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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

Harvard isn't particularly close to Boston. It's 25-30 miles outside of Boston and outside of even I-495, the outer loop highway encircling Boston. (Still River, where the farm is, is on the far end of Harvard.)

Article says they used to farm two fields they owned and three they leased and have backing away from some of the leased land. From a quick search (unverified/fact-checked), it looks like it's a <20 acres of owned farmland, which would fetch close to $3M in all likelihood. Add $1M for buildings and equipment and, assuming no debt, it's a modest 7-figure estate, seemingly split two ways. Many regular employees on this board have more in investments than each of the owners of this farm and didn't have to farm for 60 years to get there.

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Probably not even that expensive. I live a town or two further out. One of my neighbors has a small apple tree orchard and the other has a Christmas tree farm. It's pretty accessible to Boston for the day but not really close. My old farmhouse was the original property for about a 75 acre farm. It's been renovated but certainly not a multi-million dollar property. You can actually get out of Boston fairly quickly to reasonably priced real estate.

It's mostly a very Bay area thing to imagine that being a 60-90 minute drive from the city means you're talking multi-million dollar real estate. That mostly isn't true of even relatively expensive cities.

But yeah my neighbor has scaled down you-pick apples over the years as it's really not worth the effort.

IMO it's due go higher property taxes, the New England states have some of the highest property taxes and high taxes overall which makes land speculation expensive. CA has extremely low property taxes with a loopholes that push the average even lower

Even just a few miles outside NYC, you can get a decent house in NJ for 500K but the property taxes alone will be around 5-10K.

Which is literally why you have to farm the land. The agricultural rate can be substantially lower than the residential rate.

I don’t know about MA, but in NY for 7 acres or more you just need to average $10,000 in sales for 2 years. Interestingly if you have les than 7 acres the threshold goes up, but you can lease land to bring yourself over the 7 acres. Additionally, since property tax rates are set at the local municipality level an ag assessment uses state law to cap what the municipality can claim.

This is not tax advice, and I don’t know the law in MA, but probably not to far from NY’s.

You've just described all those "low cost of housing" homes in Texas. Rundown 30-year old stick homes will run you $400k to $600k and $10k to $15k in property tax.

No state income tax is a lie, it's paid through small home property taxes. Larger land owners invariably go for rural/ag exemptions and reductions.

There's also the cost of heating in the winter. People budget monthly and housing prices tend to rise to consume surplus income (at least over the past few decades of ZIRP). So rather than dreading your heating bills in the winter, you should appreciate that it's a bill you don't have to pay in the summer. Whereas warmer climates end up paying a higher mortgage year round.

"You can actually get out of Boston fairly quickly to reasonably priced real estate" Maybe compared to SV. I'd argue that it's surprisingly still very expensive even an hour out of Boston. I always wonder who are these wealthy people that can afford these million+ dollar mansions not even close to Boston.

It depends a lot on the town and the property. Massachusetts is certainly not cheap in general but get outside of 495 and there are many decent properties for far less than a million. It's also the case that a ton of Massachusetts companies are not in the city. Tech was historically not in the city much at all. So living 45 minutes plus outside the city can actually be a lot more convenient to many jobs than closer in.

A lot of people who live that relatively far out just don't go into Boston much.

The farmers didn't need to farm for 60 years either, if they just let land till I follow, it would still be worth just as much to a developer.

They gave to farm to keep their taxes down.

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