WinsingtonIII t1_j7pk1h4 wrote on February 8, 2023 at 2:32 PM

Reply to comment by ItsMeTK in These housing numbers are insane. In some towns the cost to buy a house is 10x the average salary. by LopsidedWafer3269

> I thought those were all carved up for crappy apartments we can’t afford.

If you want housing prices to stop increasing, or even decline, you have to support building much more housing, and realistically that means building much more multi-family housing as that's the most efficient way to increase the number of housing units.

You can't complain about building the "wrong type of housing" and also complain about high housing costs at the same time. Especially if what you want is a single-family home, as SFHs are the least efficient way to build more housing to satisfy demand. It's fine to want a SFH, but if you want SFHs to not be really expensive, you need to be willing to support the building of much more housing, even if it's apartments.

ItsMeTK t1_j7q94hd wrote on February 8, 2023 at 5:20 PM

This sounds right in theory but is certainly not true in practice in Framingham. they keep building and rent keeps rising. I have been living in these carved up apartments for over a decade. We were evicted from our fist one so landlord could essentially carve our apartment into two. All our attic storage space became another room and bathroom. More apartments with less storage is bad. In our current place, we have no thermostat control. The upstairs neighbors keep it too hot and do nothing to curb the mouse problem.

WinsingtonIII t1_j7qikz5 wrote on February 8, 2023 at 6:21 PM

The issue is that the state has a housing shortage of ~108,000 units. The amount we are building isn't enough to put a meaningful dent in that, so rent keeps rising. If we actually built enough to erase that deficit, rent would indeed stabilize as the supply of housing would accurately reflect the demand.

But that doesn't mean we shouldn't build what we are already building simply because it's not enough. If we stopped building what we are currently building, the deficit would get even worse and the rate of rent increase would be even worse than it already is.