The single most important issue for me in local politics is housing. A lot of people are in favor of rent control, but I really feel that’s a recipe for disinvestment and disaster. We don’t need to squeeze the landlords, we need more apartments, more condos, more homes. The area has a serious lack of low to moderate priced housing: you can go to the suburbs and get a large house for a 350 and up, or you can live in the city in a condo for 350 and up, but there’s not much under a quarter million.
Some people are opposed to adding apartments, because they think apartment dwellers aren’t invested in their communities. That’s just wrong. The Fenway-area development of new aparment and retail buildings needs to go forward, over the objections of the anti-growth crowd. Yes, it needs to include parking for residents, blah blah blah, but we really need a very large number of units, and scaling it back is not a good idea.
Robert Reich had a good idea about how to make it easier to increase the supply of housing: increase maximum heights, speed up approvals, unify licensing. Designated affordable units in each new development is good, but it’s not enough: we need to increase the actual supply. Also, I have a sneaking suspicion that designated affordable units drive up the price of the other units: you end up with one ‘affordable’ and ten very expensive units and nothing in the middle, which is hard on Average Joe, poor guy. I imagine that a dramatically increased supply of housing would make most of those problems go away.
I also have a sneaking suspicion that all this expensive housing is going to hurt the economy, and not just because it’s a bubble. I find that when I think about buying a house, I look at my finances and think of ways to avoid spending any money at all. Like, college-studenty ways of doing things, like spending no money ever, and washing clothes in the sink to avoid spending a buck fifty on laundry. And that can’t be good for the economy.
Secretly Ironic 