https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/02/17/metro/residents-urged-stay-indoors-keep-windows-closed-after-fire-clean-harbors-facility-braintree-thursday/

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/02/17/metro/residents-urged-stay-indoors-keep-windows-closed-after-fire-clean-harbors-facility-braintree-thursday/

Hot water and dish soap. Use the rough side of a sponge

Broadsheet and Curio. All you need.

Try Punjab Palace. They are in Allston but quick delivery to Cambridge. I know people love Punjabi Dhaba but personally I don’t think it’s very good.

What gave it away?

That sounds like a good time

There will places open, but mostly ethnic food such as Thai, Indian, etc. Apologies for the generalization, but cultures that are less likely to celebrate Thanksgiving are more likely to be open. I spent Christmas alone one year (long story) and Mamalehs was a godsend. I was the only gentile in the place.

Just head east and let Jesus take the wheel, you’ll hit the cape eventually.

If you’re taking 195 to the Cape that will pass by Fall River on the way, there is Northeast Alternatives and Sunnyside. I prefer the latter but the former is more convenient for your drive.

I’m a pessimist so my only point is that I don’t think this particular policy will create enough additional housing for prices to meaningfully drop, but it’s certainly a nice step in the right direction. Right now the supply doesn’t even come close to meeting demand so it seems like there’s always someone willing to pay some stupid amount for a closet in Harvard Sq

I’m not opposing the policy, it’s good policy and I support it. My commentary is aimed at the people in this sub who are like “this is it, housing will be cheap now!” If we want a systematic drop in rental and real estate prices we need radical change.

No that’s late stage capitalism, which is significantly worse

The price of grain or oil doesn’t drop if the supply only increases marginally and that increase still doesn’t meet or exceed demand. That is especially true if grain and oil sellers decide that long term profits will be higher if they set a price based on the current market and hold or let spoil some of the product that doesn’t sell, while making fewer sales at a higher price point. People in here learned supply and demand in high school and just regurgitate that term as if it will cause some magic fix. There are literal studies and theories widely accepted in macroeconomic circles that argue capitalist society has moved beyond supply and demand based concepts for staple goods such as housing, food, etc.

I don’t know what you even mean to say. My point is that, although we need more housing, this policy is not going to create anywhere near enough new housing to have a perceptible effect on housing prices. It’s a step in the right direction for sure. We should be moving on from car dependent urban planning anyway.

I didn’t say it wasn’t a solution, you are arguing with a straw man. I said that the amount of increased housing development that this individual legislation will create is not going to be anywhere near enough to make a meaningful difference in housing affordability. It’s a step in the right direction but people in here are acting like this will cause rents to drop. It won’t.

The market has an endless supply of people willing and able to pay current rates. Developers and investors frequently hold firm on pricing and let places go unoccupied for long periods of time before lowering prices, which is only done as a last resort and rarely happens. There would need to be an enormous influx of housing to make a dent in a market where there are millions of people willing to pay out the ass to live in a closet in Cambridge.

You’re assuming that removing parking mandates will increase housing supply enough to meet or exceed an ever increasing demand, which I think is a massive, massive assumption. You’re also assuming that building more would saturate the market such that buyers and renters will have enough leverage to send prices downward, another massive assumption. The most likely scenario is that roughly the same number of housing is developed, or a little more, but the prices are set at market rate and developers hold firm on pricing because they know eventually someone will pay it. Developers and real estate investors would rather and often do have places go unoccupied for months or even a year before they’ll lower prices. It’s naive to think otherwise.

Government regulation is always a good thing when that regulation is motivated by the desire to improve the lives of its citizens. A significant amount of government regulation since the 1980s works precisely the opposite: it’s burdens the populace in favor of special interests. This is one example. Mandated parking was never about accessibility, it was part of a nationwide effort by the auto lobby to make our towns and cities dependent on motor vehicles. It worked. Ask any European what is sneaky the most surprising thing about visiting America and they’ll say how little public transportation there is and how many American cities aren’t walkable. We have ceded so much public space to cars and we don’t even realize it.

Developers will charge the same market rate and pocket the saved costs

It adds 100-$250 in “rent” via converting development costs to rental prices but I don’t see anything that prevents developers from just charging the same market rate rents and pocketing the saved expenses.