Doctrina_Stabilitas t1_ixly5nj wrote on November 24, 2022 at 1:14 PM

Reply to comment by velkoz007 in The lack of homes could strangle our life sciences industry: Why the concentration of biopharma in Cambridge and Boston would ratchet up costs, exacerbate the housing crisis, and pitch the region from its throne. by writethefuture3

And we don’t really have the money to upgrade stuff, when the star is forced to send back tax surpluses because it rises faster than some predetermined maximum amount based on an expected increase in tax revenue we’ll wee out of luck

Nice for those of us who won the housing and work lottery I guess

Master_Dogs t1_ixop77o wrote on November 25, 2022 at 2:22 AM

In addition we can only raise property taxes by so much due to laws from the 80's like Prop 2.5 which limit residential property tax growth. So even if tomorrow a city like Somerville said "yeah so we're going to jack taxes up to fund major infrastructure investments"... They literally couldn't do that. It's definitely a contributing factor to how we're piece mealing infrastructure improvements like only doing 1 street per year, at a rate so slow by the time we've addressed every street in a given City we'll have to start over again.

Oh and even if say Somerville or Cambridge decided to fix things, that doesn't matter if towns like Lexington, Concord, etc are allowed to continue denying any new dense housing buildings. We need every City and Town within MA to step up it's game, otherwise things will continue to get worse. No one town can fix things.