Hub luxo apartment glut: One building resorts to free rent to try to drum up tenants

It doesn't change the fact that $1700 for a studio in walking distance to the Financial District isn't unreasonable. Sure, you can rent smaller/crappier/less convenient places for less money, never did I say you couldn't.

I have no idea whether or not the apartments will fill up with Audi owners or not, but they are more than welcome to purchase a garage parking space.

Personally, I couldn't afford a $2,129/mo apartment. At least, not at this point in my life. And presumably most of the units cost a lot more than that, up to $5,000/mo apparently. But supposing I could stretch that far, and if for some reason I wanted to live there, and I wanted to shop at Whole Foods, then I would probably do the following calculations:

Weekly shopping at Whole Foods = 52 * $6 ride home = $312 annual cost
Adding pannier(s) to a bike = probably $30-50 one time cost

vs

Cost of owning a car = between $6,000 and $10,000 annually.

That probably figures you do more than drive to the nearby grocery store, but on the other hand, also probably figures you don't live in Fort Point.

So it would be vastly cheaper (order of magnitude) to just hire a ride-sharing service or a taxi when I wanted to cart heavy groceries from the store. Or I could ride my bike on nice days and put the grocery bags in the pannier, which is what I used to do during a time that I lived further than a mile from the store.

Unless you're actually using the car every day for other purposes, it's not really worth while to have it around just for grocery shopping. Then again, maybe it's just a status symbol. And again, if you are willing to drop $6,000 to $10,000 on a status symbol annually, I don't really think paying for a garage parking spot is all that big a concern. Especially if you don't want your Audi/BMW/Benz/Tesla/whatever scratched up.

Thank you-- that essay puts into words my concerns, which I have vented about perhaps too much on UHub, that Boston is at risk of becoming a quaint theme park for the rich. While I agree with Byrne that poverty, danger, and crime are not necessary for art, they are the trinity that created affordable space, not just for artists, but for bootstraps businesses and for working class families. It is a sick and sad joke that the people who overcame the poverty, banded together to end the danger, fought and survived the crime, made cities as livable as they now are in 2014, are no longer welcome in them.

Adding insult to this injury, since we're a few generations into the mallification of American culture, a large number of people want every house or apartment to be as predictable as a hotel room. The city neighborhood is no longer a neighborhood, but a "water/city view" and a collection of interchangeable restaurants.

We no longer even remember that people wanted to have warehouse space in order to have the room and light to create something; lofts are now built from the ground up. They don't understand that if you price out most of the Italian or Korean families, it's no longer "Little Italy" or "Koreatown." If the wharf is too expensive for a fishing fleet to use it, you can't call it "Fisherman's Wharf." And if a neighborhood prices out its artists and does little to attract them, then don't say your neighborhood is "bohemian." or heaven help me, "artsy."

It doesn't mean it's no longer a city; it means that the city has lost the diversity that made it interesting and lively.

Welcome to Tulsa-Sur-La-Mer!

You put 10% or 20% down on a $1M condo, that's a lot of money that you can't use for something else.

You could probably get an 8% return on it just by sticking it in a mutual fund. By putting it down, you're passing that up.

That's not to say that buying isn't the right decision. It really depends on the specifics, though. Does the gain in equity long term and the mortgage interest tax deduction outweigh the other uses for that money? What's the price-to-rent ratio? If it's $1M vs $5,000 a month (x12), that's 16:1, which slightly favors renting according to some rules of thumb (if you believe them).

I think that in this case it comes down to a bunch of factors that you can't generalize about, details about the specific building, location, and preferences of the person buying/renting.