Looking at housing prices
To the Editor,
Here I live over on the other side of the city still trying to come back to East Boston, so I know all about affordability in Boston’s neighborhoods. You can barely find it anywhere inside the city today.
The more high-end, high-rise and high-priced our city gets, the more this city is leaving many working families and low-wage earners between a rock and a hard place. Look at Jeffries Point, the more gentrified it gets, the more expensive is housing across this neighborhood. Look at real estate prices, look at rents out there. If you don’t own, how do you stay here? And where do you go? Housing prices and rents are soaring and not just in Boston. Look nearby, even Chelsea is in the beginning midst of a housing boom, too.
Recently, at the Mayor’s State of the City Address, Mayor Walsh highlighted housing costs in his address saying “We will leave no one behind.” Great catch phrase. You get a big applause but anything else? Are rents really stabilizing as the mayor said/ He did admit that housing and rents are still too high for too many people.
Boston needs to have a stabilized middle class but that goal seems miles away. We cannot become a city of extremes, the rich and those who live on much less. Selling a downtown garage or a real -estate transfer tax is not a real answer.
The new Suffolk Downs large scale development is a 109- acre project which will create a new city in a city with 10,000 homes atop an old race track. Two thirds of the project will be in East Boston and one-third in Revere. A whole new neighborhood of residences with plenty of commercial and retail space.
How will this proposal benefit poor and working people will be in the details. I liked what I have heard from City Councilor Lydia Edwards who when asked stated, “I will be happy to support a plan for Suffolk Downs that balances union, jobs, affordable housing, traffic and resiliency…When this plan does, I will support it…”
Sal Giarratani