In Boston, 'affordable' rent for a family of three is about $1,400 a month

"I like living in Manhattan, therefore I want the State of Massachusetts to turn every part of Greater Boston into Manhattan by force!"

People like their privacy and their peace and quiet. A solution to the housing price problem that seem to acknowledge exists that actually has a chance of happening is to scrap all affordable housing requirements, scrap 40B, and encourage the conversion of the vast swathes of conservation land outside of 128 and inside of 495 into vast swathes of suburbs with detached single-family homes on <0.5 arce lots, and to build out the roads and trains to support that commuting population without mandating high density that people will fight tooth and nail.

The reason that conservation land is there is because people out outside 128 don't want to import the city and its structural problems into their communities. Current laws encourage developers to import the city into those communities, so all development gets fought and conservation land gets banked up to prevent opportunities for development at all. Get rid of the legal incentives to manhattanize and you might find more willing partners out in the suburbs.

Unlike your "Manhattanize of else!" proposal, this will alleviate the price of housing on the "workforce" end, which is an obfuscation to refer to "married couples with children (plural) who don't want to cram into a 2 bedroom" by providing them an opportunity to purchase a house big enough for their needs and withing a reasonable distance of their jobs, which will in turn lower the pressure on the housing closer in to the city for the younger, single, or older set who don't need and don't want to pay for a detached house.

This model worked very well about 60 years ago in not-Massachusetts and continues to work quite well in not-Massachusetts, where 1600 sq foot houses on .3 acre lots in good school districts within minutes of commuter rail with ample parking go for under 500k routinely. Here, it's 700k on the low end and your commute sucks worse.

The only reason actual American suburbs is a taboo in Massachusetts is because the politicians in Massachusetts like high housing prices and traffic congestion. It allows them to develop dependent constituencies by continually promising pleasant-sounding but ineffectual solutions thereby gaining a (national) reputation as activists and a loyal core of true believers to keep electing them. And having repeated the lie for nearly fifty years, they've gotten a whole bunch of well-meaning people to actually believe it too.

You want change, quit voting for the democrat who runs unopposed every time. Maybe some rare individual might even grow a pair and run for office himself instead of just complaining. As a friendly reminder...both the state reps and state senators serve two-year terms.

The very definition of "government picking winners and losers."

In the few other cities that have tried this the effect has been negligible. These so-called “foreign buyers” just aren’t having the huge impact that many would like to believe. The problem is that too much of our land is reserved for single family homes so building enougg housing for all of our jobs is impossible.

Speculation, which is when people purchase property as an investment, with no intention of living in it, is something that happened a lot in the 1980's and the 1990's, and is still happening. It's disgusting, disgraceful, and selfish, and shouldn't be allowed to take place..

The Boston of 1968, especially when it comes to housing, is almost unrecognizable today. You could buy a whole South End townhouse then for about the cost of a nice car. That neighborhood was mostly poor, plagued by arson, blight, crime, and people who wanted to demolish it and replace it with a highway and God knows what else. Now it’s the poster child for Shiny Pretty Neighborhoods That No One Can Afford (unless you luck into one of the mixed-income buildings). So the Tent City stuff is fascinating but it doesn’t really help understand the challenges we’re facing at the moment.

You are borderline homeless and living with your mother, but you thought you had a pretty decent job?

Was the last real estate bubble bursting in MA? 1987?

Just wait Until the bubble bursts and all these fools are stuck with property they overpaid for.

I was fiercely arguing counterpoint on this back in 2001 on the internets. They called me a troll. Me. Capecoddah. Being called a troll.

So 17 years later I'll say it again... This ain't any sort of real estate bubble. This is the norm.

It was 2001 that I jumped from selling Boston real estate to the mortgage industry and luckily I ended up in a very ethical firm where most agents would try to talk clients out of any potential balloon fiascos. Many other firms pushed them and that is about as close as any sort of bubble came into play, which barely affected real estate prices during the mortgage crash of the later 00s. You can see a small correction around 2007 but no bubble from at least the late 80s to now unless you wish to torture sales records with inflation adjustments.

My stance is that there is no mass overprice and there has not been since the late 80s. Just one period of a massive influx of new-to-the-market people overextending themselves and buying where they should not have. There is a hefty amount of perspective in the argument but there is no denying that in 2001, people were complaining about a real estate bubble that could not last forever and now in this very thread people are looking back at 2001 as the good old days of house pricing. In 2035, I will be on yet another board, arguing the same thing when people call 2018 the good old days of affordable house prices.