Comment by ianm218
18 hours ago
I think your model is off. If single family homes got rezoned to allow large complexes near trains, those plots of land would be worth more and it would likely be worth it for the people living there to eventually sell to developers. This doesn't require the city or state buying anyone out.
In the greater boston area NIMBY's are incredibly effective and will pull out every stop. I.e. instead of designating normal areas as multifamily, they will designate a portion of a golf course as multi family so you'd have to buy out the whole golf course [1].
It really is sad MA is 50/50 in housing produciton per capita [2]. Despite being severely under built and very desirable place to live, and then everyone pretends to be progressive. Michelle Wu in Boston uses "affordable housing" to bring all residential construction to a halt.
[1]. https://www.cbsnews.com/boston/news/marblehead-david-modica-...
Thank you. I hadn't even thought about the prices of property. To get an idea of what property costs would be in an area I'm familiar with, I looked on Zillow at properties around a couple of train stations in Weston.
Looking at one of the train stations in a lower-priced section of Weston, properties within walking distance of the stop go for roughly $2 million per acre, according to Zillow. Given what happened to the properties around the Green Line extension, I would expect those properties to sell for at least twice their Zillow listing price.
I thought about what it would take to get me to sell. I think it would take multiple millions, with a sub-5% mortgage, to get me to sell. It is kind of hard to put a value on it because I have established mini-orchard and berry patches.
How many housing units and parking spaces can you fit into two acres? Unless the units are heavily subsidized, I don't think any of them will be considered "affordable" because condos in the area sold for around half a million dollars seven years ago, and so I'd expect these to go for at least $750,000 to a million.
The point is just to increase housing supply not create “affordable housing”. Right now there is massively more demand than supply, so any incremental unit is still very expensive. We’ve strangled housing supply for so long that it seems like the only way is for the state to come in and do rent control.
We start allowing supply again and the less desireable places on the commuter rail i.e: Brockton/ bridgewater/ Randolph get truly affordable over time, “top” destinations like Weston housing price growth stalls out at least.
I’ve never seen an area more adverse to economics 101 than Boston.