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UltravioletClearance t1_iu044dr wrote

This is a really great idea. Most office workers have been priced so far out of Boston they were commuting 4+ hours a day to the Financial District. The pandemic and remote work showed us all how unnecessary it all was. The cat's out of the bag and there's no going back to that.

I just hope they actually go through with this plan. Part of the problem with these "reports" is they never actually get implemented. But the future of downtown depends on completely re-imagining it.

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Maxpowr9 t1_iu05im3 wrote

The Age of the CBD (Central Business District) is over. You need more mixed development aka housing, so CBDs don't become ghost towns. They're already empty on the weekends and now they're pretty empty on the weekdays. Those restaurants/retailers aren't gonna stay in business if people are WFH.

I'm sure someone will make a snide comment but I am also 100% fine with the housing in Financial District being all luxury housing.

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Snoo_97625 t1_iu096y3 wrote

Put all the luxury housing in the financial district so the rest of us can have our neighborhoods back

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crazicus t1_iu19scr wrote

Every neighborhood needs to change to adapt to a growing city, and no single neighborhood should bear the burden of all of the change needed.

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No_Judge_3817 t1_iu0pwdb wrote

"the rest of us can have our neighborhood back" way to gatekeep Boston and shit on transplants, sorry my life wasn't hard enough to meet your gritty standards of a true Boston resident

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LinkLT3 t1_iu0ywar wrote

They’re not talking about people moving to Boston, weirdo. They’re talking about tearing down sections of neighborhoods to build overpriced “luxury” condos that force people out of their neighborhood. You not having a gritty life doesn’t mean you can’t move to the city, but it doesn’t mean you can push the people already there out either.

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TouchDownBurrito OP t1_iu0zsg9 wrote

> standards of a true Boston resident

>flair says Somerville

Don’t mean to gatekeep but I’d say the requirements would, at a minimum, include actually living in the city limits of Boston…

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Snoo_97625 t1_iu170a2 wrote

Wonder if that guy even remembers when Somerville was 'gritty'

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FitzwilliamTDarcy t1_iu174iv wrote

>Most office workers have been priced so far out of Boston they were commuting 4+ hours a day to the Financial District

That's a little disingenuous in a thread where the initial comment says "Most office workers have been priced so far out of Boston they were commuting 4+ hours a day to the Financial District"

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TouchDownBurrito OP t1_iu1o5py wrote

Not when Somerville rivals some of Boston’s more expensive neighborhoods in price.

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FitzwilliamTDarcy t1_iu4wvi9 wrote

Huh? You were gatekeeping the guy by saying more or less that being a Boston resident was a requirement. I pointed out that this part of thread is explicitly about people having been priced out of Boston, the implication being that no, other people (non Boston residents) get to play too.

Not remotely sure what Somerville's cost has to do with the price of fish except bolstering the point made at the top of this thread that people have been priced out of Boston.

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TouchDownBurrito OP t1_iu4y4mn wrote

> You were gatekeeping the guy by saying more or less that being a Boston resident was a requirement.

Yes, living in the city of Boston is a requirement for calling yourself a Boston resident. Idk how that is controversial.

> Not remotely sure what Somerville’s cost has to do with the price of fish except bolstering the point made at the top of this thread that people have been priced out of Boston.

If they can afford to live in Somerville they haven’t been “priced out” of Boston. The median rent in Somerville is $3k a month, that’s higher than a great deal of, if not most, neighborhoods is Boston.

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abhikavi t1_iu1crr8 wrote

> [shitting on] luxury housing

> gatekeep Boston and shit on transplants

k

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Snoo_97625 t1_iu17gnk wrote

I have no problems with immigrants who came here looking for a better life. Especially if they came from a country that we couped or destabilized. I DO have a problem with Amazon engineers from California who make 5x what I make renting these shitty apartments for twice what they're worth just because they can

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northeast0 t1_iu0ujjw wrote

The city doesn’t give a damn about mom and pop restaurants catering to a bunch of suits and skirts on lunch break. Office buildings generate a huge chunk of tax revenue from property tax assessments and take comparatively little for the city to maintain (see: prioritization of the Seaport development) New construction brings in tons of money in the form of tradespeople being employed which means those people will vote for development-friendly governments and the building contractors and unions will contribute funds to the elected officials’ campaigns to keep the gravy train rolling.

If the values of those offices tank because leases aren’t renewed and the buildings end up 50+% vacant, the city is staring down the barrel of a huge funding problem. Then, demand for new square footage vanishes, construction companies have no work, people get laid off, and demand can fall more.

This is not an easy problem to solve and it’s going to get worse before it gets better. The only saving grace is that commercial leases are 5+ year terms in most cases with renewal options, so there’s still some time to fix this problem. Not much, but some.

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Maxpowr9 t1_iu0v9n8 wrote

Oh I agree.

On a related tangent, once you stop seeing construction cranes in the skyline, that means your city is in decline.

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BasicDesignAdvice t1_iu0zjbr wrote

San Francisco has 20 Salesforce Towers worth of empty office space.

That is 28,000,000 sqft of empty space in a city with a similar housing crisis.

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[deleted] t1_iu0cim0 wrote

[deleted]

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UltravioletClearance t1_iu0wuco wrote

Looks like that data only looked at 244,346 commuters inside 495. This article says there are 160,000 "super commuters" in greater Boston in 2019, and notes that number is probably much higher in 2022 due to a 19% increase in urban to suburban/rural moves nationwide.

The Globe article doesn't say how they defined a "super commuter," but the US Census Bureau defines it as a 90-minute one-way commute. Or 180 minutes both ways. Which equals 3 hours. Not quite 4 hours but way more than 45 minutes.

As someone who spent his entire life just outside 495, I can tell you anecdotally 2-hour one-way commutes are the norm.

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Exotic_Zucchini t1_iu04pa5 wrote

I can't see the article. But, I agree with what you just said. There are so many opportunities here to make things better for tons of people, and part of it definitely involves a buy in allowing WFH instead of the current tug of war between workers and their employers.

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_hephaestus t1_iu1ee69 wrote

The title is a great idea, is this actually a good plan to get there? I've only skimmed it so far but in the vein of making it a 24 hour city I couldn't find anything about extending mbta hours. From other comments here zoning/late night permit logic seems to be missing some notes.

Kinda worried this 24 hour neighborhood in name approach leads to a few bodegas opening up and declaring mission accomplished

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