trade schools and apprenticeships, and return esteem to these jobs (rather than to the vapid reality tv celebrities). second, the regulatory environment needs to be improved. here are 25 regulatory proposals for california: https://urbanize.la/post/25-solutions-builder%E2%80%99s-perspective-fix-california-housing-crisis https://urbanize.la/post/25-solutions-builder%E2%80%99s-pers... (submitted to HN but didn't get any discussion). i don't agree with all of them, but many are very sensible. and there are other hurdles like the lack of space. there aren't too many infill opportunities left, so construction projects get more expensive and risky because of the added cost and delay of demolition. public transportation is great, but it's also expensive (some of which is due to corruption) and taxpayers are weary of that. that's not to say i don't agree with you. just that we must overcome a number of challenges to get there.

existencebox 9y ago

Out of personal curiosity: I was in Boston for a while maybe 10-12 years ago, and remember thinking that the T was so far beyond what most other cities had, and served even the outlying areas well enough via the bus connections. (And I was previously from Philly, so no stranger to decent public transit) In that context I'm surprised to hear you say that the T sucks. Is it that my memory is far out of date with respect to how the city grew? Or are my standards very low? (Also viable is that I was lucky in that the routes I needed to take were well served, usually starting from Cambridge) To give another point of comparison, in Seattle now, I would give an arm and a leg for something even roughly comparable to my memory of the T, let alone SEPTA/subways. Baltimore was similar, in having little to nothing outside of unreliable and sparse buses, and token light rail only along 1-2 "primary" corridors.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
nostrademons 9y ago
(I grew up in Boston but now live in Silicon Valley.) The T has great coverage but shitty service. Boston is second only to NYC in terms of the fraction of the city that you can get to via public transit. The Red Line covers most of the densely-populated Arlington/Somerville/Cambridge neighborhoods, runs straight into the heart of the city, and then services even the lower-income neighborhoods in Roxbury/Dorchester/Mattapan/Quincy. The Green Line covers the whole Back Bay and Brookline area. Orange Line will get you up to Tufts & Medford, and Blue Line covers North & East Boston. All of these except the outer reaches of the Green Line have reasonable transit times. By contrast, SF has good public transit if you happen to live in the BART corridor through Mission & Market streets, or around 4th & King or Potrero. But if you're in the Sunset, Presidio, Pac Heights, North Beach, Twin Peaks & highlands, Excelsior, or really anywhere else - you can forget about it. It takes as long to get from the Outer Sunset to Downtown as it does to get from Mountain View, 50 miles away, to SF. However, BART runs on time, as does Caltrain. To the minute, unless somebody kills themselves on the tracks. You know exactly when the next BART train will arrive, and when it will get to its destination. By contrast, when I took the Red Line to work I would frequently find myself sitting stopped outside Alewife or Harvard Square for about 20 minutes for track maintenance, or because they lost the third rail, or because there was another train in the station whose doors were jammed, or any number of other reasons that a well-maintained public transportation system shouldn't have.
- sokoloff 9y ago
  Or the “every 10 minutes #1 bus” wouldn’t come for 40 minutes, at which point 4 of them would arrive, nose to tail, as if they were drafting each other on a NASCAR circuit.
  - seltzered_ 9y ago
    The term you're looking for is bus bunching: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_bunching Anecdotally, it seems to happen more on longer routes into a city center, and gets worse if there's traffic / bridge opens / etc. along the route.
- burfog 9y ago
  The MBTA's T, Red Line, in Boston around 1995: At the train approaches the station, people in the station hear an announcement and see it on a lighted sign. It is something like "Braintree train approaching", letting you know the direction and final destination. Inside the train, they see and hear something like "Approaching Park Street. Next Stop: Downtown Crossing. This is a Braintree train.". When the train stops, there is a similar announcement, again both voice and lighted display, both inside the train and on the station platform. People inside the train can read the brightly-lighted station sign through the windows, and people on the platform can read a brightly-lighted sign on the train itself. Another announcement is made just before the doors close, and another one right after. The other lines were about as good, with a few oddities like a human announcer on the Green Line. San Francisco's MUNI, around 2015, two decades later: There is no voice announcement or message display when I board the train underground, either in the station or in the train. Gee, I hope I'm going the right direction. The train pops out of the ground and runs down the eastern side of the city. It stops only when there is a person waiting at the stop or when somebody in the train pulls a cord, there are no station announcements in the train, and the signs on the stations are unlighted and/or hidden. There is simply no way to count stops to determine where you are. You have to truly recognize the city (for me: in the dark, as an out-of-town visitor) or stay focused on a GPS-based map display. I obviously couldn't do the former, and my phone battery was dying so the latter was a problem as well. So it looks to me like SF in 2015 can't match Boston in 1995.
maccam94 9y ago
The MBTA has suffered from funding issues, and it was saddled with billions in debt from the Big Dig. Many of the trains and track infrastructure are old and in need of replacement, but without the funds the MBTA has been forced to repair old equipment at higher cost. This article has more info: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/11/04/what-the-heck-is-wrong-with-bostons-mbta/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2016/11/04/what-the-heck-is-wron...
lovich 9y ago
For the last few months at least the stickied post on the Boston subreddit has been "Is the T fucked today?". The system aged without improvements, and currently keeps actual blacksmiths on the payroll to make parts for the ancient cars that are no longer supported by the manufacturer. I believe they've been dropping a few billion on new cars/improvements but someone from Boston would be better able to report on that
Amygaz 9y ago
If we had to give grade to the MBTA, we would give it a D (passing grade), because they deserve a large area. However, everything else is bad. On top of that, all the improvements they are making are things that were needed 10 years ago, not things we will need over the next 10 years and onward.
lsllc 9y ago
The T is great -- if you live near it, otherwise it may as well not exist (otherwise walk/bike or maybe bus route if lucky). Trouble is, as the city has expanded massively in the last 20 years the T has stayed static. Even the Somerville/Medford-greenline extension has been watered down/will it ever happen? Cambridge, Somerville, Medford seem to have been instituting 25 mph limits and swapping out road-space for bike lanes. Seriously, who's going to try biking in 20" of snow. Or in the dark (Nov-March). I'd rather they just ripped up some big streets and replaced with green-line style light-rail as they have done in Manchester UK (metrolink?). For example: Rt 99 through Chelsea, Everett-Malden. Medford St / Rt 38. Mt Auburn/Rt 16/Watertown Sq. Fellsway/Rt 28 into Stoneham/Reading. (sorry, don't know much of south of the city but I'm sure there are equivalents). It just isn't possible to have such a densely packed city, constrained at the east by the Atlantic and allow one person-per-car ... not sustainable.

deevolution 9y ago

Alot of the shitty apartment buildings have been bulldozed, but they've been replaced with giant biotech buildings in kendal sq... I agree tho, the majority of housing is absolute shit. No insulation, old, worn down 100+ year old buildings everywhere. Way overpriced to live in 19th century log cabins.

Thriptic 9y ago
Wasn't most of Kendall warehouses prior to the original felling of buildings 10-15 years ago? That was a bit before my time but it's the narrative I've heard. The newer buildings put up in the last 5 years or so exclusively replaced disused or low value commercial spaces. Same with the biotech buildings in Central.
- lsllc 9y ago
  You are right -- 3rd St from Broadway to Binney is all new in the last 10 years, previously was dead space or old industrial (i.e. not housing!). Even the old OSF building on Broadway is now gone. However on 2nd street, between Hampshire and Binney, there are a lot of commercial buildings that I think used to be housing. 1st Street (Hampshire to Land Blvd) is also seeing a lot of regeneration (mostly old retail into new mixed development).
onlyrealcuzzo 9y ago
I left Boston for LA exactly for this reason. 4 years ago, I could rent a place in some of the nicest luxury apartments in LA for the same price a shitty, run-down place with no amenities cost in Somerville. I loved that town, but I'm really happy I left for LA, even though it's not as much of a deal these days, the weather is pretty nice...
- labster 9y ago
  Wow. I'm trying to square your "not as much of a deal" with the phrase we use here, "statewide housing crisis". Are things really that crazy around Boston?

autokad 9y ago

> "Yet another data point showing why we need more housing and better public transportation in coastal cities." most big tech companies force people in these areas, and it doesnt have to be that way. furthermore, big tech company hiring practices ensure that qualified people could never make it by their interview process. How can a developer with a family 'implement a tree in python along with breath first search to solve a specific question in a google doc' when that skill seems to me as not generalizible to the industry. for someone to get past this gate keeper, they have to spend many hours outside work preparing for it by doing leet code questions, etc. instead of trying to build more houses in places that dont want to build them, why not force the companies to spread.

ef4 9y ago

Yours is a pretty weird description of the current real estate market here in Somerville. It's a pretty even mix of owners and renters (about 40%/60% last I checked). Because of all the factors in the article, huge amounts of money are flowing in and they're being spent on upgrading the housing stock. Far from "shitty and falling apart", you see gleaming post-restoration projects everywhere, at astronomical prices. Maybe I'm biased toward the west end of the city because I live there and the gentrification is furthest along here. But "it's extremely expensive" and "no one likes it" are really not compatible statements. The market remains extremely hot, and it's being fed by people with money who want to buy and live here, not absentee landlords. There are still some of those, but it's a shrinking group because the overwhelming financial incentive is to gut-renovate and sell as condos. As for increasing the density, I'm all for it, but it's worth pointing out Somerville is already the densest city in New England. Denser than Boston proper, despite all Boston's own high rises. You don't find a denser city until you get to NYC. People underestimate how effectively you can pack a city even at three-to-five stories tall, if you actually stick to that height _everywhere_. We were lucky to be built in the streetcar era, and then ignored through the incredibly-dumb architectural trends of the second half of the 20th century. If the rest of Greater Boston was merely as dense as Somerville there would be no housing shortage. My favorite strategy for getting higher density here is killing all the parking lots, along with simply getting our transit system back to the scope and quality it had in 1930, with streetcar lines all over the place.

jon_richards 9y ago
>"it's extremely expensive" and "no one likes it" are really not compatible statements I don't know much about the situation, but these are easily compatible statements. People might be trying to live where their job is or near the city they like or grew up in. Quality of the building you are living in is usually not the #1 concern.
lsllc 9y ago
concur, most of the 2-3 family rentals are shitty and very expensive.

clairity 9y ago

building more housing has a lot of hurdles to overcome. first, because we're close to full employment, it's hard to find skilled construction workers. we need to establish more and better trade schools and apprenticeships, and return esteem to these jobs (rather than to the vapid reality tv celebrities). second, the regulatory environment needs to be improved. here are 25 regulatory proposals for california: https://urbanize.la/post/25-solutions-builder%E2%80%99s-perspective-fix-california-housing-crisis https://urbanize.la/post/25-solutions-builder%E2%80%99s-pers... (submitted to HN but didn't get any discussion). i don't agree with all of them, but many are very sensible. and there are other hurdles like the lack of space. there aren't too many infill opportunities left, so construction projects get more expensive and risky because of the added cost and delay of demolition. public transportation is great, but it's also expensive (some of which is due to corruption) and taxpayers are weary of that. that's not to say i don't agree with you. just that we must overcome a number of challenges to get there.