Yeah because we need more 1 bedroom apartments that cost $2,000 a month. How about some low income housing? Maybe cut that Section 8 waitlist down from ~10 years?

Low income housing and condos instead of apartments. Let some residents own the unit and build equity instead of being a renter for life.

All of these new buildings and they’re all rentals pumping money out of Worcester.

Build some condos that local residents can buy for the love of God.
These new apartment owners are not even locally based. It’s enough, let locals own these condos. Keep the money in Worcester.

no one is addressing the elephant in the room, which is that new triple/quad deckers would solve this problem but they are illegal because of some old bigoted anti-immigrant law that was put into place over 100 years ago.

imagine new 3 deckers with modern plumbing and electric tech with thicker floors for soundproofing and off-property parking and provisions for moving heavy items to upper floors.

they are a win for the developer who can sell them after renting them out a few years, they are a win for people who need affordable apartments, and they are a win for the new owners as they provide upward mobility by living onsite and renting the other floors.

there's no reason to be against them unless you envision the outdated model. a small neighborhood of new 3 deckers would provide a lot of what is lacking in this city.

time to do away with laws that were only enacted to be hostile to immigrants and start providing affordable apartments and promoting home ownership.

I don't think that's ever going to happen without some kind of subsidization. Or public housing. Both of which have obvious issues. Other than that, nobody is building anything you or I could afford.

I realize it's not super intuitive, but adding more housing, even housing that is unaffordable to most people, has ripple effects that help to reduce the cost of housing for everyone else.

Here's one study, but this has been ound to be true in several others as well.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094119022001048?via%3Dihub

On top of the issue of affordability, can we have some buildings that are not cookie-cutter look alikes? These boring blocks make the area look like everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

Question? Are all these new buildings there building only for rent and not sale ?

Whose gonna pay for that? Over priced condos are the only thing developers are willingly to invest in. Unfortunately that's the future of Worcester.

>imagine new 3 deckers with modern plumbing and electric tech with thicker floors for soundproofing and off-property parking and provisions for moving heavy items to upper floors.

I lived in one and the landlords where terrible but otherwise... it was nice, all 3 floors got along, rent was 'cheap' until it was suddenly $2100 and all 3 floors left.

I mean, you're correct that the city (and state, and beyond, really) absolutely cannot rely on developers to solve the housing crisis. Governments are gonna have to invest in public housing again, and that's all there is to it.

This. I have a coworker who would love to buy a condo but it needs to be on a bus line because they don’t drive…there aren’t many out there that meet their needs.

Worcester badly needs to do address the public transit problem. It is a joke and no one cares about the people that depend on it. It’s ridiculous.

I'm new to the area (coming up on a year in Worcester) and this was what floored me about this city. The lack of any coherent transit system, or in reality, the lack of support for any mode of transportation that isn't a car. I can't run more than like 9 miles uninterrupted in this town. I don't think I've seen a single bike lane the whole time I've been here.

Reliable public transit, bike infrastructure, or even just sidewalks that don't just end/have trees growing out the middle of them would be a great start to actually help this city achieve it's full potential. These are the kinds of things that increase opportunity for citizens in a city. More opportunities means more financially secure citizens, more people with expendable income, and in turn better economic health. Cars are expensive and often cause more financial hardship in the long or sometimes short term. I lived in Milwaukee WI, for about a decade without having a car. If I had needed one I'm not sure I would have made it through school. I really don't know how people make it in this town without a car.

I'm fine with projects like this being built, but in tandem with it we need:

1. Affordable / low-income units, and programs that make sure low-income Worcester residents can continue to live and thrive here.
2. More robust public transit / make the city less reliant on car infrastructure
3. More condo units for sale so there isnt an oversaturation of """luxury""" rentable units or just competitive single-family homes.
4. More culture and institutions that are genuinely interesting and edgy and cool but uniquely Worcester. Why pay New York style prices and not even get the tip of the iceberg of the type of amenities of that city? I'm so ready to move out of this city to NYC (was born here, lived in Boston for 11 years, and just recently moved back to the Woo) because between the shit public transit and lack of stuff to do, I'm at my wits end here, and if the city is going to start costing just as much, might as well be somewhere worth the high price.
5. More than just $15 an hour jobs outside of the medical or tech field. I've been scouring Indeed for the past few weeks for a new interim job, and the pay wages these days are abysmal if you're not in med or tech (real estate is maybe the only other field I can think of here that pays well but THEY are the ones who are part of the problem of gentrification/high cost of units and homes).

Build it. But seriously, the Madison St. side needs a rethink. No reason that can't also be a street wall of housing and retail at some point rather than a wide open wasteland and alley for parking garage entrances.

Worcester residents want more parking sadly. They don’t understand that so many don’t want to drive in this city with hills everywhere. Improved public transit and pedestrian infrastructure is a benefit for EVERYONE. Drivers, non drivers, businesses, the city, etc, but people are extremely selfish.

I’m not tuned in politically so I couldn’t tell you what’s stopping the city govt from doing something about this, but I’m sure it has to do with money.

I’m a little confused about what’s illegal… building new triple deckers?

correct

For what it's worth, where these and other apartments are being built (walking distance from the hub) is pretty much the ideal location to live in if you want to use the current bus system. Having basically any bus be able to take you home is a massive improvement.

Looking at Zillow there are currently three condos for sale near downtown that are either directly on or within a tenth of a mile of Pleasant St, which has a bus route. Granted that's still not a ton of options but it's also the middle of winter. It's pretty near comparable to the number of options someone looking for a single family home in Newton Square or Tatnuck would be facing at the moment, for example. Or really just most single requirements imposed on a search would get you to that limited a selection.

But maybe there are other requirements that haven't been specified that limit the options even further.

There's also the fact that the WRTA is not directly under the control of city government. The city council and various committees have much more control over where a parking garage goes than they do on the hiring of more bus drivers and restructuring of bus routes.

it's so crazy to me—public transport & walkable neighborhoods are one of the best ways to make the city desirable for more people without immediately fucking over the lower income people already living in those areas, and yet it's totally being casted aside

Condos in a building like this unfortunately aren't going to happen. It's not financially feasible in a market like Worcester, for a number of reasons.

Trying to be helpful here, not argumentative, so here are a few reasons:

The return per square foot just isn't there. You can rent these units for a higher psf rate than you can sell them. I know everyone is complaining about housing costs here in Worcester, but the reality is that you can buy a single family home for less cost per square foot than it would take to build a similarly sized condo, by a large margin (about $200-$300psf to buy vs $500 psf to build where you'd need to sell for $700psf to make a return) so they aren't economically viable. No one is going to buy a 700k 1,000SF condo in Worcester.

Condos are significantly more expensive to build than apartments, which excacerbates the problem. The level of finishes on a condo tend to be higher, and the build quality has to be higher. When you are renting an appartment, it's pretty much take it or leave it to the person that wants to rent. In a condo building you want to pre sell, and then there are always issues when the units are built of people that bought the condo coming and and having crazy punch lists and huge battles trying to finish the project. It's just a huge headache that developers don't want to deal with.

Continuing on the last point, if you are a developer buidling these as appartments, it's a one owner sitsituation. You either hold it and make money of the rents, or you sell it to an institutional buyer that really only cares about the cash flow coming in. If these were condos, you now have 100 different buyers to deal with, and a condo association to deal with while you are trying to unload the rest of the units. Everyone knows how much of a pain HOAs are and building condos means you have to deal with one. All it takes is a few angry buyers to sue for whatever they want and you can be locked up in years of legal battles. I think you are on the hook for 10 years. So people just don't want the liability and renting as appartments makes all thay headache go away.

And what is the law that prevents them from being built? I’ve never heard this before and lived in the city for about 30 years

the wording is something to the effect of banning "any wooden tenement in which cooking will be done above the second floor".

for more info look up Prescot Farnsworth Hall and his "immigration restriction league". the short version is that 3 deckers represented upward mobility for "undesirables", though the record is made to appear that it was due to fire hazards and "ugliness".

While I agree with all your points, the cost of living is not and likely will never be that of Boston or NYC lmfao. I agree, more industry diversity for jobs - better transportation, with that comes more parking (like it or not, people do drive here) - more affordable apartments - better upkeep of the cities infrastructure. What the hell are we paying our taxes towards anyways?