Cran125GPS

Cran125GPS t1_j72r25b wrote

This is the absolutely worst way to handle a housing crisis, it's populism gone off the rails. The most basic understanding of economics shows why this is a bad idea.

Every area that has tried this has made the issue worse. Look how San Francisco is doing....

This is purely a supply issue. The amount of people living here isn't changing, in fact it's going up. The only way to bring down housing prices is to increase housing. Artificially distorting the marking makes everything worse. Rent control does nothing to help increase housing supply and in fact makes it worse at is disincentivizes investment in new housing.

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Cran125GPS t1_j5b7ocn wrote

Condos in a building like this unfortunately aren't going to happen. It's not financially feasible in a market like Worcester, for a number of reasons.

Trying to be helpful here, not argumentative, so here are a few reasons:

The return per square foot just isn't there. You can rent these units for a higher psf rate than you can sell them. I know everyone is complaining about housing costs here in Worcester, but the reality is that you can buy a single family home for less cost per square foot than it would take to build a similarly sized condo, by a large margin (about $200-$300psf to buy vs $500 psf to build where you'd need to sell for $700psf to make a return) so they aren't economically viable. No one is going to buy a 700k 1,000SF condo in Worcester.

Condos are significantly more expensive to build than apartments, which excacerbates the problem. The level of finishes on a condo tend to be higher, and the build quality has to be higher. When you are renting an appartment, it's pretty much take it or leave it to the person that wants to rent. In a condo building you want to pre sell, and then there are always issues when the units are built of people that bought the condo coming and and having crazy punch lists and huge battles trying to finish the project. It's just a huge headache that developers don't want to deal with.

Continuing on the last point, if you are a developer buidling these as appartments, it's a one owner sitsituation. You either hold it and make money of the rents, or you sell it to an institutional buyer that really only cares about the cash flow coming in. If these were condos, you now have 100 different buyers to deal with, and a condo association to deal with while you are trying to unload the rest of the units. Everyone knows how much of a pain HOAs are and building condos means you have to deal with one. All it takes is a few angry buyers to sue for whatever they want and you can be locked up in years of legal battles. I think you are on the hook for 10 years. So people just don't want the liability and renting as appartments makes all thay headache go away.

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Cran125GPS t1_j3j7h9b wrote

Best bagels but so so awfully slow its painful. They should hire a WPI student to optimize their service. The owners could make a killing there but on the weekends it takes absolutely forever to get anything. There's nothing more I'd like in Worcester than a good bagel place that doesn't take 45 minutes to get a bagel on a Saturday.

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Cran125GPS t1_it74ry8 wrote

Roberta Schaefer hasn't been on the board in 8+ years....if you look at the board of directors and staff there is no one with the name Schaeffer. I know probably half of the board. I mean come on Allen Fletcher, Tim Garvin, Tim Murray, and Deb Packard are on the board....real right wing extremists there

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