Re: Green Line to Medford to start in 2011
But I can't be the only who feels that cities are turning into the playgrounds of the well off. Downtown areas being expensive ok, but Southie, Somerville, Dorchester, where do the families live? Even Allston now has ripe off apartments. Middle class families are getting kicked out as a whole. It's better than crime and what not and I'm not sure if any other balance exists, but chain stores and ethnic-less yuppies taking over local business and families as a whole does suck. Local flavor is being sterilized.
If you begin from the premise that change is bad, you'll view any turnover in residents or retail as bad. Anybody who tries to stop this change ends up imposing serious costs on all of society (we've choked off housing supply in the vain hope of keeping us all in the same "moment" as we happen to be in right now). You say "downtown" should be expensive, but as cities grow, downtowns grow. Seaport, Kendall, Allston....Cambridge, Somerville. Beacon Hill was the Red Light District and farmland when it was developed into townhouses (c.1790). In NYC when St. Patricks was built, Rockefeller Center was like today's Somerville (tired low-rise apartments) and Queens was pastureland. Now 5th at 50th is the CBD and Queens is all apartments.
Change is what life does. That's how you know things are alive. They change. If life is good, change is good. Relax, you're soaking in it.
For 400 years, everyone has always been pushing somebody further out. Offices push residents out. Wharves pushed relentlessly into the harbor. Attached dwellings displace standalones (see Beacon Hill c. 1800), Big houses get cut up into apartments (Back Bay), and somewhere, nice middle class farming families are moving further out after selling the farm to a guy building ticky-tacky boxes.
In Re: Where do middle class families life?
Generally a place that has more space at the cost of more commute times.
Partly that's how you know they're middle class: their work is valuable enough to pay for a commute, but not so crazy valuable that they can afford to live in the Millennium or commute by helicopter.
In the city, high prices reflect a one-bedroom-per-wage-earner market. Every bedroom is going to be priced like it saves a guy a commute. Few parents can afford to keep a kid in a bedroom that a "real" wage-earner would like to occupy. So Families move where each wage earner can afford, say, 2 bedrooms. Retirees move to where they can afford a bedroom on "half-pay".
I live in Medford. So do a lot of Somerville cops with families. Solidly middle class--and looking forward to when they can rent or sell their childhood home in Somerville to the new people.
Families are coming to Medford and the schools are getting better almost in spite of themselves. Buy now, 'cause big stretches of medford will get more pricey still when the GLX gets to College Ave or the U-Haul.
10 years from now, Medford will be red hot, and South Medford will be gettin infill development. Families will be moving to fixer-uppers in Stoneham, Reading and Woburn. It was ever thus.
