Kayla Comalli

September 1st is when most Boston rental units turnover. Boston's availability of apartments is up 250% today versus this time last year. That's.... extreme. Available today = vacant tomorrow. This is creating a K-shaped rental market in Boston, read on for more:

New piece by @LehmanBrother42 on Boston’s policy environment published in Pirate Wires–go check it out: piratewires.com/p/is-boston-… As many of you know, I’m a huge fan of Boston. I was born here, lived here pretty much my whole life etc… etc… but far more importantly, I’ve chosen to build here (LevelUp, Grubhub, Groma) because it’s a great city with great people. Groma is probably the most direct example of my commitment to this city. We are investing huge amounts of time and treasure into making housing work better for everyone in Boston. Groma breathes new life into old properties, we advocate for policies that create more housing, we own and operate 100+ properties, and enable everyone, including our renters, to own them along with us. While we’ll expand the Groma model to other cities in the future, we’re starting in Boston for a reason. It’s a unique city and a place capable of forging solutions to local and global problems. A big part of Groma’s approach to investing to improve cities we operate in is an active approach to policy risk. A bad policy can do tremendous damage to cities as we’ve seen time and time again. Lots of cities across the US, including most of the big ones, have a tendency to propose or implement policies that are bad for residents, businesses and economic growth more broadly, but may have short term positive effects for certain favored groups, which is helpful during election cycles. Groma has a variety of strategies for mitigating the impact of these policies. In some cases, our scale and operational flexibility allow us to minimize their impact; in others, we’re able to work with aligned groups to stop the proposals from being implemented in the first place. This latter approach tends to rely heavily on active discussion and calling attention to the negative expected impacts of policy proposals when appropriate. Chris’s article is pretty harsh, but it fits squarely into this category. Our goal here is to build awareness of the risk posed not just to Boston, but to Massachusetts’s economy as a whole, by these policies. The state legislature in particular has been pretty well attuned to Boston’s political excesses, and conveying to them the importance of maintaining smart, pro-growth policy at the state level has been an effective strategy. I care a lot about Boston. I know Chris feels the same. And caring about something sometimes requires saying some pretty harsh truths. Boston has a choice in the coming years. Do we go for the Mamdani/Johnson/Breed doom loop ride, or skip it? SF is already recovering, NYC is headed down a scary path, and Chicago is in a rough spot with no obvious path out. Boston is doing fine today, but flirting with terrible choices with predictably terrible results. If you care about Boston, read Chris’s (extremely thorough) article, and let’s work together to not make the same mistakes other cities have in the past few years. There’s no need to repeat the experiment. As always, feel free to ping me or Chris with any questions about this piece–we’re always happy to chat.