3 ms·
Maybe similar to NYC in this way, one of the downsides of the Cambridge, MA, area is that apartment renters pay huge rents to live in often rotting old building
by neilv 3y ago
Maybe similar to NYC in this way, one of the downsides of the Cambridge, MA, area is that apartment renters pay huge rents to live in often rotting old buildings.
When one's building has lots of problems, moving to a better place isn't as easy as it used to be. The current market rents keep going up (and seem more coordinated in price increases than they used to), so most of the alternatives at a doable price bump are also old buildings, sure to share some of the same problems to discover. (Plus there's high one-time moving costs, when upfront here is conventionally the legal maximum of 3x monthly rent, plus the expensive professional movers that are a good idea in a city of narrow old staircases and difficult parking. The high one-time cost for each move makes playing Old Apartment Building Roulette risky, since you might be stuck with new showstoppers next time.)
Old apartment building problems here include rats indoors, roaches, bed bugs, mold, leaks, noise pollution, peeling lead paint, lead in pipes, asbestos, various toxic resides from many decades, water outages, heat outages, poorly controlled antique central heat, failing structures, fire hazards, burglaries, fumes from neighbors' drug use and sometimes production, etc. (I've lived in buildings here that had almost all of these, at once.)
The city does keep building a lot of dense nice, new apartments, but with income restrictions targeted at families near the poverty line. People above that level tend to either be wealthy, to live outside of the close-in cities, or to pay small fortunes but still have roommates. Or, frequently, they move to the SF Bay Area, NYC, or Austin, so that they get better lifestyle for their money. Almost everyone with whom I went to grad school fled the Boston area shortly after graduation, for one of those more attractive cities.
The big universities have real estate investment sidelines, and maybe at least that facet is happy that most educated alumni leave the area, rather than putting down roots and showing up to zoning hearings. People will still come to the universities, to study and work, because of the brand prestige, rather than the lifestyle.
- sokoloff 3y agoI stayed here rather than relocate to the Bay Area because I couldn't afford the same (good) lifestyle in the SF area that I can here in Cambridge. I think your list of "old building" problems is a list of city problems and "poorly maintained building" problems more than old building specific. I'm here in an old (1926) brick house in Cambridge and we have noise and might have asbestos inside the old boiler. (And surely have toxic residues from various items, but so do brand new buildings, possibly in greater amounts.) Noise is a people and density problem more than an age of building problem. The rest of that list of problems can be addressed by proper maintenance/upkeep/pest control (and asbestos can as well, but intact asbestos is best left undisturbed if not required to be disturbed). Lots of rental properties are probably not maintained the way an owner-occupant would maintain their property; that's hardly shocking.
- neilv 3y agoTrue, a lot of the old apartment building problems could be solved, with money, and some are. But even large old apartment buildings that became owner-occupied condos (without extensive building-wide renovation) have problems that are nonviable to solve, or don't get solved for complicated reasons. I know one such building, where units are valued higher than new McMansions most places, and monthly condo fees alone are more than rents in most cities-- yet the building is still overrun with problems. IIUC, the problems are a mix of: prohibitively expensive without gutting the building, problems that could in theory be solved with assessments on top of regular fees, and a lot of corner-cutting and incompetence on what should be smaller costs (because many owners already overextended and alarmed, by increasing fees and problems, and some crazy politics worse than the new subdivision HOA pettiness we read about). I get the impression that the sheer cost of things has people with properties worth a fortune making sacrifices and tradeoffs not unlike we've heard of for different socioeconomic classes as "it's expensive to be poor". Best of luck to everyone currently playing the overpriced old housing stock lottery. :)
- sokoloff 3y agoIt’s not solely the expense but also the pain in the ass of getting tradespeople out to provide service for moderate sized or smaller projects. There aren’t enough skilled tradespeople to service the needs in a highly competitive way. So, if you have money to throw around on a large bill, you can get projects done, but being on a budget makes for a difficult prioritization result for projects.
- neilv 3y agoGood point. I also heard (from a fairly credible source) that most plumbers in the area simply won't touch units in a particular large old condo building here, because it's just not worth the headache or liability of dealing with the building condition and quirks. It sounded like the reason wasn't just the usual skilled trades preferences for kinds of work (e.g., new construction), but rather, yet another unpleasant surprise of old rotting apartment buildings.