Submitted by mattosx t3_122tdgz in massachusetts
Wow. For kicks I just calculated what my mortgage and taxes would be if I bought my little Cape House today. It was over $4k/month. I count my lucky stars I got this house at the rates when I did.
What does Massachusetts housing look like in 2040?
MA continues to be very desirable. A structural NIMBY attitude driven inability to build substantially more housing. High wealth and high income household outcompetes everyone else on the limited housing
>What does Massachusetts housing look like in 2040?
Anyone making under $350K a year now lives in Albany and commutes 6 hours into Boston for work. I-90 from Albany to Boston sets a world record for most congested road in the world.
And of course they still won't have broken ground on that Worcester to Springfield high speed rail line.
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A city can't function solely with high wage, white collar professionals, and there's a practical limit to how far low and middle wage workers can commute from cheaper exurbs.
We're seeing the cracks starting to form now. It's getting harder and harder to find city workers to take jobs that historically have been pretty desirable, even if they only offered modest wages in return for stability and great benefits. Bus and train drivers, teachers, nurses, etc are necessary to make the city run, but don't offer the high salaries that are increasingly necessary to afford living within or reasonably near the city. A complete drain of vital workers as cost of living continues to rapidly outpace wage growth.
We're facing an exodus of working class people from exactly the places where they are needed. These high cost of living hubs will be the homes of the very wealthy and the desperately poor and few in between. A city full of elites but no teachers or garbage collectors because they can only afford to live 2 hrs away.
High cost homes and tent cities surrounded by massive congestion as the people who help make the city run languish in long, miserable commutes.
Hope the NIMBYs enjoy the neighborhood character they fought so hard to preserve. It'll sorta still be there as long as they avert their eyes from the nightmare of extreme poverty and homelessness they are creating.
The same applies in expensive vacation spots like the Cape or the Berkshires. People buying or renting expensive houses only to find that there's no waiters at the restaurants or all the other service jobs that don't pay the high salaries required to live there.
The Cape figured out they could limp along by flying in thousands of migrants from third-world countries who will gladly live in squalor tenement housing and work for minimum wage. Guessing Boston will go a similar route if things get that bad. That helps with service workers, but of course that doesn't help the shortage of teachers, nurses, and other roles requiring advanced training and degrees.
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Corporate ownership of most property. A rent burden of over 50%. No mass transit options.
People aren't paying enough attention re: car prices.
We're going to run out of affordable used cars very, very soon. New cars are obscenely expensive and people will not be able to afford them with rent costs exploding.
Yep. And the MBTA is irredeemable. Mass transit will only start failing more and more and certainly won't be built out to areas where housing is more affordable. In fact, the new law reinforces that by demanding high density housing in areas "served," by the MBTA, only those areas will receive resources to keep the system running (and I use that word loosely.)
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It's entirely about timing.
Current peaks will not last. Will be deal again just like in 2008 and just like before Covid.
I'm thinking about Western MA, major peaks and valleys here. Now is the time to save up your down payment and wait.
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What does Massachusetts housing look like in 2040? Tent cities on every street.
Audioengineer68 t1_jdrqke5 wrote
Tent cities for minimum wage workers. Maybe in the Rose Kennedy park in Boston as an outreach program. Education and all but the most basic social services gets slashed because there's no tax base left to pay for services. So we get a shrinking demographic of poor, uneducated and in poor health voters. The lesser ones of these will start camping on the banks on the Cape Cod canal. Eventually leading to an uptick in crime amongst the fishermen trying to get sponsored on YouTube by making the mind-numbing fishing videos.
The police get even bigger budgets and wartime gear so they can ride around at parades and pretend we give a shit. Someone figures out how to keep people from stealing catalytic converters. They're given the keys to the city. Of Methuen.
And the corrupt and stupid will lead them.