“This year, we built only five housing units. Yes, just five. In a city of 50,000 homes, that’s not 1% or even 0.1%; it’s less than 0.01%. These numbers are not just statistics. They represent a profound failure to keep up with the needs of our community.”
-#CambMA councillor Burhan Azeem https://www.cambridgeday.com/2023/08/23/in-a-city-of-50000-homes-we-built-five-this-year/
....aaaaand i just heard that a developer has started having convos about a residential development on this exact spot, thank dog.
@bikepedantic Without digging into the property details, gas stations are generally tougher because someone has to pay for gas tank removal and soil remediation before you’ve develop it.
@lkngrrr Yes i'm aware, and the LUST fund and other federal funding sources are available to remediate that exact problem. In one of the country's most overheated residential real estate markets, remediation would be a non-issue if zoning allowed anything.
@bikepedantic It's also cheap and easy for owners like this to just sit on the land and let it appreciate thanks to what I call the "Cambridge Parking Lot and Vacant Building Land Speculator Tax Abatement Program."
That property is only assessed at $846,700 which is clearly way less than it would sell for today and most of the discount is in the land valuation. Which is $94 psf while the property behind it is $130 psf.
Here's a map I did in QGIS a while back:
@bikepedantic While the allocation of value between building and land seems a little arbitrary, a clear example of this policy is this house, which sits on a large parcel with an asphault parking lot, between two similar houses on standard sized lots.
The house on the left has a total assesment of $1.5M, the one with big lot is also $1.5M, and the house to the right is $1.9M. The City did this by slashing the land assesment of the property with the huge developable area.
@bikepedantic they clearly follow you here
@DemonHusky have i griped here about our waterfront Honda dealership yet?
@bikepedantic I support you convincing the ether that should be housing
@DemonHusky "but Hondas need access to nature too" --someone in the local ether
@bikepedantic 12+ years ago I went to a community meeting at the Peabody school about mass Ave rezoning etc. I was in the minority arguing for way more density. I remember a few things from that meeting, one being an old lady who lived on that street who had come to the meeting with a single agenda: raise hell about that particular lot. She was very passionate, and every time I pass the lot I think about her, and wonder how it could still be sitting there vacant…
@bikepedantic I think the city guys running the meeting said something about complex enviro concerns…
@bikepedantic Wait, what? Five?! That can't... 
I think a lot about how I want to stay here, and I wonder if we'll be able to buy a nice condo. My partner would prefer a single-family house, and when he mentioned it, I laughed. And we've got it good -- I went into engineering and happened to pick up some ML stuff in grad school, but still...
I think a lot (too much) about this 7,000 sq ft lot with abandoned gas station/garage fronting on Mass Ave. Without even being the least bit architecturally creative, an owner could plunk three triple-deckers on this lot and apparently nearly double our housing production. But they can't, so they won't.