People talk about Central being "dangerous" or whatever but it's all bark and no bite. There are certainly unhoused and unemployed people hanging out and making noise/minor disturbances, but violent crime is fairly rare. On the rare case that it does happen, it's generally between people who know each other and doesn't involve random strangers/tourists.

Keep your wits about you, know where you're going, and mind your business and you should be fine.

Yeah, we're now entering the "petty tit-for-tat political grandstanding for your domestic audience" phase of the US-China relationship.

The weather will also probably be better in April!

If you have any flexibility in your plans, as a history nerd it might make sense to delay your trip a few weeks to the Patriots Day weekend instead (April 15-17). That's when the "big grass field and a few statues" in Lexington/Concord will be a lot more interesting since they have battle reenactments and other events to commemorate the anniversary of the battle itself.

Not sure how committed your plans are, but given that it's only three weeks after your planned trip and you're coming here for the history, it might be worth thinking about if you can do it.

The "T" is the nickname for the MBTA -- Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority. People usually use it to refer to the subway, but the MBTA also runs buses and Commuter Rail trains as well.

The four lines of the subway (Red, Orange, Blue, and Green) and buses are considered part of the same network, and you can buy a daily or weekly "Link Pass" for unlimited usage of them. This is what you'd use when getting around Boston, Cambridge, etc..

The Commuter Rail trains (indicated in purple on the system maps) are their own network which require you to buy separate tickets: you'd need to take the Commuter Rail to get to Salem and Concord.

Given the length of your stay, I'd suggest sticking to Boston and Salem and skipping Concord. Yeah yeah, it's an important site and all that, but unless you go during one of the reenactments (which happen on Patriots' Day in April, not in March) you're basically just looking at an empty field with a few plaques.

Here's the list, just make sure you only park in the garages that are listed as "Yes" for Overnight Parking: https://www.mbta.com/parking/stations-and-rates

Park the car in the Riverside lot on the Green Line, then take the subway to and from the hotel. $6 per day. You could also use the covered garages at Alewife or Quincy Adams for $9 per day.

Ah yes, because those silly Africans don't know what's good for them and need a clever Westerner to make decisions on their behalf, right?

You either get companies controlled by the government, or a government controlled by the companies. Choose your poison.

It's because your local city councilors and state representatives get 74 calls per week from retired senior citizens and 6 calls per week from young people trying to start a family.

3-deckers by right statewide, 6 stories within a mile of the T, 12 stories within a half mile of the T.

That's mostly about city and county assessors trying to avoid getting yelled at by their constituents. All the political incentives are in place for towns to under-assess properties if they can get away with it.

Yeah, they should really stop giving interviews to the CIA.

There's no precise definition of "luxury" housing.

Any newly built construction is going to cost more than older housing stock. People seem to understand that new cars cost more than used cars, but for whatever reason this understanding doesn't always translate to housing for some reason.

Developers then slap the word "luxury" on the marketing materials to make prospective buyers feel mildly better about spending $800K on a studio apartment. The studio doesn't cost $800K because it has fancy countertops and a gym with ellipticals that will be broken down within five years. It costs $800K because of local land prices and Boston's extremely low vacancy rate.

Ironically, you're helping out the developers you dislike when you perpetuate their advertising strategy of referring to high-priced apartments with basic amenities as "luxury units."

Solutions? The solution is actually pretty simple on a technical level but impossible politically.

1. Seize every golf course within 15 miles of the State House dome under eminent domain and build tens of thousands of cross-subsidized social housing units (similar to what you see in Vienna and Singapore) on the land.
2. Take zoning authority away from towns and give it back to the state. The state then does a Japan-style zoning reform where they define 10-15 different types of zoning categories, and local governments can have input on how those categories are applied locally. This makes permitting and construction cheaper and easier because you don't have every special snowflake town creating its own arcane zoning rules which means that all 351 cities and towns have to be approached differently with a legal team and political connections to get anything built.
3. Institute zoning minimums near public transit stations, and once that's established pull a Hong Kong MTR by using the "Rail + Property" business model to get real estate developers to fund public transit extensions along dense and valuable corridors.

Quincy or Braintree. One bonus to this location is that if your remote biotech job ever goes away you're a one-seat ride on the Red Line from Kendall Square.

Problem is it's really infrequent so if you miss your train you're screwed. I'd say drive to Wonderland and take the Blue Line.

Different "take the train, you rube" suggestion: park at the Wonderland Garage in Revere and take the Blue Line downtown to State.

The Red and Orange Lines are kind of messy but the Blue Line is clean, reliable, and efficient. And Wonderland is just off of Route 1 where you'll be driving from. The last 5-10 miles into the city can be the most brutal, so this plan lets you avoid it while taking the most reliable train line.

I grew up here and didn't even have A/C until I was like 25 years old. I maybe use it 20 days a year (mostly at night) when it's really brutal in July/August.

I'd say you're pretty much looking at $25-30K of extra cost of living, most of that being housing. So even with "only" $225K (lol) you wouldn't notice a huge change in your standard of living.

The car-free thing depends on where exactly you want to live. You really need to live in the core areas (most of Boston, Cambridge, Somerville, and specific neighborhoods of Brookline, Revere, Newton, and Malden) for it to be feasible.

One option is going "car light" and signing up for Zipcar or one of those services. Then you can rent a car in your neighborhood at an hourly or daily rate whenever you need one, without having to deal with the hassle of parking, mechanics, etc.

For a couple it kind of goes like this around here:

$50K - hope you like rice and beans

$75K - you're stable. . . ish

$100K - you have some breathing room but don't get careless

$150K - you're comfortable enough and can even afford some luxuries (like off-street parking and an in-unit washer/dryer. . . luxuries!)

$200K+ - you don't really need to worry about much but you might not be saving as much as you'd assume you should be given your income

So yeah, for you two the main impact isn't going to be on your quality of living so much as how much you'll be able to save.

Also note that if you plan on having a kid anytime soon, $2000/month for a private childcare is pretty common. MA has the highest childcare costs in the country because we have strict regulations about the caregiver:child ratio and square footage:child ratio. These aren't bad things in and of themselves -- it means you don't get cramped, small daycares crammed with too many kids -- but it does drive up the cost per kid.

It's probably kind of a wash since you no longer the have "running the AC during Alabama summers" cost.

Nah, the wealthy parents end up leaving Boston because the lottery is fairly nepotism proof. The BPS lottery is frankly too complicated and confusing to be easily gamed -- I don't even think the people running it even understand how it works. If it were that easy to game, the rich parents would have had it locked up decades ago.

There was a huge dust-up recently about exam school seats, because they changed the rules to give seats to a more geographically diverse set of students. This resulted in a lot of angry upper-class parents, because (surprise surprise) those upper-class neighborhoods had previously been overrepresented in exam school admissions.

The fact that people use "good public schools" as code for "public schools with as few poor kids, special needs kids, and English learners as possible" is always telling.

Teaching a bunch of upper-middle class kids from highly-educated, well-resourced, English-native-speaking backgrounds is playing the game on Easy Mode. It's not particularly impressive to get good metrics if that's your student base.

It's depressing that the housing market is so bad that people are starting to see MBTA extensions as bad things.