How rebuilding strip malls could help solve Boston’s housing crisis 

No one is living there for a reason. I mean if you put a gun to my head and told me to move to Danvers I would kindly ask that you pull the trigger instead. These environments are painfully depressing and a major reason why I moved to the Boston area to begin with. I want to live in a walkable environment with real downtown centers, not these fake "live in your strip mall" spaces. If anything, I find that to be even more depressing than the cul de sac suburbs. At least one can escape the hideous strip mall environment for the serenity and beauty of the nature band aid they call their backyard. This looks like the worst of both worlds. We have high density living in a strip mall environment where you will likely have to drive 1 mile down the road to the giant train station parking lot. What we really need is to remodel these places to be like the Boston area. Beacon street in North Brookline has the ideal set up IMO. You have a trolly that runs down the middle (goes directly into downtown Boston) with large walkable sidewalks, a mixture of businesses and houses. It's incredibly expensive and only available to the very wealthy because there is such a lack of this kind of structure anywhere in the US. No one has to give up their car, but I don't know why we can't add light rail systems down these ugly strip malls. This is the model that we need to be recreating, this was the old system before the automobile industry tore it to pieces. We need to go back to these structures instead of trying to force cul de sac into low density. Just because you add apartments to them doesn't mean people move there. Unless you add some public transit, nothing is going to change. If people can't walk to the train, they're not going to bother living in these places. Especially when you consider how unreliable and inconsistent commuter rail already is. Commuter rail would basically have to turn into the subway, which is riddled with massive budget and safety issues. When I lived near Newburyport the commuter rail was late every day. most people need to be in work at 9:00am if they are commuting. The Newburyport line (and most commuter rail lines) are getting people into the city directly at 9:00am. It makes no logical sense for anyone to live in the suburbs outside of the Boston area unless they fix these very real scheduling issues. They should abolish commuter rail entirely and just turn it into a subway instead. Also, if they do build these apartments they are going to charge market rate or higher for them which no one (not even the rich) wants to pay. My fiance and I made 140,000 dollars total before we moved to Boston. We could afford those pricey luxury apartments as our income was around 3800. We decided to take the cheaper one bedroom for 1850.....because we're not stupid. Why would people pay more for apartments when they can pay less. Even rich people want a good value for their dollar. Where I live in Allston-Brighton, housing used to be affordable. Now it costs 5000 dollars for a studio apartment in all of these new apartment complexes. This has consistently brought up the price of other older apartments as they are in high demand. This is the real problem with housing in Boston. it's not that there "aren't enough" apartments, it's that every time they build one it costs too much for most people. Those that can afford it are not going to waste money on something they don't need. Therefore, they are not moving out of the cheaper apartments to make room for the poorer/middle class families to live in older apartments. The trickle down theory that people are using to excuse the frenetic "let's keep building new apartments" craze is just contributing to the scarcity of affordable. The housing shortage is only a part of the problem. The other larger aspect is that the market rate is simply too high for a middle class family to afford. The average cost of a two bedroom apartment in Brighton where I live is anywhere between 2100-3700. Middle class salaries in MA are between 28,000-84,000. A third of 84,000 is roughly 2300 and therefore middle class families cannot afford to live in the Boston area. You're not magically going to be paying less in Danvers for these new apartments. You're going to be paying the market rate. Therefore, this is going to raise the cost of living in Danvers, increase the competition for affordable housing, and likely drastically raise property value and therefore property taxes for people living in cul de sac suburbs. (Because suddenly the property value of Danvers is higher due to increase in market rate). Finally, if they start building these new "luxury" apartments in places like Danvers, you will see the San Francisco effect. All of the suburbs will become like the Bay Area where nothing is remotely affordable to anyone. Thankfully we have remote working and people can move out to Western MA or New Hampshire (developing at a rapid rate) and avoid this altogether. This will make it so middle class families will leave MA for other places and the people that actually want to be in the Boston area or need to be in the Boston area will continue to struggle for housing in places like Allston-Brighton, JP, Roslindale, Medford, Brookline, etc...we're just extending the struggle out towards places that are affordable. I believe that MA needs to do more to discourage these real estate companies from charging so much rent. They need to lower the market rate or have more affordable units in these "luxury" apartment buildings. Lowering property taxes for companies that have a certain amount of affordable units and raising taxes for those that refuse to comply is a possible solution. Rent control does not work because it doesn't target the problem. There's one going up down the street from me that is inconceivably expensive. A studio apartment is 3240 at the cheapest with two bedrooms costing 4327. The building has a gym and a pet spa. I don't know why any building ever needs a pet spa, but these companies whine and insist they "need" to charge this much money to come out even. I don't think they needed to spend any money on a gym or a pet spa. Perhaps if they chose to build units where the pet spas, gyms, and pools were then we would come out even.

@@felixthecat2786 There's nothing wrong with these sorts of projects. You may not want to live in Danvers, but you can do this elsewhere too. In fact, that's what they did with Assembly Square in Somerville.

@@felixthecat2786 why can't the apartment rent be lowered to around $700 - $900 a month?

​@@felixthecat2786mk Kk O.J.ihioi m

ugh i'd fucking love it if they'd finally do that so many malls are dead here.. you just add 5 story apartment towers to dead anchor spaces, then you have a lovely walkable area with grocery stores, restaurants, and entertainment to give residents QOL when they aren't at their demanding jobs. There really needs to be a housing to retail law that requires housing be built to support retail. The Costco development concept was such a breath of fresh air.

I think if there’s enough supply of these projects, chases are the pricing will go down. The benefit of this is not having to rely on a car if everything is more in a range that is walkable, that alone would save the money to make that rent. But it has to be walkable.

Housing is housing. Don't let perfect get in the way of good. I'll take more Bartacos and Lululemons if it means more units on the market.

And rent control, which was needlessly killed off in the 90s. If rents weren't outstripping inflation due to greed, then it would not matter as much if new construction was somewhat nice (just not empty "luxury" apartments), because other units would be freed up as people moved.

Corporations don’t pay their share. Walmarting of America is to blame. Bezos cost communities money to try to get him to move to their state. Instead of PA or WV, he moved to Northern Virginia. Corporations are to blame for our troubles. Creepy billionaires as Sheldon would say.

Speak for yourself. I've lived in both and prefer apartments

There are different types of homes inbetween single detatched homes and apartment towers. Look up "missing middle" housing

It's not wasteful because that strip mall were wasting a lot of space. The mixed use development would benefit the community more, because now they'll be more residences to support the businesses. However, I do agree that those "luxury" apartments shouldn't be the one's going it. And calling those apartments "Luxury" is only to upcharge the rent. It's just a basic building apartment that looks nice. What we really need is the State to create laws that limit how much corporate landlords charge on rent, because a lot of it just goes to their profit.

@@jrho8033 True on the luxury apartments. My point on the waste is that we do a lot of environmentally bad things by tearing down every building, not just strip mall buildings to replace them with completely new construction. In areas with empty office buildings, conversion to apartments might be the environmentally better way to go. Creating more trash isn't helping anyone in the long run.

Reuse in place is great, where it's practical. But for many building types, especially these big box stores, it's not. You should be aware however, that the state has had regulations in place for many years that require the diversion of construction and demolition waste. It doesn't all go straight to a landfill. It is is taken to facilities to be sorted where much of the material is separated for recycling.

Yep ev/one wants to make sweet dosh not caring about affordable