Just check out this 4,000-square-foot Waltham house that was on the market for nearly $900,000 this spring. (And it dwarfs the lot, which is less than a third of an acre, with the front door seemingly ten feet from the road.)
Then consider you could get the same house in the Dallas area for a third of the price.
Is the tradeoff worth it in order to live in the Boston area, with all its supposed advantages, some real, some imagined? And at what point do companies and professionals say enough is enough and start steering clear?
Here are some interesting thoughts on the issue put forth by DrDoofenschmirtz on the comments section of this blog.
I agree with condo premise and that lot more people will have to “settle” in terms of living space if staying closer to Boston/Cambridge. However, I do wonder if that fact will indeed become deterrent, and disincentive for companies to settle here or move their people into MA. So many people who came in the last 5 years are still looking at their homes and COL, and wondering if it was worth it.
On the paper MA looks almost ideal, but living here brings completely different perspective and lot more stress. It is truly overcrowded and overpriced, infrastructure is very old and inadequate, transportation is passable, not great as it could be, etc…
We are having great housing gains in prices, and people can feel wealthy, but that wealth doesn’t translate in better conditions of living at all. I do not feel any wish to upgrade, improve, get into rebuilding of our towns and state of MA at all. There is very hands-off attitude concerning investments and improvement. We have Harvard and MIT! Why bother, I guess?
Are we in the arrested development phase and when will that possibly tip the scale against MA?