Luxury housing is housing. It’s not rocket science. Somebody who would move into the building moves down from Boston. But we don’t build luxury housing. That’s fine - they get a nice place in fox point. The person they beat out for an apartment looks somewhere else. And so on down the line. The people at the top aren’t the ones feeling the pain.

Yes. It really fucking does. Supply and demand is still the driving factor and there's still going to be people getting price out of Boston who move here and if we're not adding units for them, they're just going to outbid for what's already here.

That's already been happening for years. We need to increase housing at every price point otherwise anything that isn't section 8 is guaranteed not to stay affordable.

Exactly! It's much healthier for cities and the environment to make sure the upper classes continue to live in outer suburbs and commute in for work.

It appears luxury housing is the only damn thing being made and allowed to continue. It's fuckin stupid the shit that's being pulled everywhere with housing. Here in EP the mayor made a big photoshoot before election of "breaking ground" on a housing project, that's been sitting for years. A percentage of which is supposed to be affordable. That pile of dirt that they literally brought in instead of actually just digging some up from this empty lot is still there, untouched. While on the other end of the street a nice apartment or condo building is put in. Then there's the Kettle Point development that literally paid a fine just so they wouldn't have to do a percentage for "the poors". Then up the road more where there was gonna be a huge waterfront development with a bunch of housing, a percentage affordable, and shops, restaurants and what not. Straightened out the land and now just sitting there some years, long empty waterfront strip. Then there's Exxon that owns the most land in the city and most of it empty now and they don't pay property taxes on any of their land, I looked it up. It's all valued at $0.

Superman building has huge subsidies. This was all private with modest tax break. This is a tragedy.

>I'm absolutely fine with more housing, I just didn't want some wavy Miami skyscraper standing at odds with the entire skyline. It also wasn't exactly affordable housing they were trying to build. The superman building is a better hope there. Heck give it a couple years and the providence place mall is a better hope there. Let's make what we have work for us.

This response perfectly encapsulates the thinking holding Providence and RI in general back.

Sure, there’s a housing crisis pricing people out of the area, but is this solution I don’t need to spend a dime on pretty enough?!

I’m totally ignorant about the economics of this and another unrelated project but I have strong feelings about it and those feelings matter. Also, turning disused malls into residential space is an awesome idea I just had that completely ignores the fact that there are malls that have been dead for decades and if it was even remotely viable it would… exist.