The Boston real estate market is insane. Every day there’s some new story about a tiny house, a miniscule condo, going for a small fortune. Dumps in soon-to-be-glammed-up neighborhoods are snatched up (for exceedingly big bucks) and torn down. A building on my block that used to house 8 apartments is being converted to a single family. When the jack hammering is over, the finish work done, the place will be worth about $20M. Meanwhile, I recently had an Uber driver whose main job is installing custom kitchens. He had just finished up work on a project for a kitchen in the neighboring town of Brookline that cost $600K. For the kitchen.
High-rise “luxury” (some real luxury, some faux luxe) buildings are going up on every plot of land available, anywhere around here. Affordable housing is nearly impossible to find. (Affordable equals anything where a studio goes for less that $2.5K a month.) Whenever a building that includes set asides for low- and moderate-income residents is announced, the developers are flooded with folks who want to get in on the lottery for one of the units.
And as more and more suburban tech companies move in town, and more and more tech, biotech, and every other cool stuff businesses want to be located downtown – not in a boring, stuffy suburb – the demand for housing zooms.
So many of the buildings going up are aimed at the young tech folks who want to live near where they work. Then there are the young fin-serv folks who have even more money to spend on housing than the techies.
One hot Boston property is the Ink Block complex. Located in what was (and to large extent remains) an ugly, industrial, highway bordering wasteland, the Ink Block may still be a bit on the ugly side. But it’s become an it place. There’s a nearby arts district, new boîtes that are too cool for the likes of me, and a truly excellent Whole Foods.
The Ink Block is getting a new building:
It will be a 14-story tower featuring 250 “co-living” units — micro apartments in a high-service building loaded with amenities — which its developer described as a “millennial resort.” (Source: Boston Globe)
For starters, a lot of the micro apartments in the “millennial resort” will truly be micro apartments: the size of a hotel room - under 400 square feet.
As someone who spent her childhood fantasizing about living in an apartment the size of a very small bathroom - I had it all worked out in my head: the bed folded down over the bathtub - this actually doesn’t sound all that bad to me. I lived for a number of years in a studio apartment and much enjoyed it. I had a miniscule kitchen, a slightly less miniscule bathroom, an alcove office, a miniscule foyer that was separated from the main room by a door, and not bad closet space. (Of course, back in those days, I had a lot less stuff to store.) I loved that apartment. While these days, I’d strongly prefer having a separate bedroom, I do know for a fact that I can live comfortably in 400 square feet, plus or minus.
But it’s not the size that makes this new Ink Block building a “millenial resort.” This place will be:
…a cross between a fancy college dorm and the super-luxe condo buildings, but aimed mainly at 20-somethings too busy to spend much time in their homes. (Source: a different article from the Boston Globe)
Just the idea of a “fancy college dorm” makes me smile. I went to college in the era of the minimalist college dorm room, something akin to what might be offered to a white-collar criminal in a minimum security setting.
The new Ink Block units will include housekeeping, including linens and towels, if you want. (I wouldn’t want…) Some will “come with furniture, custom-built.” And there will be social activities organized by a live-in “community manager.” Everyone will have their own bathroom and kitchen, but there will be communal hang out spaces. And things to do, should one so desire.
Sounds to me a lot like the congregant living situations that the oldsters are currently occupying, but will soon give way to the invasion of the Baby Boomers.
And it sounds pretty good to me. Micro-unit in the Ink Block here I come? Maybe not. But there’s probably something a lot like this in my future. I’m already planning my space…
1 comment:
There are several dynamics playing out, and no one specific cause. The horrific damage being done by suburbanization is slowly unwinding, and more people are moving back into the cities as they should. Suburbia is more than just boring, it is a ecological nightmare that perforce requires hundreds of miles of highways clogged with automobiles. To just buy a cup of coffee necessitates climbing into a 4 ton vehicle. So - instant pent-up demand for livable dwellings in a city that basically hasn't been touched in any meaningful way since before WWII. Huge swaths of decrepit, semi-derelict triple deckers being snapped up and renovate with glorious first world amenities like grounded electrical outlets, dishwashers, and windows that open. And yes, extreme concentrations of wealth in a very small number of people is inevitably going to distort prices. That would have happened with or without the tech companies who currently take so much of the blame. (Yet never the property developers, the parasites who sit back on their overstuffed portfolios and increase their prices 10, 25, 50, 150% year over year. Nice how they sidestep culpability and lay the blame on some innocent tech worker who decided to study STEM in school rather than basket weaving) Perhaps worst of all, we have our NIMBYs, who turn out in droves to protest any and all development. Until they are bought off, that is. Unsurprisingly, the cost of bribing NIMBYs with promises of job quotas for no-show jobs, for infrastructure improvements that are the responsibility of the city, all this costs a LOT of money.
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