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Re: Hotter than Tabasco sauce: the Boston RE market

It's a non-argument. Where did MIT start? In Boston. Moved to Cambridge not because they were more forward thinking, Moved so they could have room to expand.
Harvard is a Boston Institution, just happens to reside more in the confines of Cambridge. Take away "Cambridge", and both of those vaunted Universities sit in Boston.

Fun fact: Harvard owns much more land in Boston than in Cambridge. Its land holdings in Allston alone are almost twice the size of all its land on the north bank of the Charles.

http://www.provost.harvard.edu/institutional_research/harvard_fact_book_2012_physical_plant.pdf
 
Re: Hotter than Tabasco sauce: the Boston RE market

I don't agree with Rifleman about many things, but he is the only one who seems to appreciate the full significance of MIT to our economy.

MIT is much, much more than a great engineering and business school. It is one of the top 2 technical institutions in the world. It has been the single most important technology developer for defense and space since WWII and is the global epicenter of biotechnology. I wouldn't be surprised if less than a quarter of the institute had anything at all to do with undergraduate education.

MIT is to Kendall Square and greater Boston what Stanford is to Silicon Valley and the Bay Area.

As far as new technology ecosystems go, those are head-and-shoulders the biggest in the world. Sure, both areas have other significant educational institutions to feed their talent pool, but MIT and Stanford are engines that pump out new businesses and whole new business sectors. Others are trying to imitate the model - Cambridge (in old England) has been rather successful largely because it is the only serious player in Europe and Cornell is launching a new campus in NYC to try to do the same there. 99% of schools have 1% of the economic impact of Stanford or MIT.

As for the other schools in the Boston area - of course they are very large employers and higher quality employers than most other industries. However, even research universities like Harvard and BU are nowhere near the power and significance of MIT. BC, NU, and all the small schools are primarily educational institutions. Good to have in your neighborhood, but hardly economic engines.
 
Re: Hotter than Tabasco sauce: the Boston RE market

You have to remember Boston is the closest major US city to Europe and thus is one of the principal port along the East Coast. It benefits greatly for being a hub for shipping.

Boston is practically irrelevant in the shipping sector.
 
Re: Hotter than Tabasco sauce: the Boston RE market

^^^
Agree.........So if you took away MIT & Harvard which both schools are located in Cambridge---and both have unlimited money.

The future of Boston would be a better version of Detroit on the ocean.

If you take away MIT and Harvard and replayed the last two centuries of Boston. Boston would still probably be a good jump better than Detroit. Not merely a better version of Detroit, enough to not say in the same breath.

Even without Harvard and MIT providing elite politicians and new tech industries advantages. Boston still have positional advantageous of the ocean and Europe. There would still be tourist money and the remaining schools would still provide some drive. It's almost certain Boston would be a less prosperous place, but it wouldn't be Detroit.

If I was to guess, we would be treated with the status of Philadelphia (as it is also a city riding on tourist money, some schools, and proximity though no ocean access). That's still a far distance to Detroit.
 
Re: Hotter than Tabasco sauce: the Boston RE market

Fun fact: Harvard owns much more land in Boston than in Cambridge. Its land holdings in Allston alone are almost twice the size of all its land on the north bank of the Charles.

http://www.provost.harvard.edu/institutional_research/harvard_fact_book_2012_physical_plant.pdf

tRUE. tHERE IS A SWEET MAP OF THOSE HOLDINGS SOMEONE POSTED ON HERE BEFORE. tHOUGHT ABOUT IT BEFORE WRITING... caps be damned...
But, they are land banking a lot. "Harvard" is still more in Cambridge than Boston.
 
Re: Hotter than Tabasco sauce: the Boston RE market

If you take away MIT and Harvard and replayed the last two centuries of Boston. Boston would still probably be a good jump better than Detroit. Not merely a better version of Detroit, enough to not say in the same breath.
That's still a far distance to Detroit.

Centuries? How about going back 2 or 3 Decades 80's Real Estate Bust. Cambridge was very bad area.

Boston in general back late 70's early 80's was a rough place.
 
Re: Hotter than Tabasco sauce: the Boston RE market

Centuries? How about going back 2 or 3 Decades 80's Real Estate Bust. Cambridge was very bad area.

Boston in general back late 70's early 80's was a rough place.

Now you're just being pedantic (sp?). I said replay the last two centuries because you can't re-imagine Boston's development with all the influence Harvard and MIT did before 1970 and remove their role right there with the influence done to Boston already. For example, if we just folded MIT in 1970, MIT would already left its mark with tons of tech companies already founded and growing fast. Boston would still experience its tech golden age that fueled its recovery.

Taking it out in the 1800's before MIT ever founded and Harvard never getting a chance to become a impactful player would measure their impact more.

My guess, if never existed, one likely impact would non-existence of the 128 boom in the 1980's. Boston would had to recover basing around the other universities (so a harder catering as a college town) and tourism. I would compare Boston's standing to Philly.
 
Re: Hotter than Tabasco sauce: the Boston RE market

hi - I'm originally from Detroit.

it's almost impossible to do anything there without a car - it might not seem that significant, but for someone on the margins access to one is the line between just barely scraping by and abject poverty. There are people living in actual shanties in the shadows of vacant factories hunting and growing their own food (one was across the street from where a friend of mine lived in the early 90s). Just outside the city, most of southern macomb county is poorly-built tract homes inhabited by people who are one or two paychecks away from total financial ruin... For all of Boston's troubles in the 70s and 80s - it was nowhere even remotely close to what Detroit went through and is continuing to go through.

a few things - Metro Detroit grew further and further out but the population never increased (Boston metro is roughly twice as populous as it was in the 60s - whereas Detroit Metro has stayed about the same). Land was already cleared and much cheaper to buy from farmers who owned massive tracts of land (like square miles of land). Boston area the ownership is much more complicated - there are reservations, snob-zoned communities with old estates, etc... all these land use restrictions really kept us from moving too far out when all cities were in decline. anyway - all these surrounding towns were essentially cannibalizing population from the city in pursuit of growing their tax base - they enticed big corporations with big tax breaks (something that is coming back to bite many municipalities in the ass now - but that's a different story)... instead of viewing themselves as part of Detroit, they were competing with Detroit. Oakland County won this battle, while pretty much everyone else lost. The real center of "Detroit" is now Southfield. (it's even their city motto).

yeah - there's probably some race stuff associated with this - but basically it was one large concerted effort of many people over several decades (with support of industry leaders - notably Ford - who even tried to create his own utopian society in Brazil) to abandon the core city and create a new, "more perfect" decentralized one - based around the automobile - from scratch. This process was already well underway in the 50s and 60s, and it's pretty much complete now. of course there's the token "GM HQ in Detroit" - but the real center of their operations are not even in the city.

I'm probably making this sound a lot more nefarious than it actually is, but the point is that Detroit didn't do this to itself.
 
Re: Hotter than Tabasco sauce: the Boston RE market

Centuries? How about going back 2 or 3 Decades 80's Real Estate Bust. Cambridge was very bad area.

Boston in general back late 70's early 80's was a rough place.

Jeez... MIT couldn't save us from that? I thought it was the only thing holding this city together...
 
Re: Hotter than Tabasco sauce: the Boston RE market

Democrats have controlled Detroit for the past 50 years. Yes, this includes city councilors, mayors, people on the school board, etc.... You gotta acknowledge this buddy boy.

So what is bankrupted Jefferson County, Alabama's (pop. 660,000 vs. Detroit's 700,000) excuse?
 
Re: Hotter than Tabasco sauce: the Boston RE market

So what is bankrupted Jefferson County, Alabama's (pop. 660,000 vs. Detroit's 700,000) excuse?

2 of the 5 commissioners are democrats. So you trying to make an argument that 50 years of republican super majority rule doesn't work. You need to find a better example.
 
Re: Hotter than Tabasco sauce: the Boston RE market

2 of the 5 commissioners are democrats. So you trying to make an argument that 50 years of republican super majority rule doesn't work. You need to find a better example.

The lionshare of their bankruptcy was linked to the mismanagement of a controversial county sewer system project. Of the county's $4.2 million dept, roughly $3.2 billion of it came from that project.

The county also found itself mirred in a "bond swapping" fiasco.
 
Re: Hotter than Tabasco sauce: the Boston RE market

2 of the 5 commissioners are democrats. So you trying to make an argument that 50 years of republican super majority rule doesn't work. You need to find a better example.

The strict party line democrat thing is just dumb politics. You know what other cities have democrat mayors: Boston, New York, SF, LA, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Miami- pretty much every big city.

Detroit's problem wasn't necessarily exorbitant pension out of line with other public employees, but that the city lost half of its population in 40 years. Pensions are a risk because you are expecting things to grow over time to be able to support the pension liability incurred today. In Detroit, all the growth happened outside city limits. So if you retired 20 years ago in Detroit after doing good public work for 40 years, the city's tax base shrunk by half.
 
Re: Hotter than Tabasco sauce: the Boston RE market

The strict party line democrat thing is just dumb politics. You know what other cities have democrat mayors: Boston, New York, SF, LA, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Miami- pretty much every big city.

I agree with your overall point, but I have to nitpick: New York's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is an independent. He was a Democrat, then he turned into a Republican during the Bush years, and now he's an independent. That being said, he holds a lot of views similar to the Democrats.
 
Re: Hotter than Tabasco sauce: the Boston RE market

My main point is to blame the structural and decades long decline of Detroit because of a current political parties position is petty and not productive in terms of actually addressing the problems.

Republicans were the main pushers of NAFTA over union protected democrats. Now Mexico has a car industry. I agree with free trade and am not trying to vindicate my own politics, but these stupid blanket statements people make are reactions and not reflections.
 
Re: Hotter than Tabasco sauce: the Boston RE market

The strict party line democrat thing is just dumb politics. You know what other cities have democrat mayors: Boston, New York, SF, LA, Chicago, Houston, Dallas, Miami- pretty much every big city.

You are so wrong.

-Dallas's mayors go back and forth between Republican and Democrat.
-Miami's mayors go back and forth between Republican and Democrat.
-NYC has had republican mayors the past two decades, with Bloomberg switching to his own independent party.

Oh yeah, btw Einstein, Chicago has been losing people for several decades and the numbers are comparable to Detroit's.
 
Re: Hotter than Tabasco sauce: the Boston RE market

My main point is to blame the structural and decades long decline of Detroit because of a current political parties position is petty and not productive in terms of actually addressing the problems.

Republicans were the main pushers of NAFTA over union protected democrats. Now Mexico has a car industry. I agree with free trade and am not trying to vindicate my own politics, but these stupid blanket statements people make are reactions and not reflections.

Thank you. The whole "Democrats are ruining cities" is complete bullshit and it's used because people are too lazy to actually look around and find numbers and data to support it, so they just use a scapegoat. Austin, TX is a booming, young city deep in Red Texas. Guess who's the mayor? Lee Leffingwell, a Democrat and the Democratic party have been in control for more than a decade. So cut the crap. Blaming either party is weak.
 
Re: Hotter than Tabasco sauce: the Boston RE market

^Chicago isn't "booming." It's losing people and it's controlled by democrats.
 
Re: Hotter than Tabasco sauce: the Boston RE market

^Chicago isn't "booming." It's losing people and it's controlled by democrats.

I said Austin, TX. How you got Chicago from that is beyond me.
 

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