Waterfront apartment building, townhouses approved in East Boston

where are the tenants going to park.....their bikes?

No of course if you dare express an opinion on something you have to also be able to actually do that thing as well, don't you? If I come out of the movie theater and say "that was a crappy movie" Swirlyturd would say "unless you can make a better movie, you're wrong...that work of cinema by Adam Sandler was certainly enough for everyone in this crowd." "Was that a bad meal? Well shut up! If you can't cook a better one then button your pie hole!"

And of course she can say this because as we all know she has firsthand, expert experience with EVERYTHING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED OR COULD BE DONE. I mean, how can you argue with that?

But I still have not heard one specific idea other than "make it look like a triple decker", which would be somewhat absurd given the scale of the building. It would be like those "colonoids" - the huge, wood facade buildings meant to look faux-lonial, but just look out of scale and stupid.

Maybe the townhouses could have an homage to triple deckers ... but I still have yet to hear a singe other idea other than "they should make it look better" or "they should look local" or "they need to be more creative". That isn't a critique - that's whining.

HOW??? And how do you propose modifications which will be both economical to build and maintain? I realize that the local culture is one of demanding other people spend money to make things satisfying, but the fact is that it has to be affordable and remain so.

All I hear is "they shouldn't look like this". Fine, So how SHOULD they look?

(local and special and pretty and cute and ... they should do this... and not like this)

Sorry, but given the lack of specific recommendations and how they won't bloat the price and upkeep, my defense of the existing design stands.

The only two people who hate rent control are..

1. Landlords
2. People who can't get into a rent control apartment

Also, people who don't believe a private citizen/enterprise should subsidize the rent of others, and believe rent subsidies are the responsibility of the government.

Remember the 1970s? It was a complete disaster. No thank you to that.

Rent control does not solve the problem because it removes all incentive to create new housing supply. Ultimately, if you have a growing population, then you need more housing. If you enact a law which stifles development, then all you will end up with is a crisis where new residents cannot find homes, where property owners simply walk away from their buildings and let them literally fall to the ground, because it is not worthwhile to continue maintaining them. And then even older residents will not be able to find homes since you are effectively reducing the housing supply!

Manhattan DOES have rent control still, and it is a problem because those people living in controlled apartments will never leave, and the non-controlled units are subsidizing them, raising rents on the market further.

Now regarding tax breaks, I would never support them for purely luxury building, or for most building for that matter. I didn't even mention tax breaks, actually. Appropriate development to receive subsidies is property managed by a non-profit CDC. And often those grants come from the Federal government, not even local, although technically linkage fees are supposed to be used for such grants as well. Here the goal is to cover the high costs of new construction while providing housing that is available to people of modest means immediately.

But there is most certainly no need for tax breaks to develop in hot areas of the city where the market is already pushing rents up high. That style of "economic development" (Menino-style) is imported straight from the suburbs, and it needs to end immediately.

But the best overall, long term, solution is to boost the supply of housing by taking all the ridiculous snob-zoning restrictions away. A few crazy NIMBYs should not be able to block much needed housing because they claim that it doesn't please their aesthetic sense. Or because they are secretly trying to block all outsiders from coming into their neighborhood. That's simply not a goal that public policy should be supporting.

Your parents went to college and paid for you to go too

I'm guessing that because you clearly have no idea how expensive college is now, nor child care to make that possible for people already with kids, etc.

Either that, or you are just so fundamentally lacking in empathy as to not understand how the barriers to getting into the middle class are mounting up.

Must be nice.

.

What makes construction expensive is that we chopped down all the trees that made cheap building possible, and now we have safety requirements that mean you can't build things cheap because firestorms are so last century, and labor is more expensive - even non union labor - and a land is much more expensive, too!

Stop vilifying unions,

Besides the laborers (who even have to go to school now) which labor union is unskilled? Each trade has skills that are taught and practiced over a period of 5 years. There are a lot of risks involved in that kind of work, never mind the conditions. Were you working 8-12 hour days last week when the temps (+wind chill) were below zero? Doubt it. Non union contractors are expensive too. Let me know how the $4.00 an hour guy works for you, I'm sure he's insured!

surgery to have your head removed from your behind you wouldn't elect to have that $4 an hour surgeon perform the procedure or would you? Yeah you probably would and by the way with your logic it is medically necessary.

They're probably the same distance-wise from downtown. But for someone like me without a car, I was just off put by the idea of only having one route home. No buses, no walking. It's as much psychological as anything else. I like walking or biking everywhere. I like having a "village" but I like being able to cross easily into the next one and to see how one neighborhood connects to the next one. I realized in the end that it wasn't going to work for me, even though I could have gotten more house for my money than I eventually did in JP.

1) Far too isolated from the "Blue Hill/Dorchester Avenue Corridor" of gangs and drugs.

2) Preexisting conditions. Unfortunately about the only thing European immigrants share with most of their Caribbean immigrant brethren these days is language. Let's say you're in your late teens. You pack up with your parents and leave your home in Portugal or Cape Verde and join your relatives already living in East Boston or Mattapan, respectively. Coming from Portugal, and now living in East Boston, you're going to assimilate into the school system as best you can and help out with whatever your relatives' family business is. Coming from Cape Verde, and now living in Mattapan: "Welcome to the gang!!!!" Both "low income" neighborhoods; completely different mentality.

I have a friend who's a Transit Police officer--he and others do youth outreach programs in the Roxbury/Dorchester Area. He says you have to break the cycle with these kids--and that's what they are--kids. When you grow up in an environment where drugs and violence is how you put food on the table and a roof over your head, that's all you know. And the ones that don't get killed or locked up forever and have children just continue the cycle. Mayor Walsh says fixing this is going to be a "priority" over the next four years--we'll see!!