If we had the housing and transit that people need, we'd be unstoppable

> Pretty sure it is legal to ask about your job

Maybe? It's a bit hard to say. You aren't allowed to discriminate based on source of income in Massachusetts. So if you filled out an application and the landlord emailed you saying, "oh, I don't want to rent to tech workers," it seems like they'd be toast since they're discriminating on the source of your income.

Yes, I think every rental application I've done has asked where I work. However, why should they be asking about something that they're not allowed to consider in their decision?

When you're interviewing someone for a job, there's a reason why you aren't supposed to ask certain questions. Even if it's legal to ask the question, it might not be legal to use the question in your decision. Why did you ask an irrelevant question? Did you ask because you're planning on using that information even though it's illegal to? It's not a great place to be.

As I said, I think every rental application I've done has asked where I work.

> and been background checked

I've never had this happen. I've had to submit a credit report, but that's it. Maybe the credit report seems like a background check?

I'm not sure why you started with "job". It sounds like this is just about the fact that you have kids.

Typically, landlords don't want kids in an apartment because nearly all of our housing hasn't been de-leaded. If a kid moves in, the landlord is required to remediate the lead paint in the unit at their expense. Lead paint removal might cost $10,000, the landlord has to pay your moving costs due to the remediation work, they lose any rent while the remediation work is happening, and they have to pay for your accommodations (hotel or whatnot) above what the rent is (so if the rent is $2,000 and the hotel is $3,000, you pay the hotel $2,000 and the landlord pays $1,000).

It isn't legal to discriminate against people with kids under six, but there is a huge incentive to do it.

Somerville's Tenant's Handbook (https://s3.amazonaws.com/somervillema.gov.if-us-east-1/s3fs-public/tenants-helper-handbook.pdf) is probably a good place to start.

It sounds like the brokers aren't asking about kids and you're just bringing it up. Why? They ask about your job and your response is, "I'm starting grad school, my wife works full time, and we have two kids that require expensive de-leading if you rent to me." I'm sure you're not phrasing it like that, but it seems like you're steering the conversation that way (from the way your post is phrased). You don't have to lie. You can just not bring it up and if they ask kinda deflect the issue or change the subject.

> Also, feels like they are discriminating against me, being a grad student.

Ok, this is back to the job. Landlords aren't allowed to discriminate based on source of income in Massachusetts. However, they can decide to go with a tenant with more income. I don't know what your wife's job is, but it might not be as high as others who are looking at places. It's not just proving that you can pay the rent (which can never actually be proven since circumstances change). Someone else might seem more likely to be able to pay the rent because they have a higher income. Often landlords like to see 3-4x the rent as income.

If you're applying to cheaper places, they probably have a huge stack of applicants. I'm guessing if you looked at the Zinc Apartments or something like that, you would have less trouble. The problem is that new buildings are expensive in Cambridge - a 2-bed place there is $4,300-4,600/mo. If you're looking at places at $2,800, there's going to be a ton of competition. It's hard to know whether it's discrimination or random.

You can create a complaint with MCAD, but I've heard that they're pretty backed up.

If the issue isn't cost, the new professionally managed buildings won't have lead issues (since they were built after lead paint was made illegal). If cost is an issue, maybe don't bring up kids until after a lease is signed. However, I should note that if the landlord has to de-lead the unit, you probably won't be able to move in on time. Once the existing tenant moves out, they'll have to remove the lead. I don't know how long that will take, but it will likely require you to move into some temporary housing until your unit is available - just so that you plan for that.

No, there isn't.

I get what you're asking. Maybe there's a secret website listing places that are too lazy to put up listings on the apartment listing websites. However, if there were such a place, it would just be another one of those apartment listing websites.

Like, Craigslist is a website that connects apartment buildings that don't post on MLS - but it's well-known enough that it's just part of your "places I already know about."

There are other websites like Zillow and ApartmentList, but I don't think you're just looking for another version of MLS/Apartments.com/CL. I think you're hoping for a magic list of "buildings that never list their apartments and probably have great vacancies I could get." If such a website existed, we'd all use it and then it wouldn't be the site you're looking for.

So they're saying that a resident permit that doesn't have to worry about street cleaning is only $50/mo!

I think a huge number of people are just going to pay the ticket. There are certainly low-income people who live in Cambridge and people who live with a few roommates, but there's also a lot of people easily affording $3,000+ in rent. $50/mo to not have to deal with street cleaning will likely get a lot of people not moving their cars.

I think that's why the pilot will likely fail or at least need to be adjusted. If the ticket were $200, it would make a lot more people move their car. At $50, it's way cheaper than paying for off-street parking.

Maybe the alternative would be to do street cleaning twice a month like Somerville does. That way you'd get the places a car didn't move the first time on the second go-around. It would also mean $100/mo in fines instead of just $50.

At $50, it just seems like a lot of people would pay it and ignore it. I am glad that Cambridge is moving away from towing because that was always terrible. I just think that a $50 ticket is going to be meaningless to half of Cambridge. Median income in Cambridge is $113,000. Of the population that owns cars, the median income is going to be a lot higher. Towing was always way too harsh a solution to the problem, but $50 probably won't move the needle enough.

Thinking about it some more, maybe the solution is towing a car on the third ticket. We've ticketed your car twice for not moving for street cleaning and you don't care about the $50 so we're going to tow. I think that makes a lot of sense. Towing someone for a mistake is way too harsh. However, letting some rich person pay way less than off-street parking costs to ignore street cleaning seems too lenient and problematic for street cleaning. This way, the city just tickets for infractions that might be honest mistakes, but also deals with habitual violators to make sure that people understand this isn't a $50/mo way to buy yourself out of street cleaning.

At first glance, ideas like this make sense. However, a big problem is that those locations often don't have the infrastructure necessary to support what you're talking about. While Boston doesn't build housing nearly as quickly as it needs to, places outside the Boston/128 loop often build at half the rate Boston does and often have residents that don't want to build housing faster. Most areas don't have a public transit network outside of Boston and it's really hard to add more cars.

For example, Google employs 2,100 people in Cambridge. An interstate highway can carry about 2,200 cars per hour per lane. So to support just Google's relatively small presence in Cambridge via cars would basically require adding two lanes to an interstate (one out and one in). Given that the cars would need to slow down and park, it would require a lot more infrastructure.

It's also hard to incentivize good jobs to move somewhere. For a company like Google, they want to locate their offices where they're confident they'll get workers and can continue to grow and expand. In Cambridge, Google has expanded from 441 employees in 2008 to 2,100 in 2022. If the state offered Google some incentive to open an office in Springfield or Worcester, how would Google incentivize workers to move out there? When Google opened an office in Cambridge, it was already a place where lots of software engineers lived and wanted to live. Maybe Google could pay workers more, but then there's really no state incentive for Google since they likely have to spend more than that incentive getting workers to move.

In fact, how much of an incentive could the state offer? $10,000 per worker per year? At that point, the worker would need to earn over $200,000 for the state to break even (since the state taxes on a $200,000 salary would be less than $10,000). Even then, the state is losing tons of money. If that worker were in Cambridge without a state subsidy, the state would make nearly $10,000 in tax revenue rather than losing money. Would Google take $10,000 per worker per year? Probably not. "Hey, we'd like to give you $5M per year to open a small 500 worker office in a location that puts your company at a big competitive disadvantage compared to your peers who will be able to more easily hire top talent in desirable locations." $5M is tiny to a company whose revenue is $282B - oh, $282B plus $836M; the $836M was just such an uninterestingly low amount of money compared to the $282B.

That's not to say that the state can't do things to make places like New Bedford, Lowell, Worcester, and Springfield more attractive for business. However, it takes time (like a decade or more) and there are going to be moves that many residents might dislike. Creating business districts that are nice for transit, walking, and biking will mean trading off parking and road throughput. Residents often hate new housing because they worry about traffic and parking. What happens when you say that you're going to be bringing in a truck-full of new housing because you're looking to incentivize businesses to move there? How do they react when you tell them that the parking lot they like using is going to become a building with minimal parking - and there will be a lot more people trying to get to that area too?

If you want employers to move to areas, they need to feel confident that it's a good investment. Money won't sway them - at least not any amount of money it would be sane to spend on an incentive. When Amazon was looking for HQ2, they weren't swayed by incentives. They were simply looking to milk money out of the locations they already wanted to go to - NYC and DC, places where the workers they want already wanted to live. Massachusetts can't offer Google $50M a year to hire 500 people outside of Boston. That would be $100,000 per worker. We can't give Google 20 people's taxes for every worker they hire outside Boston/128.

If we want places like Worcester and Lowell to be places where companies want to go, we need to focus on creating the environment that will make that happen. For example, if we had a higher speed express rail link between Lowell and Boston, that could make Lowell a place more easily commutable to for existing workers. A tech worker could move to Lowell and commute to Boston which incentivizes a tech company to move to Lowell. A tech company moving to Lowell could retain more workers living in Boston if it were a reasonable commute. If we started converting a lot of the parking around the Lowell rail stop to businesses and housing and allowed any building to be 5-stories tall within half a mile of the station without parking requirements, that could make sure that there would be housing and new office space available as companies and workers need it. If we put more money into public transit in Lowell and started converting car lanes into bus lanes, we could ensure people could get around (a bus lane moves more people per hour than a car lane).

But I can already hear the complaints. People don't often think about how their community has to change in order to accommodate the kinds of things you want. They want the jobs, but they don't want to have the traffic or parking difficulties - difficulties that will be compounded by the fact that you'll have to give up some of that parking while also having more people in the area. There's a lot of 1 and 2-family homes a couple blocks from the Lowell rail station. Will they be receptive to people building larger apartment buildings? People often want the jobs/money without any changes. Often times people will literally say, "can't they build it somewhere else?" That's what's already happening while they're complaining people aren't bringing all the money and building to their town!

What's a concrete example of this? Somerville. The city isn't perfect, but it has leveraged its way to the kind of thing you're talking about. I know, it's in the Boston area, but it's building itself up as a biotech hub along the Green Line Extension (and Assembly on the Orange Line). What are some of the keys? They got a rail link that ensures workers can get to jobs, they're minimizing parking, and they're making it an increasingly nice place to bike, walk, and hang out. Somerville wasn't always what it's like today.

If other cities outside Boston/128 want that kind of development, they're going to need to do similar things. What stands in the way? A bunch of things. Money is always hard to come by and infrastructure isn't cheap. The fact that suburbs like North Billerica would likely dislike being bypassed on a job-connector rail line might make an express line difficult. Boston/Cambridge/Somerville outweigh their suburbs more than Lowell or Worcester do. Ultimately, I think the biggest thing that stands in the way is that a lot of people aren't looking for their city to change. Sure, they'll complain that Boston gets all the good jobs, but most would also hate my proposal to increase housing and move people away from cars.

Creating social change like that isn't easy. Cities across the country have tried to lure workers with offers of cheap housing and tens of thousands of dollars and they've had almost no takers. Cities sometimes likewise try to draw companies with incentives and usually get burned in the process. The company milks the town for all it's worth and doesn't actually generate economic benefits for the area. What creates sustainable economic benefits are when you create a good environment for economic prosperity. However, that also means giving up some things that many residents might prize: parking minimums so that you never have to pay for or hunt for parking at the stores you go to, apartments that bring new neighbors, and more traffic and a bit of a modal shift toward public transit.

There is the potential to do it in other ways. Maybe you don't want a lot of new housing. Somerville is doing that with one of the lowest levels of new homes in Boston. At the same time, people dislike the rising rents and displacement. We could create a business-only focused Lowell or Worcester revitalization plan, but what's the point if most of the current residents won't get to benefit from it?

Ultimately, if we want businesses to move to those cities, we need to make them places people want to be and that can accommodate population growth (though more housing and public transportation) so that businesses know they can grow and thrive there. Otherwise, we're just going to get garbage businesses who will take money and deliver no benefits.

I am curious if there were specific incentives you'd like to see done. If you were governor and legislature of Mass, what would you do - keeping in mind that there's basically no reasonable amount of money you could pay a company to incentivize them to move to Worcester?

Did you (OP) just move (or set up new billing because a roommate moved out)? If so, you'll be on Eversource's basic rate for a couple billing cycles before you get auto-enrolled in the Cambridge community program. If you've switched off the community program, you'll have to manually enroll.

Electric rates have been extremely high this winter. Community aggregation rates are usually negotiated for 2 years at a time. Cambridge lucked out and wasn't re-negotiating for this winter when prices were high so 10.2c is locked in. Somerville was negotiating for this winter which made their rate 15.654c.

It looks like electric rates are already starting to return to normal (after the huge winter scare over the lack of Russian natural gas). If you look at Eversource's "Monthly Variable Rate" you'll see things coming down to 13c this summer (https://www.eversource.com/content/residential/account-billing/manage-bill/about-your-bill/rates-tariffs/electric-supply-rates). Most customers are on the 6-month fixed rate which is fixed at 25.776c through June 30th, but given that the monthly variable rate is dropping fast, I'd expect the July-December rate to be a lot lower.

Still, the community aggregation is a good idea. It's not always cheaper, but it provides a consistent rate without huge spikes and it's negotiated in your interest by the city. For those in Somerville, there are cheaper rates currently available from third parties, but you need to keep on top of those rates once the initial term is up. Some (most?) suppliers switch you to a variable rate after the initial term that could be really high. Somerville got unlucky negotiating their 2-year deal in fall 2022 when everyone was super worried about energy prices.

Still, it might be best to stick with community aggregation even in the event of slightly unlucky timing. Somerville's rate might be 16c, but Eversource's 26c was really high. Eversource's rate would have to drop below 12.28c for the following 18 months to make up for the 26c spike January-June. That seems unlikely given that energy prices have generally been at least 10c and even if we've survived this winter without Russian natural gas, it will likely keep energy prices marginally higher - plus general inflationary pressure. Even if Eversource ends up having slightly cheaper rates than Somerville's community aggregation, it might be best to go with something negotiated in your interest. Plus, Somerville has a less-green 14.914c rate if someone really wants it. At that point, Eversource's rate would have to drop to 11.29c to be cheaper which seems even less likely.

Community aggregations are great. For any Somerville people reading this, you might get a better rate at https://www.energyswitchma.gov, but also beware to make sure you don't get switched to a higher rate at the end of your initial term and that you don't sign up for something with termination fees or enrollment fees. It might just be worth sticking with the community aggregation rather than pinching every penny.

I might be misinterpreting it, but it seems to be highly restrictive while being presented as relaxing restrictions. Maybe I just need some clarifications?

It seems to mandate a lot of open space on lots. The 10-15 foot front yard would basically outlaw 3-deckers built close to the street like these: https://www.google.com/maps/@42.3733375,-71.1025584,3a,75y,136.43h,85.93t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sEP3hE4973XPibJpuqR5lMg!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DEP3hE4973XPibJpuqR5lMg%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D220.66273%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192

Is the minimum side yard on each side of the building? Even 7.5-feet on each side of the building would mean leaving 15-feet between buildings which is probably around a good bit more space than exists between 3-deckers in Cambridge. 15-feet would mean leaving 30 feet between buildings. To put that in perspective, a 3-decker is around 25-30 feet wide.

The minimum lot width is either 50 or 65 feet. That seems quite a bit wider than most lots with 3-deckers on them. Looking at the lots on Fayette St, they're around 40-45 feet wide. So I'd have to buy multiple lots in order to hit the minimum lot width of 50 or 65 feet.

The minimum lot sizes are either 5,000 or 6,000 sq ft. Most lots with 3 deckers seem to be smaller than that. In order to comply with this zoning, it seems like one would have to buy multiple buildings.

https://www.cambridgema.gov/PropertyDatabase/185461

58 Fayette St is a pretty standard Cambridge 3-decker. The lot size is 3,974 sq ft (well below your minimum lot size). It's already slightly above 1.0 FAR. It looks like it has around 20-25 feet in back, but it's against the property line on one side, has around 9 feet on the other side, and only set back from the sidewalk by about 5 feet.

Do driveways count as side-yards?

There's a 30% minimum private open space to lot area ratio in the petition. Do driveways count as open space? Is that 30% per unit or 30% total? Do shared yards count as "private open space" or does it have to be deeded to a unit? Do the front steps count as open space?

Again, maybe I'm misinterpreting this, but it looks like a petition to severely restrict building compared to what already exists. Looking around Cambridge's property maps, 50 foot widths aren't common, never mind 65 foot. For example: https://gis.cambridgema.gov/blockmaps/Block_114A.pdf. It looks like 40-foot is the common lot width in that neighborhood. Most don't have 15 foot front yards and don't have 7.5' side yards on both sides (never mind 15').

Looking around Cambridgeport, lots of places don't come close to having 20' back yards, are too close to the sidewalk, don't meet the minimum lot size, don't have the minimum side yards, etc.: https://gis.cambridgema.gov/map/Viewer.aspx?state=475487167367

Before people get to enthusiastic about this proposal, we should probably think about what the proposal is actually doing. It's definitely not making it easy to build 3-deckers like those that already exist in Cambridge. Requiring a 50 or 65 foot lot width seems to be making almost every lot non-conforming and therefore not relaxing zoning one bit. Requiring 7.5 or 15' side yards would mean using a lot less of the lot than is currently being used. Most lots don't hit the 5,000 or 6,000 sq ft minimum. How does this allow us to build more housing if only a tiny number of our lots comply?

It feels like these changes don't actually relax restrictions. For example, if I came up with a petition that said you can build anything you want and the only restriction is that the minimum lot with is 100 miles, that's not actually letting you build anything you want. Likewise, by setting/keeping the minimum lot with at 50 or 60 feet, it's setting a minimum lot width that's wider than basically any of our lots. Am I misinterpreting something that I don't understand?

EDIT: Back when the petitioner was running for city council, they proposed eliminating minimum lot sizes so I'm a bit surprised that they're keeping minimum lot sizes in this petition (https://web.archive.org/web/20200222194858/https://www.abettercambridgeaf.org/candq_charles). Maybe their thinking has changed over the past few years (we all change), but I guess I'd want to know more. At the time, they said they were "generally not" in support of the 100% Affordable Housing Overlay. They also seemed skeptical that Cambridge should be building more housing.

It makes me sad that we have so many unelected officials that control so much of Cambridge. The City Manager is hired by the council, but then appoints BZA members that are kinda unaccountable. The City Manager appoints the Cambridge Historical Commission members who can veto changes in a large portion of Cambridge and are also unaccountable.

> I also asked councilors to make clear to the city manager that all BZA members who voted in favor of shutting Starlight down will NOT be approved for reappointment

Does the City Council have that power? The Zoning Ordinance just says they're appointed by the City Manager and doesn't mention anything about approval by the City Council. Maybe something else overrides that?

https://library.municode.com/ma/cambridge/codes/zoning_ordinance?nodeId=ZONING_ORDINANCE_ART10.000APVASPPE

If they're scanning plates, they might still notice that you've been there more than the maximum time. For example, you feed the meter for 30 minutes at 1pm. They scan your plate at 1:05pm. You re-fill via app at 1:30pm. They scan your plate at 1:40pm and note that you were already there at 1:05pm and therefore have been parking for 35 minutes, above the 30 minute maximum.

If they were really smart, the apps could literally tell them you were there over time. They scan your plate at 1:05pm, the app notes that your plate paid for additional parking at 1:30pm, the app lets parking enforcement know that they can go and ticket your car in 5 minutes.

Not to get technical, but "until 1:40pm" doesn't mean "through 1:40pm". "You can park here before the time is 1:40pm. Once the clock shows 1:40pm, you are over your time. You can park here until a clock shows 1:40pm."

To make it really clear, the first minute is 1:10:00-1:10:59.99999. The first minute doesn't extend until the end of 1:11. Then that would be two minutes. The first minute extends from 1:10 until 1:11, not through 1:11.

I agree that the city shouldn't ticket until 1:41 in your case because people have trouble understanding situations like this.

Imagine you're a doctor scheduling 1 hour appointments. If someone is scheduled from 9am until 10am and another person is scheduled from 10am to 11am, the first person doesn't continue to be seen at 10am. They are seen until 10am. Otherwise, the second person's appointment would start at 10:01am. Likewise, your parking goes from 1:10pm until 1:40pm. As soon as 1:40pm started, your time had expired.

I hate to bring math into it, but the ticket is probably valid. Let's say that you pay for 30 minutes of parking at 1:10:00pm. You then get a ticket at 1:40:01pm. You've stayed in the parking space for 30 minutes and 1 second. Your parking technically expires at 1:39:59.99999999999...., but just before 1:40:00.

Most likely, their automated system reads the actual time and not just minutes. It's possible that you were only 30 seconds over the time, but got the ticket and that truly sucks.

If the city doesn't overturn the ticket, you have basically zero chance before a judge. In order to appeal it to a judge, there is a non-refundable $275 filing fee. If you win the case, Cambridge has to forgive (or refund if you paid) the fine. You don't get the $275 back from the city or the court. So if you got a $50 ticket from the city, it'll cost you $225 if you win in court and $325 if you lose. It's a lot better to pay the $50 ticket. Yes, it is somewhat problematic that you can't actually appeal the tickets, but that is how things are at the moment.

One big thing I wish were addressed: what if my landlord isn't cooperative? Generally, fiber-to-the-home is done by putting an ONT/ONU (optical network terminal/unit that handles the fiber signal) in the basement and running ethernet into the unit. You can use MoCA (multimedia over coax) to get from the basement to the unit, but a lot of places just have the coax punch through the side of the building rather than coming up from the basement (I'm sure back in the 80s a lot of landlords didn't care about what was cheap property back then). Will Cambridge make an ordinance that landlords have to allow tenants to hook up municipal fiber? In a city where most people rent, this is a big concern. If Cambridge gets municipal fiber and I can't get it because my landlord isn't cooperative, that's a big problem - and will severely impact the take rate. This has stymied Verizon's Fios a lot in New York City. Verizon will have Fios available, but can't get it into your unit. Sometimes they're able to use coax wiring in the building already. Sometimes landlords just shut them out - and sometimes the cable company will pay the landlord for exclusivity (though I think the city is moving against that).

I guess I'm left wondering how the service will get from the street to my unit with a landlord that might not care. The presentation had so many tiny details on how they were getting it around the city and such, but didn't talk about getting it into the units. I know that some large buildings in Somerville are Comcast-only because of this (one of my friends hates it about his building). If my cable connection is just something that was drilled through the third-floor exterior wall back in the 80s, but now the landlord doesn't want new punctures in their property that's now worth millions, what will happen? Am I just out of luck? I'm sure many landlords will accommodate and might see it as a selling point to their property, but it seems like it could be a bit logistically difficult in many situations. A 30 unit building isn't going to want 30 punctures in their building. MoCA is an option, but then everyone is sharing a theoretical 2.5Gbps (depending on how good the wiring is) and not really getting the full fiber experience (and MoCA can bring some security concerns since most people don't enable encryption on it and additional latency). I'm guessing that most large buildings will end up being MoCA which isn't ideal and I'd have to assume that a lot of small buildings probably just have a bunch of exterior penetrations for coax rather than wiring down to the basement.

Does anyone have details on how renters will get service in different scenarios? Is this a solved problem that's so boring they didn't put it in the presentation? I guess it just feels like it's missing because they talk about all sorts of random details like the trenching, hubs, maps of the backbone, primary, and secondary distribution, taps, drop access handholds, and fiber distribution cabinets. Again, maybe this is something that is solved, but it doesn't seem to be given what people in other cities seem to complain about. Maybe this was already discussed in other documents?

Yea, Fios is only available in a few buildings. A decent part of it is that TV franchises are done on a town-by-town basis in Massachusetts and Verizon only wanted to build Fios where they could also sell TV - and then Verizon found out that their fiber business had poor economics even with TV service and backed out of a ton of their fiber builds in New York and New Jersey.

I think a lot of wired providers found the economics to just be poor when challenging an incumbent. RCN went bankrupt in 2004, 10 years after being founded. It hasn't really expanded its coverage in recent memory and is now just owned by a private equity firm via a leveraged buyout.

On the plus side, it looks like maybe the economics are shifting. AT&T has announced that they're going to be doubling their fiber footprint over the next couple years. Verizon isn't doing anything nearly that ambitious, but they are looking to grow their Fios network by 9% over the next 3 years. AT&T seems to have a difference of opinion on the economics of fixed-wireless vs fiber compared to Verizon. AT&T has said that fixed wireless isn't going to be a big part of their strategy and that the cost to serve customers with fiber is better, but some of that depends on how much data you're expecting customers to use. Verizon seems to disagree and is planning for their fixed-wireless network to cover 2.8x more households than Fios (with a very minimal investment in Fios expansion).

It's hard to compete against an incumbent and invest in a new network where you might only take 30% share. I know, everyone thinks that the whole world would jump on fiber just because they would, but it's hard to take marketshare and with something like Fios, you'd often need a landlord to approve having it installed. RCN has been in Somerville for many decades and can easily hook up most residences without the landlord being involved because they'll use the same coax that an existing cable connection would use (and they can just disconnect the unused Comcast line outside the building). With Fios, you're talking about installing an ONT (optical network terminal that converts the fiber to something usable inside your home) in the basement and then running ethernet from there or trying to use existing coax wiring with MoCA - but a lot of buildings in Cambridge don't even have coax running inside the building because they just made penetrations from the outside on each floor - back in the day for cable TV and back when these buildings weren't worth much during the white-flight era of cities.

In Somerville, RCN has about 27% of the market while Comcast has 73%. Yes, RCN isn't fiber so it isn't really a superior product, but people truly hate Comcast and RCN can only achieve 27% - and RCN has the advantage that they can easily disconnect Comcast on the outside and swap their connection in while Verizon would have a lot more work to do.

That's not to say it can't or shouldn't happen. AT&T is making a huge bet on fiber over the next couple years and they even talked about moving into markets beyond their wireline footprint in select areas where it made economics sense past that. That said, it is hard to compete with incumbents.

Yea, they aren't going out of business yet, but they did lay off half their workforce in 2022. When you're in the business of building networks, you need people.

I'm guessing they'll come back and maybe keep the lights on for their customer base, but they probably won't be expanding much in the near future.

I agree we need internet options. I doubt Starry is going to come out of this healthy. Starry eliminated half its workforce in 2022. At that point, you're the walking dead - especially in a capital intensive industry. You need to be spending money building a network that can sign up customers and that simply isn't going to happen when you've laid off half your workforce.

Already, T-Mobile's fixed wireless business is 26x larger and Verizon's is 9x larger than Starry. In the coming years, it will be relatively straightforward for the big wireless companies to adopt Starry's strategy to augment their more traditional network. T-Mobile or Verizon could cover a large area with mid-band spectrum and then use millimeter-wave spectrum with installed antennas on large buildings offering improved speed and capacity for those buildings. Verizon has installed some street-level mmWave and could also use that to augment capacity in areas that need it.

I'm sad about Starry, but I think the future of fixed wireless is going to involve a much more layered approach that can impact more people and that will require low and mid-band spectrum in addition to mmWave. Low and mid-band spectrum allows a company to cover a reasonably broad area and start signing up customers and if the need arises they can augment capacity using mmWave.

I think there's a lot of competition coming to home broadband over the next few years, but I don't think it'll be from Starry. T-Mobile is looking to have 7-8M customers by year-end 2025 (less than 3 years away) and that might not sound like a lot, but it would surpass Verizon's Fios which only has 6.7M customers. Even though it would be smaller than Comcast, it would be putting a lot of pressure on incumbent cable companies. Verizon is looking to have fixed wireless available to 50M households by year-end 2025 and while they're projecting fewer customers than T-Mobile, it's easy to see how availability to around 40% of American households would have a huge impact on the market.

Broadband monopolies have been acting in anti-consumer ways because they know you don't have another option. Even if you don't personally want T-Mobile or Verizon fixed-wireless, it can still put a lot of pressure on an incumbent monopoly to treat you better.

I'd argue that the tech side "sucking" was what made the business side suck. Yes, if you were a customer, the tech side was great.

Starry's tech was based around millimeter-wave radios which basically require line-of-sight to function. That makes the tech expensive since you have to go to each building individually. The "badness" of the tech would limit Starry's reach to select larger buildings. That badness makes it hard to do marketing. How can you market your home internet service when 99% of the people you're advertising to can't get it? You're throwing your marketing dollars away. But if you don't advertise it, the people who can get it might not know about it.

If Starry's tech were better, more people could have been eligible giving them economies of scale, critical mass to make a strong marketing campaign worthwhile, etc.

If the tech were more effective/better, then the business side wouldn't have sucked. The tech might have been good for you if you were able to get it. However, if the tech was "bad" which prevented economies of scale and they had to sell the service to you for less than it cost them to install/run, then it wasn't really good tech. It was just subsidized tech until their money ran out.

I don't want to sound too harsh on Starry. It's just really hard to use millimeter-wave radios in a way that works for consumers. A business might pay hundreds of dollars a month for a wireless backup for their internet and be willing to eat installation costs, but a consumer doesn't want to spend that much.

I mean, Starlink is offering an alternative to Comcast, but I don't think a lot of people would want to pay $700 for a Dishy + $110/mo to get away from Comcast. Starlink is operating off a model where they're going after customers with no real internet option. Yes, you loved Starry and hated Comcast - but you loved Starry because they were willing to give you service at an unsustainably low price. You would have hated Starry if they kept raising your bill like Comcast. You probably wouldn't have signed up for Starry in the first place if their plans started at $100/mo.

I'm not saying that they would need to do crappy things to create a viable business model, but the tech severely limited the business. And, frankly, a lot of the things you hate about Comcast kinda work. You get people with an introductory offer of $30/mo for a couple years. In Boston, a lot of people move out within that timeframe anyway. Even if it becomes $60 in the third year, you're averaging $40/mo over the 3 year period, $45 over a 4 year period. Even if it becomes $80 in the 5th year, you're still averaging $52/mo over a 5 year period. Yea, it feels painful to be paying $80/mo, but you're not actually losing much compared to Starry's standard $50 rate. If you negotiate it back down (or cancel and get a roommate to get a new-customer deal), you can save money - albeit while starting to despise Comcast.

Starry's downfall is really that their tech wasn't good enough. Yes, it was great if you got it, but it wasn't good enough because they couldn't get it to a lot of people in a cost effective way. Using millimeter-wave spectrum has the advantage that you can buy the spectrum for cheap (compared to sub-6GHz spectrum), but comes with the disadvantage that you need to do a ton more work putting up antennas on individual buildings and then serving a small number of people per antenna. Starry was a bit of a moonshot kind of business - could one make mmWave spectrum viable for home internet. Turns out the tech wasn't good enough.

And I don't want to sound too harsh on Starry. Verizon poured so much time and money into mmWave and barely made a dent. They launched 3.5GHz mid-band 5G and made amazing progress fast. Verizon also bought into mmWave big time and it really didn't work out for them - and they had a ton of advantages over Starry, including legal advantages being the Title II Common Carrier in a bunch of the country which gives them cheap access at fixed prices to a lot of infrastructure, already having a huge fiber network, having a wireless network already, and having many $10+ billion to spend every year on their network. And Verizon failed at mmWave. Sure, it does have a tiny bit of coverage and it's cool when you get it, but the tech just didn't have the impact they'd hoped. Starry: cool if you can get it, but the tech just didn't support the kind of broad availability necessary to be viable.

Starry has been going downhill for a while (from a business perspective, not your perspective as a customer) and it's hard to see them really recovering.

At this point, it'd be better to hope for home internet from T-Mobile or Verizon 5G.

The problem with Starry is that their wireless signals are extremely high frequency which means that they will be easily disrupted by things like walls, trees, etc. So they install antennas on the top of your building and point it at one of their antennas that they have a good line of sight for. However, this is very limiting and decently expensive.

T-Mobile and Verizon both have substantial low and mid-band spectrum holdings (and more high frequency spectrum holdings than Starry). Unlike Starry, T-Mobile and Verizon's signals can travel from antennas without needing line of sight.

T-Mobile already has 2.6M home internet customers and Verizon (wireless) has 0.9M. Starry has 0.1M. So Verizon's wireless home internet business is 9x larger than Starry's and Verizon has been at this game for less than 2 years. T-Mobile's is 26x larger and they've been at it for around 3 years. Starry has been at it for 7 years without a ton to show for it.

Really, they were going into a capital-intensive industry trying to compete on price with better capitalized incumbents. It's not a great strategy. Starry wasn't going around offering an order of magnitude improvement in service. Their selling point was "we all hate the cable company and we'll offer you stable pricing on a similar product." I'm not arguing that isn't a laudable goal. It is a laudable goal. It's just really hard to do.

T-Mobile and Verizon, on the other hand, both have way more money, way more staff, and a huge investment in infrastructure that they can leverage. "We already have these towers we're upgrading for 5G and we're going to have extra capacity in many areas with those upgrades. We could provide home internet in many of those locations and get extra revenue without extra cost. In other locations, we could put some more money into the network, make our mobile business better, and then sell some home internet." That's a reasonably decent business model leveraging existing strengths that can be extended. For Starry, having to approach all these buildings to get them to either lease space or give them space for free is a very time-intensive business (and staff time is money). Every antenna T-Mobile or Verizon put up can serve thousands of mobile users and cover more home users than Starry. Starry was really working with two hands tied behind its back.

I think in the coming years, T-Mobile and Verizon will continue to improve their home internet product and that will likely include high-gain installed antennas to boost performance, but even today they're making a lot more people happy than Starry was ever able to. Again, I don't mean that as a dig against Starry so much as a realistic view of what one could accomplish given the difference in assets between Starry and T-Mobile or Verizon. Starry doesn't have a truck-full of sub-6GHz spectrum that will offer a decent balance of capacity and coverage. Starry has a bunch of spectrum at 24GHz and 37GHz, but that's a lot harder to work with.

Yea, I was just thinking that has to be wrong. He made $4M in compensation in 2021 alone. Maybe he spends all his money instead of saving it, but $11M just seems really low for the CEO of a $52B company.

If he only has $11M in net worth, he's worse at managing money than he is at managing trains.

Personally, I like Rhode Island's. "Hope" is something that works for all times. "By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty," is somewhat caught in time. It might work well during war times, but it doesn't really offer anything during peace times. It's the kind of thing that you adopt in 1775 when the main concern of the day is the revolution. It feels like New York deciding in 2002 to make their motto, "9/11, Never Forget."

To me, it doesn't capture the spirit of Massachusetts which has been based in hard work, education, experimentation, and intellectualism for most of its history. We're the state of Emerson, Thoreau, and Alcott. Of the first 12 presidents, the only two non-slaveholders were from Massachusetts. We're the state Horace Mann, advocate for public education. We're the state of the Massachusetts 54th and W. E. B. Du Bois. We're the state of Senator Sumner whose outspoken abolitionist views saw him beaten on the Senate floor. We're the state where the telephone was invented, where anesthesia was first used for surgery, where the first routers were made to enable the ARPANET (the US-government precursor to the internet), and the hub of mRNA research.

In some ways I guess it does capture Massachusetts. Even when preparing for war, we put an intellectual spin on it - that peace is only worthwhile under liberty. Still, it feels a bit trapped in time for me. It feels like the 1770s preserved in amber rather than something that continues to apply to our modern life.

I like Thai Hut on Beacon St Somerville. It's mostly a take-out place, but they have a few tables (like 2 or 3). It's really good food. It's not like Similans where it's fancy. I think Thai Hut has a BYOB license.

I'd second Punjabi Dhaba for Indian. It's not fancy or anything, but it's good food and always packed for a reason.

I'd recommend Boomerangs in Central Square. Boomerangs is really cool and the money goes to benefit AIDS Action, helping prevent the spread of HIV and helping those living with HIV and AIDS in Mass.

There's a donation bin by the church on Cardinal Medeiros Ave and Cambridge St (St Anthony of Padua Catholic Church), but who knows what happens with the clothes - they might just get scrapped for textiles. There's also a Goodwill in Davis.

It's possible that it could have done both. The Blue line already curves toward the airport before curving away to the Airport stop. If they put a stop at Santarpio's, had it go under the East Boston Memorial Park to the airport, and loop back to stop either at the current Airport stop or a new stop just east between Putnam and Prescott, that would give really good neighborhood coverage while also hitting the airport.

There are definitely ways where it could serve both.

Even if you don't like the detour to Logan, the Elizabeth Line in London has some trains go to Heathrow and some not. If we could rewind time, maybe instead of building the Silver Line and the Ted Williams Tunnel, it would make more sense to have the Blue Line have two different terminuses. One leg terminates at Logan and one leg goes to Wonderland.

Burying I-93 was really important, but maybe public transit could have gotten more love and we could have put a bit less into the highways.

They were looking to do a small (but greater) amount of commercial flights out of Hanscom, but residents hate the idea and throw up enough opposition to kill most things. There was interest in using Hanscom for some flights like to NYC - things that don't warrant a 757 or anything large. It wouldn't replace Logan, but it could handle some flights except that residents are hugely opposed to it.

I've always wondered if the Red-Blue connector would be worth it compared to other projects.

Personally, it feels like a GLX from Union to Porter would be more useful for me. Or a GLX to Medford Square. How much are you trying to go Red to Blue other than the airport? For people on the Blue Line, it would open up commuting to Kendall Square easier, maybe South Station as well, though DTX and Chinatown aren't that far (Orange Line), unless you're looking to cross to the Seaport. A Blue Line extension to Lynn would get a lot more people on the subway. Resurrecting the Green Line A-Branch to Watertown would help a lot of people. Extending the Orange Line into Roslindale. Turning the Fairmount Commuter Rail into a new T line with frequent service would serve a large area and the heart of where Black people in Boston live. Making the Commuter Rail an electrified regional rail system with frequent, all-day service could make a huge difference - especially with the zoning bill that has density requirements near Commuter Rail stops. Using Track 61 to go from Back Bay to the BCEC and hook that up to good rail service. Giving Chelsea decent service (since it'll soon be the densest city in Massachusetts) maybe with the Orange Line forking at Sullivan or Assembly - and you could even extend that to the airport since the tracks go in that direction (and even back across the Blue Line tunnel into Boston). Or instead of forking the Orange Line, it could continue along the Grand Junction Path into Cambridge and to BU. It wouldn't exactly offer a connection to the Green and Red Lines, but it would run very close to Lechmere and Kendall.

I guess the Red-Blue connection has never felt as important to me as so many other wishes. The Green Line comes so frequently between Park and Government Center that it feels easy enough to get from Red to Blue (compared to so many other problems with the T) and I generally don't want the Blue Line, except to go to the airport. I guess of my dreams, a Red-Blue connector just feels like "yay, I guess I can shave 5 minutes off my airport trip now." Sure, that's fine, but I'd be more into projects that really opened up more places.

I've also always used the Blue Line for the airport. The Silver Line always frustrates the hell out of me. I'd rather change at Park, wait a couple minutes for a Green Line train and then change at Government Center for the Blue to take the shuttle than deal with the Silver Line. The Silver Line is so unpredictable. Between traffic and that absolutely awful switch over from electric to diesel, it's just nightmare fuel. Plus, the shuttles at the Blue Line are frequent and usually dedicated to one terminal rather than stopping at every terminal. Sure, if you're going to Terminal A, the Silver Line might be fine. By the time you get to Terminal E, it's annoying. I guess I've just always had good luck with the Blue Line and would rather deal with the transfer at Park than the Silver Line.

Again, I'd love to know if you see the Red-Blue connector differently or more worthwhile. It is slightly inconvenient to get to the Blue Line, but a lot of other places seem more annoying to get to.