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missitnoonan78 t1_ixlyiqd wrote

You all know this isn’t just a Boston problem right? There’s a huge chunk of the biopharma work force that has families and has no desire to live the urban lifestyle. The more junior folks tend to be younger / more urban, but most of the people I worked with lived in the suburbs by choice not necessity (spent over a decade working in biopharma in Cambridge)

Fix the commute from the suburbs, fund the commuter rail, fund expansion of the subway.

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dny6 t1_ixmaib0 wrote

Harsh reality that these companies don’t care if Susan from HR wants to live in Wellesley and hates her commute. Those urban Junior scientists are the life blood of these companies, and they in aggregate do not want to live in the suburbs or commute there.

But you are 100% right that the suburb commute needs to be fixed, via trains and subways

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missitnoonan78 t1_ixmd3wg wrote

Wasn’t talking about non-science roles. I was a scientist, almost all of the senior / PhD level folks lived in the suburbs. You telling me that they care more about Research Associates than Senior Scientists?

I got out of the field and moved into software so I could work remote / outside of the city.

No matter what, Life Science in general is much more tired to on-site work than other well paying industries in the area, so housing, transportation, etc in the whole Greater Boston area are key to keeping it healthy.

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dny6 t1_ixmu391 wrote

Well they clearly care about something in Cambridge, these companies don’t pay multi million dollar rents for the fun of it.

Part of the solution to the problem you describe is upzoning the suburbs to provide enough density for subway expansion to make sense.

The state has already started this by mandating upzoning near train stations.

I would fully expect in the next ten to fifteen years for SFH only zoning to be non existent inside 128

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Roszo21 t1_ixm201e wrote

Yeah I don't know why folks are ignoring this. The housing complainers that CEOs worry about are 30-50 year olds with families who want to live in a suburban neighborhood with a yard and decent schools. A major problem is that there's no commuter rail that's truly convenient to Kendall. Housing prices on the line that runs through Porter are outrageously expensive basically until you get to Acton and beyond, and at that point the CR itself is expensive. You can maybe walk 20 - 30 min from North Station but that's tough and cold as fuck.

There's no obvious solution. These companies don't want to be downtown or in a random suburb. They want to be in Cambridge with everybody else. A feasible option might be for these companies to band together and essentially create their own public transit system. Run a bus several times a day from several park and ride type locations in suburban areas. But it's still a miserable commute when they could just move to Austin or another Southern city where workers can get a larger, more updated house and a 30 min commute for the same money.

And this is why we need to think about housing as a regional issue, not a city issue.

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missitnoonan78 t1_ixm3fwz wrote

True on the commuter rail, most of the northern lines are essentially a nonstarter for Cambridge, and having to connect to the Red Line from the south adds a lot of time (been there, done that). The north south connector project would be nice.

The lack of parking around commuter rail stops and MBTA stations (looking at you Oak Grove) doesn’t help get pistols off the roads either.

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