City will use funds from developers to preserve affordable housing

I agree that city efforts to keep units affordable are waste of money and might possibly be making the problem worse. I also agree people should be able to change their single family into a 2 family.

But these sorts of "easy" changes won't affect the number of units available to bring prices down by any notable amount. And building 6 unit building in an area which is zoned for single families isn't always possible or sensible.

Again, the only "solution" to this problem is to make it easy for people to live outside of Boston and the neighboring towns and still get to work in a timely manor. There are affordable units in Kingston, etc but if the options are to sit in traffic for an hour or take a 90 minute train which comes only once every 2 hours there is little advantage to moving that far south.

If the train ran once every 30 minutes and it was a 30 minute ride, now you'd have a workable solution for middle class housing.

No one has a right to a spot -- and that applies as much to the middle class and rich as well as the lower middle and poor. Simply because someone can buy something does not mean that they should. Being able to afford something does not confer a right to have it.

This is not about someone squatting at a spot and refusing to go. It's about looking at the complicated web of how people of different economic classes depend on each other to function-- and the rich depend on the poor as much if not more than the reverse.

Greater Boston/Cambridge and Framingham are the two business centers east of Worcester. People commute into both, less outward. If the middle and upper class in Boston want hospitals staffed with the people who serve food and prep operating rooms, hotels staffed with people who clean rooms and greet tourists, clerks and secretaries to assist your lawyer or your accountant, people who will suit up and pull asbestos out of your basement, then we need to recognize that these people have needs beyond their employment. As much as we discuss a living wage in eastern MA, most people on the lower end of the wage scale do not make enough to balance, as I wrote above, the incurred costs of a long commute.

We, all of us, are in a position of spending time or spending money. If you are richer, then this is a choice-- maybe you decide to drive more so you can live in Weston, or you enjoy knitting so you make your kids socks. But if you don't, you can buy a place closer or shop for the kids clothes.
Poorer people don't have that choice-- they don't have the money, so they must budget out the time. If they can't squeeze out the time, then something must be sacrificed to shake loose the money. They can't hire an au pair to keep an eye on the kids and get dinner started if their commute runs long. If a doctor and an orderly both leave Brigham & Women's at 5PM, and the doctor is driving to Prince Street in Newton while the orderly is taking the T to Bluefield Terrace in Mattapan, according to Google/MBTA, the doctor will get home in 21-45 minutes depending on traffic, but the orderly get's home in 68.* The kids are alone, dinner isn't half done when the orderly gets home.

So poorer people end up with less money, less time, and often more home obligations--hands on elderly parent care, helpng kids struggling with school because tutors are not an option, and so on.

Employers could pay higher wages, so that non-professional staff can afford to either live closer or pay for more support at home. And I credit those employers who do. Many don't. Many bitched when the living wage regulations were passed. Just as employers could pay wages high enough that employees could afford to buy their own health insurance, but employers don't. Therefore, they make up the difference by either providing group health coverage themselves, or defaulting to the exchange system. We need something similar for housing. If anyone has better ideas for providing affordable housing within a reasonable commute, I'm all for looking at the options. But saying that it's just too damn bad for low wage workers is untenable.

*Here's how I chose these addresses: I worked landscaping for a few years in the late '90s. We had a client on Prince St. who was a doctor at Brighams, and one of my co-workers who I became close friends with lived on Bluefield Terrace. Not farfetched that he could be an orderly.

This is a meaningless token fund with hardly any funding. As another poster said best way to reduce rents or at least control their growth is to let development happen relatively unabated.

Really? I know it was an Always Sunny in PA episode, but I didn't think it really happened.

Names?

The actual busing happened on the west coast, though: http://www.sacbee.com/news/investigations/nevada-patient-busing/article2...