General Boston Discussion

This isnt specific to Boston but applies to all US cities.

Wonderful Atlantic article about what happened to the street grid and how the lack thereof of a cohesive grid in the far flung suburbs where most cites are adding most of their housing is creating completely disconnected areas that lack resources/transit/connectivity...etc. and why we should go back to street grids. Street grids are inherently flexible, you can start out with very small spaced out buildings in a rural setting on a grid and if the town/city grows over time the grid can just keep filling in more and more. Nyc used to be entirely made up of low rises, but the street grid allowed it to always keep growing over time.

City Planning’s Greatest Innovation Makes a Comeback​


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“Growing up in Lexington, Kentucky, my best friend and I lived only a quarter mile apart as the crow flies. We had nearly identical houses, both clad in a blend of brick and vinyl that allowed our newly minted middle-class parents to signal status without breaking the bank. Getting to each other’s homes should have been simple.

The trouble was, we lived on opposite ends of two cul-de-sac neighborhoods, each fronting a busy corridor that had once been a farm road. A strictly legal trip from his house to mine involved a 25-minute, mile-long trek along aimless streets, largely without a sidewalk. So we cheated, cutting through backyards to the howls of homeowners. This was the early 2000s; privacy fences have since been installed that probably would have ended our friendship.

Ours was a problem that city planning was supposed to prevent: Cities were meant to grow along a coordinated pattern of easily navigable streets and public spaces. Until the 20th century, they did. The street grid—an innovation as useful today as in antiquity—reigned. But about a century ago, when the modern era of American city planning began, the grid fell out of favor. Arterial roads and winding cul-de-sacs, far friendlier to cars than to pedestrians, were ascendant.

In one sense, my friend and I lived in the most planned environment in history. Every building around us was subject to a set of rigid regulations. If our neighbor turned her garage into an apartment or adjusted the pitch of her roof, zoning enforcers would be out in 24 hours. But when it came to the public realm—the space between buildings that ties a city together—there was no plan, except to move cars through a landscape of lawns.

M. Nolan Gray: Cancel zoning

We were the victims of an American approach to city planning that had lost its way. But the next generation of kids may not be so unlucky. After a long demise, the grid is showing signs of a comeback.


Humans have been doing something like city planning for millennia, though it hasn’t always been called that.

In the West, our city-planning tradition traces its roots to Hippodamus of Miletus, who laid out the ancient-Greek port of Piraeus in a rectangular grid expanding outward from an agora. The Romans replicated this model in colonies across the Mediterranean, adding sewers and stormwater infrastructure. They so loved their sewers, in fact, that they designated a goddess to preside over them.

The grid carried over to the New World. The Spanish empire instructed colonists to plan cities around a town square with a church and a royal council, violently imposed on top of existing Mesoamerican cities. From these twin centers of Spanish power, grids shot outward.

The American colonial period marked a renaissance in city planning, as settlers inspired by Enlightenment ideas platted hundreds of street grids on dispossessed land, each testing new designs. In 1682, the surveyor Thomas Holme laid out a rectangular grid connecting the Schuylkill and Delaware Rivers, with four parks of equal size orbiting a central plaza—the basis for Philadelphia. In 1811, surveyors divided a largely uninhabited Manhattan into 155 streets and a dozen grand avenues, laying the groundwork for New York City.

On occasion, American city planners even infused grids with spiritual significance. Joseph Smith’s “plat of Zion”—a grid design that eventually served as the basis for Salt Lake City—was said to be divinely inspired.

Divinity aside, there was good reason to love grids. As Alain Bertaud—a former city planner for the World Bank—points out, planning a grid in advance of growth allows surveyors to demarcate the public and private realms, reserving space for necessary infrastructure and ensuring that future expansion follows a coherent pattern. That might sound restrictive, but the result is a blank canvas that empowers cities to grow and adapt.

In the 19th century, the landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted spiced up America’s grids with citywide parks systems in places such as Louisville, Kentucky, and Buffalo, New York. A young City Beautiful movement carved grand boulevards and civic plazas out of capitals such as Denver and Washington, D.C. Transit companies blanketed metropolises such as Los Angeles and Chicago with networks of streetcars and commuter trains. Without ever using the phrasecity planning, Americans had, by the dawn of the 20th century, perfected a formula for planning cities.

And then we invented city planning.


Beginning in the 1910s, the first local city-planning departments were established, not so much to plot out the physical growth of cities but to implement a novel policy: zoning. Zoning shifted the focus of city planning from stewarding the public realm to managing private development. The forebears of professional planners were unconcerned with land uses and densities, allowing mixed-use neighborhoods to emerge. But zoning remade cities into a fragmented landscape of malls, office parks, and residential subdivisions.

From the July/August 2023 issue: How parking ruined everything

Developers lost the power to decide what to build on any given lot. But they gained unprecedented powers to shape the public realm; as long as the streets were sufficiently wide and the corners sufficiently rounded, they could plot out new streets untethered from any broader plan. With federal backing, new neighborhoods became a collection of winding streets and cul-de-sacs, connected to the broader city by only one entrance. That these neighborhoods discouraged walking was seen by contemporary planners as a feature, not a bug.

This novel approach to planning was premised on a particular vision of the ideal city that still holds sway today. Taken on its own terms, the appeal is easy to see: The archetypal American would live on a quiet street in a single-family house surrounded by a lawn. He would work in a central business district or perhaps a new industrial park on the edge of town, and spend his earnings in a dedicated shopping district. Traveling from home to work to errands would be fast, solitary, and—most important—in a car.

One hundred years later, this grand experiment has resulted in cities that are unaffordable, stagnant, segregated, and sprawling. Walk into any planning office today, and you’ll be hard-pressed to find the street and park plans of yore. Instead, you will find reams of zoning rules listing permitted and prohibited uses, maximum building heights, minimum yard depths, required lot dimensions, limits on unit numbers, and required parking.

Unlike their predecessors who spent their time sketching grids, modern American city planners now dedicate themselves to either enforcing the fading dream of zoning or working around it. Indeed, the principal function of the planning office in most major cities is to help developers navigate incoherent rules adopted decades ago, in pursuit of an urban-design vision that few still believe in—reviewing stacks of paperwork and organizing endless hearings just to get something built….”

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/american-street-grid-city-planning/677432/

-it is paywalled, it wont let me paste the non paywalled link, but in order to read it paste the above link here. It works for many other sites too, but not all..

https://12ft.io/
 
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There's likely a better thread than this... but I did take a look at advertised available apartments at various other cities in the US. Surprise, Surprise, almost all of the cities (that people would consider expensive) have stuff available that's cheaper than Boston. Even Bay Area/San Jose has stuff that's maybe a tad more expensive at best. Like in NYC, you could live in Jersey just fine and there are cheaper pockets in Brooklyn and Queens.

Now I wasn't doing that deep of an analysis, not really taking into things like commuting distance and crime and things like that. Also not comparing SFH or buying in general.
 

25% of Greater Boston’s young people plan to leave in next 5 years, new survey finds​

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“An “alarming” number of young people in Greater Boston say they plan to leave the area in the next five years, according to a new report.

The survey, released Monday by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce Foundation, polled 823 young adults between the ages of 20 and 30 living in Essex, Middlesex, Norfolk, Plymouth, and Suffolk counties in November and December. Twenty-five percent of those surveyed said they are planning to leave Greater Boston in the next five years, even while 89% said they are satisfied with their day-to-day lives in the region.

“Our young residents are not only the future of the workforce, but also our current leaders and champions of our small businesses, downtowns, and workplaces,” James E. Rooney, president of the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce Foundation, said in a statement. “It is incumbent upon us to elevate the voices of young residents who are contributing to our local vibrancy and civic fabric while navigating significant hurdles.”

Massachusetts continues to be one of the most moved from states.

“Beginning in 2020 with the shift to remote and hybrid office policies, the mobility of the workforce increased, and we are seeing residents, especially young residents, move away from Massachusetts to more affordable regions,” the Chamber Foundation said.

According to the organization’s survey, there were differences among those who were reporting their likelihood to leave. Black women and LGBTQ individuals reported that they were more likely to leave Greater Boston (35% and 31%, respectively), while 76% of millennial women and 77% of Asian American Pacific Islanders said they planned to stay.

The Chamber Foundation found that job availability, the cost of rent, and the ability to buy a home ranked as the top issues young residents said they are facing as they choose where to build a life and a career. When asked what the most urgent issues for local leaders should be, 66% said housing that is affordable should be prioritized, 39% said the availability of quality jobs should be prioritized, and 35% said financial compensation and wages should be prioritized.

Those issues “must be at the top of mind for public officials and the business community” to ensure young people want, and choose, to stay in Greater Boston,” the Chamber Foundation said.”

https://www.boston.com/news/local-n...leave-in-next-5-years-new-survey-finds/?amp=1
 
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25% of Greater Boston’s young people plan to leave in next 5 years, new survey finds​


“An “alarming” number of young people in Greater Boston say they plan to leave the area in the next five years, according to a new report.

The survey, released Monday by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce Foundation, polled 823 young adults between the ages of 20 and 30 living in Essex, Middlesex, Norfolk, Plymouth, and Suffolk counties in November and December. Twenty-five percent of those surveyed said they are planning to leave Greater Boston in the next five years, even while 89% said they are satisfied with their day-to-day lives in the region.

I don't get what's so "alarming" here. Obviously we should do everything possible to address concerns about affordability/transit/etc, but people in their 20s are a highly transient demographic, I'd be surprised if there's a big city out there that does much better than Boston on this metric. In fact, it's quite impressive that 75% of 20-30 year olds plan to stay in the Boston area, and 89% are satisfied with their lives here.
 
I don't get what's so "alarming" here. Obviously we should do everything possible to address concerns about affordability/transit/etc, but people in their 20s are a highly transient demographic, I'd be surprised if there's a big city out there that does much better than Boston on this metric. In fact, it's quite impressive that 75% of 20-30 year olds plan to stay in the Boston area, and 89% are satisfied with their lives here.

Especially when, ostensibly, a very large percentage of those 20-23 are college students who came from elsewhere. I'd be MUCH more interested in a survey of 25-35 year olds. The vast majority of people I know who stayed around the area after college are still here in our early 30s. Now that people are having kids is when I'm seeing people actively plan on moving to the outskirts of the region or to elsewhere entirely.
 
Especially when, ostensibly, a very large percentage of those 20-23 are college students who came from elsewhere. I'd be MUCH more interested in a survey of 25-35 year olds. The vast majority of people I know who stayed around the area after college are still here in our early 30s. Now that people are having kids is when I'm seeing people actively plan on moving to the outskirts of the region or to elsewhere entirely.
This is an economics problem - those with entry level jobs or young families simply can't afford to stay. We don't even have enough ratholes to be like New York to add supply. I'd be far more interested in a neighborhood breakdown of Family-Student-Shared housing by neighborhood.

An enormous number of residences are occupied by students, and growing. A 1-2 income family looking for a 3-4 bedroom home often can't outcompete a 4-"income" (parental funded) shared household. The schools are damaging the livability of the city by expanding the student body at the expense of the greater community. Solutions may include more dorms, promoting "student only" living facilities, and limiting enrollment at schools based on housing availability. These options would at least open up opportunities for family housing in the existing stock.

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This is an economics problem - entry level jobs simply can't afford to stay. We don't even have enough ratholes to be like New York to add supply. I'd be far more interested in a neighborhood breakdown of Family-Student-Shared housing by neighborhood.

An enormous number of residences are occupied by students, and growing. The schools are damaging the livability of the city by expanding the student body at the expense of the greater community. More dorms, promoting "student only" living facilities, and limiting enrollment at schools based on housing availability would at least open up opportunities for family housing.

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It’s a shame, because the growth and success of our universities SHOULD be the success of the region. I want to cheerlead this. But when housing is artificially made zero sum…well here we are.
 
If only these giant universities in the Boston/Cambridge area owned the land on and around their academic buildings that they could redevelop into housing for their students. Surely they wouldn't go and just build lab buildings on those sites, that would be crazy.
 
If only these giant universities in the Boston/Cambridge area owned the land on and around their academic buildings that they could redevelop into housing for their students. Surely they wouldn't go and just build lab buildings on those sites, that would be crazy.

That won’t help the problem at all once those students finish their degrees.
 
That won’t help the problem at all once those students finish their degrees.
Won't it? On-campus housing can easily reduce the demand for off-campus housing. If students are living on campus, they aren't occupying rental units that can then be rented to the community. Harvard actually has a pretty good program for it, since they actually seem to have enough to make their housing available to grad students and staff, but at the same time colleges expanding housing options can remove housing stock from public supply. For example, Harvard owns something like 3000 non-dorm housing units, and BU owns a healthy chunk of the historic brownstones on Bay State.

That said, do we want the colleges to redevelop a lot of their land? I personally want them to be selective, as Some, like BU, adjoin and own a ton of well preserved older buildings and brownstones, but any surface lots should absolutely be eliminated.
 
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If students are living on campus, they aren't occupying rental units that can then be rented to the community.

But when discussing “keeping the 20-something’s around”, we aren’t worried about freeing up units for the existing community. Rather, we want there to be enough units for new graduates as they move off campus and join the community. More on-campus housing doesn’t necessarily fix that.

There are plenty of reasons why a recent grad would want to stay local (professional network, friends, familiarity). But it’s hard to justify spending $1500 to share a drafty triple decker unit with 1-3 other people versus spending the same or less in a place like Austin to live alone in a new or newly renovated apartment.

Whether or not said person had guaranteed on-campus housing for the 4 years prior doesn’t change that value proposition they need to reckon with after graduation.
 
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This all assumes that schools can affordably build dorms. I'm not sure you can make the numbers work on a new-build bare-bones dorm building that could charge a rate comparable to off-campus housing, at least with today's construction costs.

Back to the original story, I'm a recent graduate degree holder entering year 8 of renting in this area, and the raising rent notices in my mailbox are starting to get old. And while I make a decent pay for my age, buying a house in this area isn't in the picture any time soon. Adjacently related, my landlord bought the house I live in now and another house down the street for $1 from his parents, and they are currently at a combined value of $4M. He is in a similar demographic of those that attend local meetings to prevent any new housing from being built.

People before me have had it worse I'm sure, but taking a snapshot relative to other cities today, anecdotally I look at Chicago or Austin as preferrable alternatives to my current situation/job and wants, and might seriously be looking in a year or two. It's just easier to live in those places, even though I have loved being raised and then living here in Boston.
 
There are plenty of reasons why a recent grad would want to stay local (professional network, friends, familiarity). But it’s hard to justify spending $1500 to share a drafty triple decker unit with 1-3 other people versus spending the same or less in a place like Austin to live alone in a new or newly renovated apartment.

Wages are likely to be decently less there though, so it's not so simple. Min Wage in Texas is just $7.25 for instance.

Plus you'd need a car.
 
People before me have had it worse I'm sure, but taking a snapshot relative to other cities today, anecdotally I look at Chicago or Austin as preferrable alternatives to my current situation/job and wants, and might seriously be looking in a year or two. It's just easier to live in those places, even though I have loved being raised and then living here in Boston.

I think we’re in similar places life-wise. I might be a bit younger. What your saying definitely rings true.

I actually got lucky with my current landlord. Our rent is lower than average and hasn’t gone up (knock on wood). However, if I want to buy a house someday then I’ll probably need to move away. I grew up here and would love to stay, but c’est la vie.

Wages are likely to be decently less there though, so it's not so simple. Min Wage in Texas is just $7.25 for instance.

Plus you'd need a car.

I need a car here currently since my job is in the suburbs. I have a bachelors and will have a masters in just a few months, so I’m not too worried about minimum wage. I only make $86k here, which for my field isn’t fantastic especially considering COL.
 
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Navy Destroyer USS Truxtun Docks In Boston During St. Patrick's Day Weekend​

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“BOSTON (WBZ NewsRadio)USS Truxtun, an American Navy destroyer, paid a visit to Boston this weekend.

The Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer was commissioned in 2009 and named after Commodore Thomas Truxtun, one of the first six commanders appointed by George Washington to the newly formed U.S. Navy.

The vessel docked at Black Falcon Terminal for St. Patrick's Day Weekend, giving the public a chance to tour the ship and its features.

"We are a Flight II Alpha, meaning that we are able to house helicopters," Lt. Meghan Brooks, the ship's operations officer, told WBZ NewsRadio Saturday.

The Truxtun also boasts several weapons systems, including anti-submarine warfare, surface warfare, air and missile defense, and a vertical launching system (VLS) that holds up to 96 missiles….”

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https://wbznewsradio.iheart.com/con...cks-in-boston-during-st-patricks-day-weekend/
 
I only make $86k here, which for my field isn’t fantastic especially considering COL.

You'd have to compare the job markets, etc, to determine the difference. Or if there are even jobs in Austin for what you do.

Federal Government pays 10% more here than Austin for instance.
 

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