> But, we need to understand what the market is seeking.
The free market is usually pretty good at that. Developers tend to build properties because they will make money.
> Do families want to move to a town like Lincoln to live in multistory units?
Probably! But developers tend to do that sort of research before spending millions on a new development.
> Many families, in order to have more of the traditional single family home, are moving further and further out.
It is not just cost, but what is seen as desirable.
Can we better explore the type of units that will meet wants and needs, and not just numbers.
The issue is simply that single family houses take up a lot of land, and land plus transport are the true determining factors here. I can't get a single family home in manhattan because there simply isn't the land for it. As the population of the greater Boston area goes up, there will be less and less places close to Boston that can sustain affordable single family detached homes on sizable lots.
> I look at Denver that has built many, many multi-story units that are going vacant, while families push further and further away from the city.
The urban sprawl is stressing municipal services and water resources.
Great thing about multi-family homes is that they put much less stress on things like water resources and municipal services than new single family home developments do. I'm not worried about vacant housing right now, given how big of a housing crisis there is in the area. Plus, new developments pay large amounts of fees and property taxes towards maintaining and upgrading aging municipal services.
Simply put, there's only so much land within a decent transit or drive of Boston/Cambridge, where many people have jobs they need to get to. So this constrains how far away people will live, and we just need to build more housing. The best way to do that is to build housing across the whole spectrum. More multi-family multi-story developments, more rowhomes, more ADUs, more splitting of lots to build second homes on the lot, and more development of vacant lots. Ideally some of those units will be affordable by design, but the best path towards affordability is simply more housing, however we can get it.
-Nick Gardner
