Viable means what the market supports lol, and the entire reason to defer to market tastes is because they reflect what people want in actuality not what they claim to want. All these beautiful and quirky shops in Harvard square for instance wouldn't have closed if they were the retail that best suited the present times, present location and present population. Plenty of people will say they liked it the way it was, but were there enough of them and did they go frequently enough and did they spend high enough margins at those shops? Evidently not. Same with beautiful quaint triple deckers and horrendously ugly 5-over-1s, people might vocally say they like the small scale detached buildings, but you can observe revealed preferences of most people (who are tapped out of this discussion) when they are willing to spend a considerable premium on a newer apartment.
I wish that were the world we lived in, actually. I think the "market" that matters is made up of billionaires, not humans. No one actually wants another branch of Silicon Valley Bank, but their private equity owners will pay more than the beloved card shop, so there you go. The infinite size of private equity funds and personal wealth of a tiny number of corrupt people has broken the system completely.
Truth to this, as much as it would hurt everyone, a severe economic disruption is a very effective way (and possibly, the only way) to dislodge the concentration of wealth from the deathgrip it's in. Thoman Picketty writes quite a lot the destruction of fortunes in WWI and WW2 and shows how that was really what led to what sadly is, or was, and aberration we saw in the mid 20th century, where there was actually a much greater equality of distribution of money. By the 80s things were headed back to the way they were before the wars, and here we are.
There's a simple math to this. Google search says the MSA currently has about 2 million households/housing units. Per another Google search, Zillow says the average home in the MSA costs $800K, average condo $600K (every apartment is a condo owned by somebody). Let's say that "affordable" to us means half that. 58% of MSA households are single-family housing, 42% are multifamily.
That comes out to $1.4B in total housing value, and we want to eliminate half. These are sketch numbers, but affordable housing in Boston fundamentally means eliminating hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth from
somebody. Either the Government makes that up somehow, or property-owning residents take a huge hit. There's no other way to do it.
There's also the problem of what happens next - people buying property would need to understand that it will only appreciate with inflation and no more - to keep housing affordable, it cannot be seen as an investment or an appreciating asset, which in the US would be a seismic cultural change. You can try to build your way out of this, but the property-owners will always try to stop you from building enough to prevent their own assets from appreciating, and you will fail.
You can fix this in a particular city by having the local market/economy crash. We saw a hint of what this would look like on a national scale in 2008, and it broke our country - broad loss of faith in the entire system.
This all belongs on a different thread, but interestingly, the Bible had a brilliant idea with all property reverting to original owners every 50 years - people 2,500 years ago understood all of this, too.
