@jeffbyrnes @marionsd @klaus @noisecapella @ef4 To be clear, subsidies and tenant protections are extremely important, but both of these things are far more effective if there is a surplus of houses to begin with. If you’ve got nowhere else to go, you’re probably a lot less likely to report your landlord for breaking the law or providing substandard housing.

@marionsd @jeffbyrnes @klaus @noisecapella @ef4 And besides, by not accommodating those rich people, they aren’t going away—They’re just displacing the poorer people who live here today, so really we have no choice but to build that housing (or watch all of our neighbors get forced out).

@marionsd @jeffbyrnes @klaus @noisecapella @ef4 The market will never be able to meet everyone’s needs (some people are just too poor to support the cost of maintaining their own housing) and for those people we need government subsidies, but for most people unsubsidized housing produced by the private market would work if only we would build enough of it. And yeah, we would need a lot, but that’s because we have a lot of jobs, and that’s a good thing!

@marionsd @jeffbyrnes @klaus @noisecapella @ef4 the thing is that right now we aren’t even letting the market try. If a developer “can’t fill a building at full price” that’s good for the rest of us because it means discounts and free months of rent. Right now we have the exact opposite problem: Developers want to build lots of units and we’re telling them to only build a few.

@marionsd @jeffbyrnes @klaus @noisecapella @ef4 and to be clear, when I say, “make it profitable” what I mean is that it has to be more profitable than other investments. No one is going to accept a 4% rate of return building a ten unit building with 2 affordable units if they can make an 8% ROR (with much less delay or risk that it will never happen) by buying a 3-decker and converting it into a duplex.

@marionsd @jeffbyrnes @klaus @noisecapella @ef4 Housing development is a business just like growing food or building fire trucks. If we want developers to do certain things, we have to make it profitable for them to do those things. If we make it more profitable to consolidate 3-deckers into duplexes, we shouldn’t be surprised when that happens. We can talk until we’re blue in the face about what they “should” be able to do, but if we want results the incentives need to support them.

@marionsd @klaus @jeffbyrnes @noisecapella @ef4 in fact the lack of consideration for cost and feasibility is a recurring criticism of the way we do apartment fire codes here in this country. We rarely ask, for example, whether encouraging landlords to put off big repairs (because we have made compliance too costly) ends up hurting more people than it helps.

@marionsd @klaus @jeffbyrnes @noisecapella @ef4 it’s the state’s fault, and I think it has a lot to do with fire officials who live in single family homes in the suburbs having a cultural fear (ahem, racism) of apartment buildings and the people who live in them. I believe the decision to require sprinklers in 3-deckers came after the death of a firefighter in the 2014 townhome fire in Back Bay. There was little discussion of how sprinklers would have helped and zero discussion about cost.

@marionsd @klaus @jeffbyrnes @noisecapella @ef4 rents really started to take off in the last 10-15 years, so we started to see a lot more gut renovations (since prices will support them) but renovating that third unit adds a bunch of expensive new code requirements (e.g. sprinklers) so many find it more profitable to just consolidate. If we relaxed the fire code (sprinklers in small buildings don’t add much safety) or allowed more units by right, you’d almost certainly see less consolidation

@klaus @marionsd @jeffbyrnes @ef4 A lot of the new units you see are big because that’s what the zoning calls for. High land prices demand that developers maximize building square footage, but zoning limits the number of units per parcel, so you end up with a small number of big units. It’s hard to know exactly what we would get without these rules but the shortage among studios and 1BRs is among the most acute so we’d probably get a decent number of those.