Boston mayor announces residential conversion program for office buildings
bostonplans.org
bostonplans.org
One thing he talked about, which I didn't know anyone did, was to actually cut through the ceiling/floorplate of buildings to basically "donut" them.
This is necessary because many office floorplans are huge with modern HVAC and when converted into residential you end up with either undesirable or illegal apartments due to lack of windows/egress/etc.
Apparently they've done it a few times. Of course only some buildings can support this, given the layout of the supports, mechanicals, etc.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-07/what-it-a...
They talk about converting 180 Water St by adding an internal atrium; it's also one of the conversions illustrated in the recent NYT article about the difficulties of office-to-residential conversions:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...
(The interactive nature doesn't quite get captured by archive correctly)
Also, TIL about loss factor:
> As offices, these buildings can also rent 100 percent (or even more) of their total square footage, according to the quirky math of commercial real estate.
https://therealdeal.com/magazine/new-york-february-2014/lies...
I was finding it hard to imagine that there are inner-city office buildings (high rises) that have floors so large that they couldn't be cut into, say 1/4'ths, with four residences on each floor, and each unit having 50% windows along its perimeter.
People build McMansions that are > 10K square feet, so for a building footprint to be too big for this (i.e., so big that buyers would balk at the size), then you'd need a high-rise with ~40K sq ft floors before this became a problem.
A standard city block in Manhattan is apparently 237,000 square feet, so if you had a building that took up a whole block, there'd be a big problem.
Now I'm wondering how many office buildings there are in a typical city block.
So you'd probably end up with close to 5k square foot condos - which isn't too ridiculous.
You'd probably do 4 corner units and 4 non-corner units for a total of eight, and end up with each being between 2000 and 2500.
The problem is, they'd be ridiculously expensive for a number of reasons. And when you're paying that much money, you probably don't want to live in a building that wasn't even designed to be lived in...
It feels wrong to build luxury housing when regular folk are suffering but if you build luxury housing to the point that the rich stop bidding on regular housing, or even better there’s so much luxury housing that everyone can get a good living space, it’s a net improvement for all of society
<owners of $5 million Tribeca lofts have entered the chat>
I know of several big, high-rise office buildings that are 75% empty since the pandemic. We’re talking a few years now!
But then again, greed is real. My current office building is getting more and more empty by the day. And they refused to budge on the rent for my company even so.
My neighbor's house is, IIRC, 11,000 sq-ft all on a single floor. Just a lot of very big rooms.
Area of Site: 79,288 square feet (7,240m) or about two acres. East to west, 424 feet (129m), north to south, 187 feet (56.9m). Height: The base of building rises five floors above the street. The entrance is four floors high.
SF floorplates are usually tiny due to historic biases of our Planning Commission (the dog whistle used to be 'we don't want a skyline of cereal boxes').
In fact, looking at the data [0] most of SF's residential tower floorplates are bigger than SF's office floorplates.
[0]https://data.sfgov.org/Housing-and-Buildings/Map-of-Tall-Bui...
Out of curiosity, what was the actual reason behind the dog whistle? "Segregate black people by... having smaller floorplates"? That doesn't make much sense to me.
One way SF planners made it hard/less economical to build towers was to force the higher floors to be smaller than lower floors (Transamerica pyramid being the near-satirical example).
That has contributed significantly to SF's inability to build enough housing for the people that live there.
Also a dog-whistle is any statement that sounds palatable to the mainstream, but has an underlying meaning to a politically motivated group. It doesn't only apply to today's American right.
Don't sleep on San Francisco.
And this isn’t to mention the wildfires or inevitable water issues.
1. September 1, 2017 – 106 degrees T-2. June 14, 2000 – 103 degrees T-2. July 17, 1988 – 103 degrees T-4. September 2, 2017 – 102 degrees T-4. October 5, 1987 – 102 degrees T-6. September 14, 1971 – 101 degrees T-6. May 30, 2001 – 101 degrees T-6. June 14, 1961 – 101 degrees T-6. September 16, 1913 – 101 degrees T-6. September 8, 1904 – 101 degrees T-11. October 4, 1987 – 100 degrees T-11. September 8, 1984 – 100 degrees
9 of the next 10 days in Dallas would be on that list. 3 days from last year in Seattle would be in the top 5 days on that list.
We are comparable to the extremes of a coastal eastern city, with significantly lower temperatures between the peaks. There’s not many places in the US that have never seen 106.
As for water, 80%+ of it in California is used for food that is exported elsewhere.
Strawberries in December in New York are much more at risk than humans in CA.
As for fires, nowhere in the world is safe from that, as this summer is proving.
I don't get why one area can only ever be for one kind of use.
TL;DR: For government officials who are charged with supervising regulations over tens of thousands of areas, it's already more than complicated enough if each of those areas has a single use designation. If you allow all of those to have multiple designations, it becomes too complex for humans to administer and so they don't allow multiple designations.
In the case of the USA, though, another 'lens' on the legibility is that overall the people making the laws were neurotically concerned with keeping black people away from white people and enforcing segregation.
'separating uses' was a good way to also 'separate users', and a little barely-that-creative law-writing lets someone keep black people quite removed from the white people.
I found a document from 1922 that is upstream of all american zoning codes - it's what got ratified in Euclid v. Ambler circa 1926.
It's explicit goal was:
"To maintain harmonious relations between the races, care has been given to ensure adequate separation between the two, with room to grow without encroaching on the other"
The race-based zoning designations are gold:
"R1 - white, R2 - colored, R3 - undecided"
Here's a deep link straight to that portion of the document: https://josh.works/full-copy-of-1922-atlanta-zone-plan#race-...
Oh, it also says:
"The ordinary two or three story store and dwelling building is not a desirable type of construction from a public stand point. The regulations as applied will tend to reduce the number of flats that would otherwise be located over stores."
So - there it is. The goal of American zoning was, in part, to eliminate 'the ordinary two or three story store and dwelling building'.
Where I live, we have short term reuse laws that allow retail spaces to be used for residential, social, or other uses on a fixed basis. Typically a few years. The idea being to review the reassignment when the local needs change.
We get a lot of kindergartens that use these spaces, but also pharmacies, social clubs, and offices. Easy to move in and out.
Anyways, it's been a hot moment since I've paid attention, but years ago the guy that owned the hardware store on 44th Ave tried to convert into a mixed use building. I don't remember a lot of objection, but then the real estate market tanked and he went out of business. The apartments got built at least…
I don't understand these comments that act like they live on a different planet.
No, the window requirement is another housing suppression tactic. In New York, it is common for apartments to be illegally subdivided. It's how a lot of people live because it's affordable. I've done it. It's fine.
Stairwells are necessary. But nobody on the 60th story of a high rise is egressing externally, FDNY's ladders don't even go that high. If you're only home at night, the window is a luxury. As evidenced by, when people are given a choice between more cash and a window, many choosing the cash.
My house has a basement and a garage, which are not approved as living space, and don't have proper windows or egress. Would it solve the problem to let the interior portions of buildings be designated as storage and utility space?
I'd love to have more space for bikes and musical instruments. ;-)
According to the article, the pre-war buildings are easy to convert.
It's that the open floor model gained popularity; and the building technique evolved. This allowed huge windows to cast light for everyone in one go, since people were not putting opaque wall everywhere which were restricting whatever light that came through "their" part of the building to reach anyone else. "My window" became "our window". Similarly HVAC system evolved to maintain equal temperature in the whole building; there was no longer a need to bring individual heating/cooling system in every single cell since carefully placing some element would let natural convection do the work.
Removing these walls allowed building to be built and heated/cooled with comparatively less material; something that was positive both economically and - dare I say it - ecologically. Converting these shared spaces into private requires to "undo" all these optimisations and will carry a significant cost. Just like converting a bus into several car is not easy because although the seats are there; you are going to need many engines.
This is a great analogy.
Add a few light pipes out to the outside walls and you can even get a bit of outside light inside!
Legality is also highly related to "keeping them separated"
For example, in the absence of good legal housing, many poor (mostly immigrant) people in NYC live in illegal basement apartments. Every time there's a flash flood warning with a storm in the city, 5x/year, some of them die in their homes.
Ideally, poor people would also be able to live in legal apartments, provided we could actually build more.. and you know, die less!
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/10/29/business/ucsb-munger-hall...
Couldn't you just wall off the middle? I mean, you do get another set of windows on the inner courtyard, but it seems expensive to perform such major surgery on a building.
Oh, yah, that's cool. You probably have a lot of systems surrounding the building (and ingress/egress) designed for that total volume.
https://www.greenbuildingadvisor.com/article/bedrooms-withou...
There's been a whole discussion of the code though as modern mid/high rises have - concrete, "fireproof" (in terms of adjacent unit to unit) construction - sprinkler systems - internal hallway leading to 2 stairways
All of which are lacking in wood frame homes which make up a higher amount of home fire deaths. So there has been an argument that you could build housing much cheaper if you could rely on the concrete & sprinklers, and could lighten the rules around multiple stairs / windows / etc.
An interesting debate, with of course, tradeoffs.
Bedrooms have egress requirements
Apartments have window requirements (eg natural light)
I mean, numbers are made up, but the point holds.
(1) https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/02/th...
I once worked in an office where all the windows face a plain interior courtyard. It was terrible as nothing ever moved and you could only see the ground, more windows, and the sky.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/03/11/upshot/office...
It's not a technical challenge, it's an economic challenge. For the large floorplate postwar buildings, the cost of the conversion usually doesn't make sense unless the rents or prices the units can fetch is very high, often higher than local wages can support.
> Most offer floor to ceiling windows around a core of elevator banks so the “no windows” thing is on the surface absurd.
A floor to ceiling window isn't operable. Many of those would have to be replaced with Windows that are operable.
Sydney, Australia is a good example. They introduced residential floorspace bonuses 10-20 years ago which have changed the city for the better. Pre-covid they wanted to shut this lever off as it almost flipped the other way where they were running out of land for offices to keep up with demand. Now its a bit of a lull on how to respond to the new environment though.
On the other hand, if we believe the offices have value, as in people working together in one place has value, having offices in centralized locations because it is more of a known quantity for commuting.
Once you settle down roots, you don't want to have to upend your life if you lose your job or just want to find another job. And from the perspective of the company, you have more of a talent pool because you can recruit from all the other companies in the area with the benefit of not asking someone to move or change their routines.
I am in the camp of believing there being some benefit to people coming together to work on projects. Maybe not 5 days a week, but even if it is hybrid or occasional, there is still benefit for me to be central. I have worked 5 different jobs within 2 mile of each other and have never had to reconsider locations or commutes. I also benefit from being able to get lunch/drinks with old coworkers, attend impromptu 'meetups' and still make it home for dinner with my family because I can walk everywhere.
From a city planning point of view, there is a network effect to cities. Businesses move to cities because that is where there are services. Services are built because there is economy of scale to density.
Decentralized office locations means less density which means public transportation makes less sense, and dense services make less sense. Then you end up with Los Angeles (and Orange County). Which has lots of scattered office parks with little to nothing to do around them and that are only accessible by cars.
This is all a very American point of view. If instead we looked at European cities that were not built around cars and have good trains even for small hamlets, then absolutely, decentralized offices would make sense to me. It would satisfy my main concern of reliable transportation and ease of finding new jobs/networking.
So with many US city planning problems, the issue is our car centric culture.
I think you're looking at Europe too much through rose-tinted glasses here. There might be more "hamlets" with "good trains" than in the US, but they're still not the norm, and compared to city centres those decentralised office and light industry business parks are mostly still a pain to get to on public transport, unless you happen to live in the right direction (which is where your "Once you settle down roots, you don't want to have to upend your life if you lose your job or just want to find another job." problem comes in).
So office sites may not be gone forever but could be converted for small businesses. (if Chicago laws allow it)
Well, the question is whether we hit an inflection point which changed the future drastically and invalidated data based on prior trends or not. So, does remote work just alleviate how quickly office space needs were growing (and if so is it to the point that new office space could be built), or does it actually reverse the trend to a degree?
I am not a town planner, but this makes little sense to me.
Can you not have mixed use?
The clustering nature of businesses wanting to be close to each other. Most commercial areas are limited in expansion and a big 'critical mass' helps to drive the success of all the businesses.
Office workers dont like to look out at residential uses (hanging laundry etc.).
On the economic side its important to note that office-only zoning is effectively a government subsidy to encourage business. If they have to compete with residential some businesses will die and others will struggle.
There's also issues with sudden change. If you convert zoning from office only to mixed use quickly expect 10 years or so of no new office buildings leading to flight of the best businesses seeking premium accommodation and office buildings start to run down and other building also seeing a lack of investment as their owners eye tearing them down soon.
If the market swings back towards office over time it will be harder to respond to. As I say also its easy to convert office to residential but almost impossible to convert back.
Additional complexities of a return to office mandate that some management blowhards want seems like a win for office to residential conversions in my opinion.
Don’t worry they’ll rebuild. They always rebuild.
The construction of plentiful new apartments near and in the urban core has the added benefit of increasing demand for existing urban office space. It also increases the city tax base and the subsequent short work commutes is good for the environment and quality of life.
Also, the last sentence of the article:
> The Mayor also committed to update Boston’s zoning code to create thousands of additional housing units in Boston’s squares and corridors and reform the Article 80 process to increase speed and predictability for development.
Looked up the property records. Either a HIGHLY coincidental name clash, or there's a recently retired T exec who has been using MBTA land as an extended back yard and off-street parking area.
That's the moment I gave up on Boston and the T, tbh. It's a small thing that doesn't really matter, but so ridiculously brazen and public and personal. If that sort of thing is what happens out in the open, can you imagine how many tens/hundreds of millions of taxpayer money is being funneled between friends and cousins via MBTA?
That lot was the lichmere stop of the green line until about two years ago. And was the lichmere stop for decades. Once torn down it was used as a gravel pile and support area for MBTA work. Recently that corner had the traffic pattern altered a bit with a new light and cross street.
You gotta remember, in America city infrastructure takes time.
Lot in question: https://maps.app.goo.gl/4HSueRhVb8TPZNoZ7
Nope. I was talking about Sullivan. davisr got it right.
Sounds like that neighbor has a solid adverse possession argument to make.
https://cdn.mbta.com/sites/default/files/2023-06/FY24%20Item...
I hadn’t been back to Boston in years until this past October, and stayed in a hotel near by.
One evening I walked past the office, which are now high end condos.
I’m sure they were crazy expensive. I loved that part of town, and walking around I saw lots of empty commercial space available. How wonderful it will be to have it teeming with life. That part of the city is glorious, and I’m sure many people will enjoy living there, hopefully at reasonable prices.
Would you live in an apartment 15 feet wide and 50 feet deep? No. That's why most office buildings dont work
You have to redo all the mechanical, plumbing, electric, and then entirely refinish the building. Its literally cheaper to build new than deal with the nightmare that is to convert an office.
I work in CRE - every single office to multi deal i have seen the developer has war stories. And the units are 40-100% more expensive in cost than other apartments.
Office buildings are like an infectious disease. You could let them die. But if you have an urban infill city environment and more and more office properties become ghost buildings, then that disease will spread. All of the restaurants and other businesses nearby that rely on the foot traffic from office folk, they will die. You will see more riff raff. More homeless. More crime.
Many office assets need to go to 0 in asset value before the private market is willing to take the risk of those conversions.
Remember, loans are close to 10% for construction. And equity returns are higher.
https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/viral-bay-area-zillow-l...
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.9703586,-122.5195036,3a,75y,...
Yes, if that's the alternative to being enslaved for life. How can people still not understand that there is a massive part of the population who need to be able to purchase their living space to not have to rent for life or take on life-long debt that they can't afford. How can people not understand this? Yes, it's better for a young worker to be able to purchase a shit apartment that is a converted office building and start building his or her future, than pay rent for years and years and have nothing to show for it.
This is a true "let them eat cake" situation. Imagine if we didn't allow people to eat because we didn't think the food was good enough. That's what's happening with housing.
In a nice part of Boston? Under 500K? Over 1K sqft? With some nice building community amenities? Hell. Yes.
For laughs, I just measured the width of my home's hallways and rooms. I don't see why 15x50 feet apartment isn't doable especially for a bachelor/new couple starting out. Assume an apartment with a 3 foot wide, 50 foot length hallway, subtract another 2 feet width for walls/piping/whatever, and then you can hang 5 rooms that are 10x10 feet from the hallway. Enough for a living room/common area/kitchen/2 bedrooms. Might get a bit cramped but very usable.
I assume I'm missing something here since this doesn't seem to be too bad.
Yes. I lived in this with my SO for 9 years. And I lived with 200 other families like this on small plots of land.
Its called a "Mobile Home".
Isn't this basically a railroad?
I think many owners have the mindset that if they're going to lose money either way they'll stick with the devil they know and hope for a miracle rebound. It sounds like this program is offering tax incentives to help offset those conversion costs to make it much easier for building owners to break even after a conversion.
https://www.apartments.com/blog/what-is-the-average-rent-in-...
around 4$ sq ft for commerical in LA
https://www.colliers.com/en/research/los-angeles/2022-q2-dow...
CRE is WAY higher in the top tier areas of SF, for the obvious reason that historically high startup capital outpaces all other residential price pressures.
This differs in other localities.
https://slate.com/business/2022/12/office-housing-conversion...
As far as fitting in here, have you read the guidelines? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>In Comments
>Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.
>Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
>When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. "That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3" can be shortened to "1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
The devil, of course, will be in the details. But incentives like this can really help get things moving in the right direction.
Certainly, if there are entities that are going to win from this, there are entities that are going to lose if they don't act.
Any east coast city should have an easier time of it, because the main determining factor for retrofitting office buildings into residential is the distance between the center of the building and the exterior, in order to make sure there's enough windows in each unit. Any office building built before the advent of the electric light should be just fine, so there's plenty of opportunity in places like Philadelphia.
Where I worked in Longwood (Boston), the offices surrounding me were massive, historic buildings with plaques commemorating their origin. They were originally built for housing nurses and doctors who worked in the area's hospitals (there is a concentration of hospitals in Longwood).
So in this case, these were built and used as housing before a later conversion to office space.
These are currently utilized hospital buildings. IMO, they are unlikely to be converted back to residential at this time.
For example if you're on the first few floors and you don't have an outside-facing window, your only source of light might be a 20 story light well. At best it always looks like dusk in your apartment, but most often it's pitch black without having your lights always on.
Some of those repurposed building are quite livable, others not as much.
This is actually a pretty nice rebate (similar to the one Ed Lee and Willie Brown proposed for Mid-Market redevelopment and Mission Bay's development respectively). I'd love for SF to use similar terms, but I doubt it's politically feasible anymore.
So you only can do this if your bank decides to agree to take a haircut... which only happens if the bank is convinced you have no other options.
Reducing the property tax provides a sweetener that you and the bank can share to make it slightly more palatable.
Yup, that's what economics does: the firms with the lowest cost to converting, do so. And it's a nice follow-on effect that more residential hopefully increases commercial demand.
This is mostly a factor where you have a big inventory of older commercial buildings. Advances in HVAC (and before that, lighting) have let you build bigger floors that are less desirable for residential use.
Subsidizing things like education, housing, and healthcare.. without corresponding encouraging increases in SUPPLY.. just gives more dollars to the demand side to chase the same stuff.
Yes, typically the market responds, but in highly regulated markets the government needs to make sure they are encouraging rather than discouraging supply.
For example in NYC, an office-to-residential dev was talking about how depending on the neighborhood, there are basically cutoff dates of what construction year is eligible for conversion. In midtown it's something like 1960 whereas downtown it is the 70s or so. That is - nothing built after that date can be converted. And the dates are fixed, not changed in years, have to be renegotiated in zoning law periodically.
There's no fixed reason for this other than setting arbitrary numbers to limit the amount of conversions to residential.. that is.. reduce the ability to build housing!
When asked why, the developer basically said "it's sort of arbitrary but they do it so that a neighborhood doesn't get too much housing when it doesn't have enough schools or markets, etc".
Which is kind of crazy. Build the housing. Build the schools. Just.. build.
Historically people moved to the cities because that's where the work was. What will drive people to cities when that's no longer true?
Granted some people really enjoy "density" but I suspect most people prefer more space / a yard / etc if the lack of commute enables then to spread out.
Of course, these things are also self-reinforcing cycles. If people move out, housing prices come down but a lot of the amenities that lead many people to live in the city in the first plce may go away as well.
If you own a bunch of downtown commercial real estate, you don't need to be a business guru to see that you could be making a lot more money if you could rent that space out as apartments.
Yup, my question is - do we expect this to hold when downtown is no longer the place to be for work.
My wife and I moved out of Boston due to the pricing, but if we could afford it while maintaining our current savings rate we’d move back in a heartbeat even though we both have remote jobs. The density allows for so many choices in food and entertainment that you can’t get in the suburbs or countryside. And that’s without even accounting for the lack of needing a car which is a constant headache in terms of maintenance and logistics that I wish I could just be rid of
I totally get how at the period of life before you have kids, the city has advantages but once you have kids that formula flips quite a bit (eg: you care about access to Thai food less, while the backyard starts to matter a lot.)
To put it in the terms of my up-thread post - that still sounds like a relatively smaller total demand vs before (eg, before COVID I suggested buying a larger place so we could have kids in NYC and I would have an easy commute - now I couldn't care less about being there vs my nice burb)
I could afford to live in the city if I wanted to but I choose not to.
You take what you can get, but in my area it seems most new housing is either smashed up against a freeway or a mish-mash of car-dependent ADUs. Future generations deserve better.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_City_Hall#/media/File:B...
As an Masshole, but not a city one, I’ve always kinda admired the job they do in Boston. At least, you don’t get the big dramatic narratives about it crumbling, like California cities, and NYC seems to be a bit boom-bust.
Boston seems to always be doing fine. The Big Dig was a ripoff but that was ages ago, and the T smells like piss but that’s par for the course, right?
I do agree, there are some beautiful old office buildings around here that would probably make great residential buildings. That would be even better for the area.
I wish it moved like the MTA, though lol. I might be willing to make that tradeoff... maybe.
But recently they started enforcing that very aggressively and requiring motorcycles to pay the same amount as cars and park in the same spots. Just a wave of orange envelopes on every motorbike I walked by.
Kind of an unfortunate move IMO - one of the things I like about European cities is not having to have 1 person per SUV clogging streets.
Task failed successfully
Their government in Boston has just announced it's about to save them from otherwise certain financial distress.
The polite term they're using to describe such generous government help is "public-private partnership."
- How much of it is the mayor playing politician?
- And how much of it is the mayor trying to inspire others to stop sitting on their residential or potential residential stock?
[1] Other comments are covering the finer - and more difficult - points of converting office building to residential.
I was surprised not to see that mentioned at all in the announcement. Is it unrelated? Is the announcement political spin to encourage those who might otherwise be against bailing out commercial real estate property owners to support it? Am I just wrong and this has nothing to do with the CRE crisis?
Yes CRE vacancy is high in Boston, but it's still far from being a CRE crisis. The share of biotech and healthcare space is so high within Boston CRE that vacancy rate aren't nearly as bad as in other cities. And lab conversions are increasingly commonplace, so it's not like a residential conversion program was necessary to save CRE.
They're grossly luxurious mind you, but it was still interesting.
If you're interested in what it looks like, at least the promotional version of it, https://www.pmcpropertygroup.com/properties/penn-garrison-lo...
If you put enough soft lighting up, it was perfectly fine
I love living in the city. I can walk to two different movie theaters, two grocery stores, a huge number of restaurants and stores, and a number of my friends' houses within 15 minutes. I can hop on a bus or the subway and expand that even more. I don't have to waste half a day every weekend mowing a pointless lawn or trimming tree branches, but I have parks, rivers, ponds, etc. easily accessible any time I want to enjoy them.
I grew up in a place where you had to drive 30+ minutes to go anywhere. It was incredibly isolating and I'd never want to go back to that.
It's fine for people to want to live like that, but it's obvious that for many (if not most) people, cities are somewhere nice to live.
So I have the option of paying $700 a month to park in town or take a bus that only comes by once every hour and then get jammed on a subway car that might even make it to it's destination.
Here's a graph of slow zones:
https://old.reddit.com/r/boston/comments/11qtx82/red_line_sl...
They are returning a good chunk of the system back to regular service this Summer, though.
Edit: the slow zones might not be clear on that graph, but at one point the Red Line end-to-end was around 1-1.5 hours slower. Especially bad for commuters.
Just today, one of their rail cars caught fire at an elevated station, and their broken fire suppression system did nothing but flood the ground floor when the firefighters tried to use it.
Wu's push for more housing density along the city's functioning arteries feels more realistic. Maybe they're realizing that plan could also suck a lot of property taxes out of the urban center.
Until we have a truly well-funded FSF filled with both successful projects and sustainable outreach programs that can reach a more diverse set of participants, I'm afraid that the topic of software freedom will continue to be relegated to the sidelines as some kind of fringe religious zeal.
Until we do that, we'd just be replacing one unethically-proprietary fire suppression system with another unethically-proprietary fire suppression system. And riders will just be commuting back and forth between abodes wired with automation systems which do not respect the wishes of the users within them.
The T definitely needs some help. But if you're living downtown, it's a very walkable city fwiw.
Let's say theres 100 apartments in the entire town, and they are all owned by the same company. Next let's say they build 50 more apartments and theres now 1000 apartments still all owned by the same company. Given the number of apartments has increased, renters now have more power to negotiate as the owners have more units they need to fill.
This is why Tesla for example is dropping prices as they produce more cars and they have inventory vs when they had 6-12 month backlog & scalpers were flipping used vehicles for more than new in 2021-2022.
When supply is severely constrained, you end up with bidding wars for the finite goods.
I had a friend's rent go up 25% in one year in an area that has seen a huge amount of apartment buildings go up. That's not rational. The companies that own these apartment buildings care about nothing more than more money and know that they'll be able to find someone to pay the exhorbant prices.
So, you're saying the demand remains greater than the supply?
IIRC, there are studies that show that places that built more housing had smaller price increases than economically comparable places that built less housing.
Positive effects can exist even if they don't singlehandedly flip a decades long trend.
Even if prices in other parts went up, they would have gone up even more if there had been no construction.