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Champagne tastes and beer money can lead to bitterness and anger. If you're priced out of an area, find some other place to live. Doesn't really matter whether it's metro Boston or any other major US city.
You're giving them more credit than they deserve. They haven't even mentioned any towns out of their price range that they find anything redeeming about. If they started out, "Oh, I love Wellesley but can't afford it and would like to find the next best closest thing." Well then.
Wellesly is clearly the diamond among the rough. Out of everywhere else, it has a town with a train station and more than a computer repair shop and t-shirt/sign printing shop. It has nail salons, galleries, shopping, and restaurants. It IS the Upper Crust of Massachusetts, and even has the residents and eponymous pizza chain location to prove it. Living here has been an amazing experience in trying to understand decision-making and why certain things are appealing. For all the old money, class remains elusive.
Comella's, Dunkah's, Brueggahs, Qdoba, California Pizzer Kitchen, Ninety-Nine, B.Good, The ChateauItalian restaurant.. go to Wellsely Hills and you get to eat Bertucci's. Or you could go to the one in Needham or Lexington or Brockton. It's all the same. It's all just chains. Best Of Mass Restaurant Chains: Which Massachusetts chain is the best? | masslive.com
Champagne taste on beer money doesn't exactly describe the situation. It's more of discernment, and an unwillingness to pay Charles Heidseik prices for Sam Adams beer solely because the local market has never had anything better, thinks that's tawp nawtch while turning it's nose to "elitist" beverages, and will pay hand over fist to get just one more "I'm true blue-collar but still entitled" point over the competition.
Real estate prices are largely based on land value, and scarcity drives increases. In Massachusetts, there is a small handful of "decent" suburban commuter towns, driving scarcity. People living in Wellesly, Weston, and Newton may perceive a high quality of life relative to people living in Randolph, Dedham, or Chelmsford, but there are far more Randolphs, Dedhams, and Chelmsfords surrounding Boston, and the few Welleselys, Westons and Newtons have much to be desired. And when you live near Boston and everyone gets 1 cattle car per hour during rush hour, the "Top 10 Things To Do in Boston" never change (and your "town" only has 5 things to do), and 90% of the businesses in "the city" are the same ones everyone has in their "town" or local mall, a better life is simply unimaginable. This is why your local Pizzerier Regina probably has 5 stars on google reviews, but Chatham Bars only has 3 stars. Because people who know better have something that serves for comparison. The most upwardly mobile people around here go to Cape Cod in the summer and a handful of mountains in the winter because the options are severely limited. Just turn on the radio and pick from the 1 hip hop station, 2 WBUR stations, and 2 90s alt/butt rock stations. The Offspring and Soundgarden had their day in the lower 45, but up here they're still banking royalties!
For a long time my wife wanted to raise her family here because she was raised here and thought the quality of life in Boston Metro was outstanding. She thought Boston was a hip city steeped in history and culture, and romanticized about moving back when she went away to school. Now, after being "home" for a couple years, she sees how rinky dink Boston and it's surrounds are, and how much of a rip-off everything is given the quality and limited options, and how uncouth the vast majority of the people can be by comparison to other cities and suburban commuter towns we've been to. To me it was like that first visit back to my elementary school after I got into college: I was amazed at how narrow the hallways were, how small the desks and classrooms were, and how much of the place badly needed an update. Suffer a train ride to Boston and you end up in brutalist Back Bay Station with its dank dungeon of platforms, diesel saturated air, and oh not one but two Dunkin Donutses, or South Station, which is quaint but commercialized and crowded with aimless drifters, or North Station, which I don't even remember what the inside looks like.
I grew up taking weekend trips to DC, Philadelphia and Manhattan, or heading out to the Adirondacks, the Catskills, and Berkshires, sailing and checking out towns on both sides of the LI Sound, and fishing the Atlantic Ocean from Cape May to Montauk to Cape Cod. After my first year in Boston the novelty wore off - there's nothing to do and nowhere to go (which is why 3/4 of the city rotates apartments on the same day every year - to try a new angle to entitlement points). And the cost of living anywhere is so high that once you buy into it you can hardly afford to leave, even if you could fight the hordes going to the same place.
So it's not that I can't afford to live here, it's just that living here isn't worth the asking price. Even if you live in Wellesly, your "city" is still Boston, you sit in the same 2 lanes of traffic to go to Corporation or Coast Guard Beach in the summer (creative names!). You get one road west, one road north, and one road south - and that's it, but not even consistently in those cardinal directions! Again, the options are limited. The quality of life is low. Unless you like Bertucci's, bullet proof mountains, and swimming in ice cold shark infested shore break.
What is Massachusetts' comparable to Wayne, Narberth, Ardmore, Media, Phoenixville, Horsham, Blue Bell, Jenkintown or even Manayunk PA? Or to Haddonfield, Moorestown or Collingswood, Morristown, Red Bank, or Rumson? How does Wellesley compare to Scarsdale, Tarrytown, Bronxville, Mt. Kisco, Katonah, Pleasantville, Armonk, Irvington, Hastings, Larchmont, Rye, or even Beacon or Croton or Brewster NY? What does it have on Greenwich, Stamford, New Canaan, Ridgefield, or Georgetown/Wilton CT?
It's not that I'm trolling, I'm just trying to gain a better understanding of appeal: Why would anyone spend $1M to live in Massachusetts?
Last edited by West-Bost-West; 01-11-2018 at 12:56 PM..
Reminds me of Lexington. It's a nice area but then you see the Rt 2 traffic and can smell the fumes. 850K a house for that? I'll pass.
If you are going to higher ed for your undergrad, need specific specialized medical care immediately or must watch professional sports by all means go to boston.
After that it gets old. Why bother watching sports at all if we keep winning? What's the point? Plenty of places have good enough health care. Boston public schools just isn't that good considering all of academia around it. How the heck can they have a 72% graduation rate and yet consider themselves a Athens of America?
The old bars and clubs of the past are long gone, happy hour is long gone and prices kept going up.
Even without leaving Mass there's cities that are much cheaper and easier to deal with. I tout Springfield but Worcester has made fantastic gains and so has Lowell.
Location: RI, MA, VT, WI, IL, CA, IN (that one sucked), KY
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mdovell
^^
Even without leaving Mass there's cities that are much cheaper and easier to deal with. I tout Springfield but Worcester has made fantastic gains and so has Lowell.
He really doesn't make many good points. And while I was priced out of Boston (sadly... because there really is a never ending list of things to do, I found it not all that different than when I lived in Chicago, and actually, more fun than living in San Francisco), I couldn't pull the trigger on Lowell (its better, but still just too small) and I tried to like Worcester (found a couple of nice places and a few things to do, it would have been great for my commute), I chose Providence. It's got a lot going on for the cost of living.
Still, none of these touch the amazing opportunities of Boston. If someone gets bored in Boston, then legit, there is something wrong with them.
Lastly, while chains do well I'm sure, otherwise they wouldn't exist, I can't think of a single friend of mine that spends money or eats at ANY of the places he listed other than Dunks. The person is clearly, from their post, running in the wrong crowd; THAT is their real complaint.
^
I'm a huge fan of Providence.
Great food. Great music scene. Great art scene......45 mins from Boston
If I worked south of Boston I would be living there.
+1 on being bored in Boston, or Providence...or wherever.
Boring people tend to be bored a lot.
It's not that I'm trolling, I'm just trying to gain a better understanding of appeal: Why would anyone spend $1M to live in Massachusetts?
Oh, thank heavens, we hadn't heard from you in a few days.
Honestly, all pricing is a function of supply and demand. Just because you don't think paying $1 million+ for a house to live in Wellesley, Lexington,Newton or Winchester, is worth it; in the current market there are plenty of people who do. Actually, you'll need closer to $2 million to get something really nice in those towns. $1 million will still get you something pretty decent in Andover, Lynnfield or Natick.
The vast majority of these people are 2 income families, most likely with jobs in life science, and an annual family income over $300,000. They come to Eastern MA for the region's strong job market, good public education system, access to top quality healthcare and higher education, 4 distinct seasons, and its proximity to ocean and mountains. Very few areas in the country offer all of these same opportunities and the ones that do are all expensive.
If any one of those criteria are not important to you then you should not live here, the price you pay for what you get is too high. We have friends and family members who have relocated to Florida, Georgia and Texas because they didn't like the weather or they didn't care about access to the mountains or oceans.
You're trying to apply your sense of appropriate values to an entire region and that won't work. Other people place a higher value on the things that you are discounting.
This is a very good point, if he had to only spend 500k to buy a decent place in Newton they would be happy.
These double income folks making 300k+, 1 million dollar house is entry level for them based on 3x income rule... their 1m threshold for happiness is your 500k threshold...
If you don't mind being a little further south of Boston, consider North Attleboro. Definitely one of the more affordable towns, median home price around $350K and some of the lowest local taxes in the state. You can take the train from Attleboro or Mansfield depending on what side of town you are in, about a 50 minute commute to South Station.
Great sense of community, a lot of people here grew up here and know everyone else, but generally are welcoming to newcomers. The downtown is well-kept and has an array of non-chain restaurants and a few shops. Although the schools have faced budget problems the last few years, that's true for pretty much everywhere, and the kids still get a very decent education. What's more, there are also the nearby Bishop Feehan HS in Attleboro and Tri-County Regional Voc, both very well-regarded.
The town was also rated the safest town in Massachusetts a couple years ago if I remember correctly.
Appropriate value is a function of money, a system of arbitrary bonus points that stratifies the world by "value" of an individual's work. Basically everyone works as hard as anyone else, but the number of arbitrary bonus points required to have someone build you a nice house in the Boston area do not come easy. You have to make good choices in college and intentionally study something that will result in a lucrative amount of bonus points, or be entrepreneurial and rewarded by the ability to collect the bonus points at the top level of the business. One of the best careers, rewarded handsomely, is finance and investment, the practice of strategically moving large numbers of imaginary bonus points back and forth. Not surprisingly, those puppeteers of the bonus point financial system are very well rewarded and $1 million homes around Boston quite affordable to folks in such fields. The rest of us who work hard in un-valued and low point funded fields do not "deserve" a dwelling near Boston because we cannot collect enough bonus points. Money makes society go round, but when one frames it in terms of what it really is, a hominid constructed system of imaginary numbers doled out by perceived value of work, exchangeable for goods and services, and hordeable by the hominids at the top who then live like kings and think they deserve to and are somehow "better" than those working in lesser point-worthy professions, it's all pretty tragi-comic.
Of course it's how things work and can't question it too much, but it is amusing to think about how we're all just apes trading numbers back and forth with serious looks on our faces.
Wellesly is clearly the diamond among the rough. Out of everywhere else, it has a town with a train station and more than a computer repair shop and t-shirt/sign printing shop. It has nail salons, galleries, shopping, and restaurants. It IS the Upper Crust of Massachusetts, and even has the residents and eponymous pizza chain location to prove it. Living here has been an amazing experience in trying to understand decision-making and why certain things are appealing. For all the old money, class remains elusive.
Comella's, Dunkah's, Brueggahs, Qdoba, California Pizzer Kitchen, Ninety-Nine, B.Good, The ChateauItalian restaurant.. go to Wellsely Hills and you get to eat Bertucci's. Or you could go to the one in Needham or Lexington or Brockton. It's all the same. It's all just chains. Best Of Mass Restaurant Chains: Which Massachusetts chain is the best? | masslive.com
Champagne taste on beer money doesn't exactly describe the situation. It's more of discernment, and an unwillingness to pay Charles Heidseik prices for Sam Adams beer solely because the local market has never had anything better, thinks that's tawp nawtch while turning it's nose to "elitist" beverages, and will pay hand over fist to get just one more "I'm true blue-collar but still entitled" point over the competition.
Real estate prices are largely based on land value, and scarcity drives increases. In Massachusetts, there is a small handful of "decent" suburban commuter towns, driving scarcity. People living in Wellesly, Weston, and Newton may perceive a high quality of life relative to people living in Randolph, Dedham, or Chelmsford, but there are far more Randolphs, Dedhams, and Chelmsfords surrounding Boston, and the few Welleselys, Westons and Newtons have much to be desired. And when you live near Boston and everyone gets 1 cattle car per hour during rush hour, the "Top 10 Things To Do in Boston" never change (and your "town" only has 5 things to do), and 90% of the businesses in "the city" are the same ones everyone has in their "town" or local mall, a better life is simply unimaginable. This is why your local Pizzerier Regina probably has 5 stars on google reviews, but Chatham Bars only has 3 stars. Because people who know better have something that serves for comparison. The most upwardly mobile people around here go to Cape Cod in the summer and a handful of mountains in the winter because the options are severely limited. Just turn on the radio and pick from the 1 hip hop station, 2 WBUR stations, and 2 90s alt/butt rock stations. The Offspring and Soundgarden had their day in the lower 45, but up here they're still banking royalties!
For a long time my wife wanted to raise her family here because she was raised here and thought the quality of life in Boston Metro was outstanding. She thought Boston was a hip city steeped in history and culture, and romanticized about moving back when she went away to school. Now, after being "home" for a couple years, she sees how rinky dink Boston and it's surrounds are, and how much of a rip-off everything is given the quality and limited options, and how uncouth the vast majority of the people can be by comparison to other cities and suburban commuter towns we've been to. To me it was like that first visit back to my elementary school after I got into college: I was amazed at how narrow the hallways were, how small the desks and classrooms were, and how much of the place badly needed an update. Suffer a train ride to Boston and you end up in brutalist Back Bay Station with its dank dungeon of platforms, diesel saturated air, and oh not one but two Dunkin Donutses, or South Station, which is quaint but commercialized and crowded with aimless drifters, or North Station, which I don't even remember what the inside looks like.
I grew up taking weekend trips to DC, Philadelphia and Manhattan, or heading out to the Adirondacks, the Catskills, and Berkshires, sailing and checking out towns on both sides of the LI Sound, and fishing the Atlantic Ocean from Cape May to Montauk to Cape Cod. After my first year in Boston the novelty wore off - there's nothing to do and nowhere to go (which is why 3/4 of the city rotates apartments on the same day every year - to try a new angle to entitlement points). And the cost of living anywhere is so high that once you buy into it you can hardly afford to leave, even if you could fight the hordes going to the same place.
So it's not that I can't afford to live here, it's just that living here isn't worth the asking price. Even if you live in Wellesly, your "city" is still Boston, you sit in the same 2 lanes of traffic to go to Corporation or Coast Guard Beach in the summer (creative names!). You get one road west, one road north, and one road south - and that's it, but not even consistently in those cardinal directions! Again, the options are limited. The quality of life is low. Unless you like Bertucci's, bullet proof mountains, and swimming in ice cold shark infested shore break.
What is Massachusetts' comparable to Wayne, Narberth, Ardmore, Media, Phoenixville, Horsham, Blue Bell, Jenkintown or even Manayunk PA? Or to Haddonfield, Moorestown or Collingswood, Morristown, Red Bank, or Rumson? How does Wellesley compare to Scarsdale, Tarrytown, Bronxville, Mt. Kisco, Katonah, Pleasantville, Armonk, Irvington, Hastings, Larchmont, Rye, or even Beacon or Croton or Brewster NY? What does it have on Greenwich, Stamford, New Canaan, Ridgefield, or Georgetown/Wilton CT?
Repeat from my earlier post: As for the chain restaurant comment, in the towns i frequent, they almost don't exist. Where do you hang out? Concord has places like Woods Hill Table, Saltbox Kitchen, Main Street Cafe, 80 Thoreau, Merchants Row, Walden Italian, etc. Lexington has Via Lago, Dabin, Daikanyama, Lexx, il Casale, Tres Petite, Avenue Deli, Cake Inc, etc.. Winchester has TWK, Sukura, Piazza Dolce, A Tavola, Black Horse, Lucia, D'Agastinos, La Patisserie, FULLer Cup, etc. Andover has Somebody's Place, Raggini, Elm Square Oyster, Mootone, LaRosa's, Casa Blanca, Andolini's, Samuel's, etc. Even Westford, which is an upscale 495 town that you referenced, has Seoul, Karma, Evivva Cucina, Fuse, Bamboo, Meat Again, Rangoli Grill, Paul's, Gene's Chinese Flatbread, etc.
Less chain restaurants in the suburbs here than the other places I've lived- Chicago, SoCal, Bay Area, Seattle- and I'm talking about a pretty wide margin. Are you ignoring the points we've made to continue to drive home your point? That much seems transparent.
As for your comparables, I'll take Massachusetts' selection of Winchester, Lexington, Concord, Cambridge, Wellesley, Weston, Newton, Needham, Marblehead, Andover, Hingham, and Arlington over any of the major areas you just listed (especially CT). More broadly, I'll take outer ring suburbs like Duxbury, Westford, Acton, Newburyport over the selection you could provide. For us, we compared a town like Northbrook in Chicago's North Shore to a comparable town in Greater Boston like Andover. And even for a native Chicagoan, it was pretty glaring. We compared a waterfront town like Hingham to a waterfront town like Highland park, and again, it was pretty glaring. We compared the 'it' suburb immediately outside of the city, Evanston vs. Cambridge. No comparison there. We compared an outer ring suburb like Lake Zurich to an outer ring suburbs like Westford, and sure enough, it wasn't close. The suburbs here are absolutely more charming.. Less chains, less strip malls, (way) more natural beauty. Less major highways, and more two lane roads. And, despite what you claim, beautiful town centers and downtown strips abound.
You mention the lack of food. You mention your issues with the highways. You take shots at the public transportation. Yet you never mention how wonderful the beaches in Massachusetts are, even when the Travel Channel tells us otherwise: Top 10 Beaches in America : TravelChannel.com | Travel Channel You never talk about how hip and electric Cambridge is. What say you about all of the notoriety Cambridge gets?: https://www.forbes.com/pictures/5965.../#41277b5c245d You fail to agree that Massachusetts likely has the best school systems in the country, yet data has been provided. You mention going on weekend trips to the Adirondacks, or Manhattan. Ever been to the white mountains? Or made a trip up to Portland, ME for the weekend? How about Acadia? Maybe tried Nantucket on for size? FYI, Manhattan is still an option.
More importantly, Can you back any of it with data? Or is this strictly and emotional conversation, one that you have frequently with your wife and her family? You can't understand why such value is placed on living in the area, and act like people here are 'just used to it' and 'know nothing else'. Can you show me some data on areas of the country that are most/least well traveled? Surely, Greater Boston's population hasn't seen much. I call you on all of it. Much like others on this forum, I've lived in a few different areas of this country. I know what Boston lacks- most notably affordability. But I certainly know what is has, and transportation, beautiful suburbs, great schools, proximity to other exciting areas are certainly on that list.
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