6 Condos In Beverly…Under $100,000!

If you’re living in the area and just starting out, you should give some of these a look.

You could spend your 20s by the beach in Beverly, have an easy C-rail commute to the hub, and own for less than rentals cost almost anywhere.

5 of the 7 are on Northridge Road, so I’ll just list two of those — this is a co-op, so traditional mortgages don’t fly.

82 Northridge Road, #82
Beverly, MA 01915
Beds:2 /Baths: 1.5
SQ.FT.: 1,000
$50,000

100 Northridge Road Address, #100
Beverly, MA 01915
Beds: 3/Baths: 1.5
SQ.FT.: 1300
$79,900

158 Park Street Address, #5
Beverly, MA 01915
Beds:1 /Baths:1
SQ.FT.:530
$ 99,000

Feds Bail Out, Install New Course Of Shingles To Prevent Trickle-Down

Boston Sweet Digs Home

“A Dream Home For Thousands”

In case, in this time of dire economic crsis—though I can’t say I’ve noticed any particular problems around here—you’ve lost site of how good you have it, take a gander at this little story from CNN.

A sharp-eyed business student visiting Tijuana caught sight of a shanty town out the window of a bus, and realized that shipping containers would make great modular homes for the area. Before you scoff, take a look inside the place; it’s not too shabby, even if you haven’t been living inside palates and tar paper your whole life.

While my ceilings may be higher, and my space better, the 320 sq. ft. of floor is right about the size of my own humble abode. And with a price tag of a mere $8,000, it would almost certainly be cheaper to find an oddly-sized, undeveloped lot somewhere in Boston and plunk one of these on top of it.

Of course, then you’d probably have the neighborhood association all over you for erecting such an ugly structure—and let’s be honest: no one wants that. So seeing as shipping containers are out, here are the next best things you can find in (or essentially in) the People’s Republic of Cambridge. The place on Park especially seems like an outstanding deal to me.

70 Park St #12
Somerville, MA 02143
1 bed, 1 bath
352 sq. ft.
$169,000

5 Haskell #46
Cambridge, MA 02140
1 bed, 1 bath
390 sq. ft.
$215,000

2 Arlington St #4
Cambridge, MA 02140
0 beds, 1 bath
340 sq. ft.
$229,000

It’s a New Day on Beacon Hill

Boston Sweet Digs Home

Allston-Brighton as an Alternative to the Fenway?

A lot of people who can’t afford a condo in neighborhoods like the Back Bay or South End go casting about for reasonable alternatives to city life in other neighborhoods. And there IS a “substitute” for just about every downtown neighborhood you can think of. For example:

• Someone looking for a condo in the North End, where the median sales price of a condo is about $550K, might consider lower-priced Charlestown, where the median condo sales price is only $375K.
• Someone pining away for the cobblestone streets of Beacon Hill (median condo sales price $707K) might take a look at East Cambridge (median sales price $575K).
• How about Jamaica Plain instead of the South End or Brookline instead of the Back Bay? I even know a few Cambridge types who vacated that city for cheaper East Boston.
• And here’s one more: Allston/Brighton instead of the Fenway. The median sales price of a condo in the Fenway is $340K. In Brighton, $248K.

According to a recent Boston Herald article, Allston’s housing market is “growing up” as more young professionals and immigrants move into the area, supplanting absentee landlords and the student crowd. According to Bob Imperato of the Allston Board of Trade who was quoted in the Herald article, “Allston is benefiting because it is surrounded by more affluent communities, (but is) very convenient to the city, affordable and has a nice retail area.” Realtors handling that neighborhood concur, saying they see more owner-occupants purchasing and fixing up two and three-family houses that were once occupied by students.

That’s good news for long-time Allston/Brighton residents who have grown impatient with a sometimes out-of-control student population. And for new residents enjoying Allston’s proximity to restaurants, the T, Cambridge, and the Mass Pike — all for a fraction of what they would pay in the Fenway— it’s also good news.

Here are three of the newest listings in Allston-Brighton:

38 Breck Avenue, #2
Brighton
BEDS:3/BATHS:2
SQ.FT: 1471
$419K

65 Lanark Road, #8
Brighton
BEDS:2/BATHS:1
Sq.Ft: 746
$319,500

79 Parsons Street
Brighton
BEDS:5/BATHS:1
SQ.FT: 1890
$525K

Sweet Digs Boston Home
Brookline, Brighton Archives

It’s a New Day on Beacon Hill

Deval Patrick has taken some heat in his short tenure as Governor of his here Commonwealth. There were the curtains. Then there was the Cadillac. Then there was the $72,000 secretary…for his wife. Not really what the voters want to see from a guy running on a reform ticket, you know?

Then there was the monumental failure of his highly-touted casino plan, which was doubly humiliating, as much of the opposition came from an allegedly friendly legislature. Did I mention he’d already spent a good deal of the money those casinos were supposed to bring in?

But, as Tommy Carcetti would say, a new day is dawning. A day where every construction site from here to West Stockbridge can get its business done without a mandatory, state-funded, overtime-paid on-site policeman.  And what’s truly impressive is the political manuvering the Governor did to bring it about.

So a new day under the dome means new listings on Beacon Hill. I mean, what else are you going to do? Lose money in the market? Watch your cash depreciate in a bank account?

47 Chestnut Street
Beacon Hill, MA 02108
6 beds,  4 baths
3,600 sq. ft.
$4,100,000

21 Revere Street, #5
Beacon Hill, MA 02114
2 beds, 1.5 baths
955 sq. ft.
$699,000

100 Chestnut Street, #1
Beacon Hill, MA 02108
2beds, 2 baths
1,373 sq. ft.
$1,395,000

Feds Bail Out, Install New Course of Shingles to Prevent Trickle-Down

A recent spin around the blog-o-sphere landed me this unpleasant fact, courtesy of Stacy Meyers at Boston.com: apparently 684,000 people over 50 are in trouble with their mortgage, and over 50,000 already lost their homes. Now, those seniors and near-seniors paid taxes their entire lives, they are still paying taxes, and they will even pay some taxes after they shuffled off their mortal coils — I think it’s safe to say that they’re paying for the recent bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac just like the rest of us.

So what are our new government-owned mortgage behemoths going to do for those taxpayers?

Is it bubkiss or budkiss? Anyway, I know how to spell zilch.

It’s lucky Social Security is in such good shape after all of the hoopla over that issue in the last — is it 2 or 3 presidential elections? What happened with that again?

According to Toni Straka at The Prudent Investor, the bailout doubled the public debt of this country. But now we — the taxpayers — own all of those mortgages, and so the power to change the terms of the bad loans that are at the heart of this whole mess is in our hands, right? This is going to be good for the average citizen in the long run, right? I mean, we’re going to see some real benefit from this weird and scary (and probably necessary — Greenspan thinks so, anyway) corporate welfare — right? Right? Um…guys?

We should have had regulation of the mortgage mammoths just as Greenspan warned in 2004, but now we have control. So what are we going to do?

By “we” I guess I’m talking about the assorted clowns, goons, and evil, greedy X-Files types who got us into this mess, and that keeps me up at night.

But let’s assume “we” really want to put the real estate market — and the country — back on the rails. What should we expect to get out of this?

The answer is simple: we need to stop the foreclosure process and provide debt relief to the people who need it most. We desperately need to keep that inventory off the market, and we need to keep those homeowners in the market. Demand for houses isn’t really low — it’s just stupid to think people don’t want to own their own homes — but the supply of qualified buyers is being gutted in 6 different ways by the worst fiscal mismanagement most of us have seen in our lifetimes.

Now, you hold your breath until January…or January 2013 if we elect more-of-the-same….

Here are a few things we should see right @$#%*&! now:

1. Forgiveness of any and all punitive debt attached to first mortgages. By “punitive debt” I mean default interest rates, late charges, and any other little treats the credit and collections folks have written into these ailing notes. It isn’t real money, and now there are no investors to crow and peddle influence against doing the right thing for everyone. So do it — give these people a reasonable chance to keep their homes, and welcome them back into the fold.
2. Curb the collections industry. Nobody likes those guys anyway. We need legislation that defines a lot of the industry’s practices for what they are: harassment and fraud.
3. Re-reform bankruptcy laws. The bankruptcy “reform” laws signed by president Bush early in his tenure look pretty sinister in retrospect. I don’t pretend to know all of the ins and outs, but we need to make it easier for people to shed bad debt and get a second start — we depend on the ability of individual consumers to recover, and writing off non-mortgage debt is going to hurt — holy cow! — the very same financial institutions that created this crisis in the first place. Call it a free-market simulation….
4. Refinance ailing mortgages. If you offer people another poke in the eye, they’ll just lose all hope and resign themselves to losing their homes. But if you offer to refinance their ARM (or whatever) at a decent rate and payment — even if it’s over 40 years — you create incentive for them to keep their homes.
5. Put a leash on the credit reporting bureaus. Say Mr. and Mrs. Gunderson are 2 months behind on their mortgage, and desperately trying to refinance an ARM. The lender is going to use their tanking credit score to raise the interest rate on the new loan — effectively offering them another deal with the devil. Again, if there’s no incentive to avoiding foreclosure, people are going to let it happen.

And You Were Worried ABout Risk In Real Estate? (Arrrrrr…)

Boston Sweet Digs Home

Houses Near the Allston Dining Scene

Outside the South End, Allston probably has one of the best dining scenes going in the city. It’s a perfect storm of ethnic restaurants, pubs and brunch places, good take-out and ethnic food shops.

Wait. I changed my mind.

It is THE best dining scene in the city, precisely because it has never taken itself too seriously, it is still affordable, and it has a wider variety of choices than you find most anywhere else. It’s all hip and trendy but not in the upscale way of the South End.

The sheer number of establishments means it’s possible to spend an evening or two just eating around Allston on a restaurant crawl. You can start off at any number of pubs for a drink, move to any number of top-notch ethnic restaurants for dinner, and finish at several places dedicated to desserts and pastries.

And if you want to cook at home, you can run to the Super 88 in Packard’s Corner or check out any one of several ethnic grocers and bakers in the neighborhood.

It’s such a rich smorgasboard that the Allston scene is being noticed beyond Commonwealth Avenue. Boston Magazine, in fact, cited several Allston establishments in its Best of Boston issue, including 2nd Cup Cafe, Deep Ellum, Fun Food Snackery and S&I To Go.

For those who want to live near all the culinary activity, here are a few choices:

15 Parkvale Ave, #3
Allston
BEDS:3/BATHS:1
SQ.FT:815
$279,900

1307 Commonwealth Avenue, Apt. 5
Brighton
BEDS:3/BATHs:1
SQ.FT: 960
$330,000

1409 Commonwealth Avenue, #304
BEDS:0/BATHS:1
SQ.FT: 336
$189K

Sweet Digs Boston Home
Brookline, Brighton Archives

East Somerville: Boston’s Transit Steal

At the time of its construction in 1901, Sullivan Square was one of the most impressive transit structures in the world; an elevated train stop with a trolley loop that ramped up from the street, reducing transfer times to a few steps. But by the 1970s, the station, and the area in general, had seen better days (see photo).

In the 1980s, Mike Dukakis, transit backer and one of the best governors in the history of Massachusetts (so long as you don’t miss happy hour or mind paying taxes) opened a new Sullivan Station under the I-93 overpass. While it’s still technically in Charlestown, the traffic circle at Washington Street and Route 99, along with a massive bus yard and parking lot, keep the new Sullivan far more closely attached to East Somerville.

Thought of largely as an ethnic enclave of Brazilian and Portuguese immigrants, East Somerville boasts an astounding variety of services, from hands-on pottery workshops at Mudflat Studio, to the Boston area’s most critically acclaimed taqueria, the sublime Taco Loco, to the best-priced lobster in Massachusetts at the Mt. Vernon Restaurant.

From a real estate standpoint, East Somerville has some of the best prices anywhere this close to downtown. Gut-refurbed colonials and three-deckers from the turn of the century dot quiet, wandering side streets, all but devoid of the traffic that’s churning Washington Street into dust.

It’s a safe bet you won’t find a home with three off-street parking spots minutes from I-93, and a single T-stop displaced from downtown, for under $250/sq. ft. anywhere else in the country, let alone in the still-climbing Boston market.

6 Austin St
Somerville, MA 02145
3 beds, 2 baths
1,526 sq. ft.
$380,000

4 George St #1
Somerville, MA 02145
2 beds, 1 bath
970 sq. ft.
$279,900

78 Mount Vernon St #3
Somerville, MA 02145
2 beds, 2 bath
1,033 sq. ft.
$365,000

Hitting the Links
Boston Sweet Digs Home

Hitting the Links

• According to its own marketing brochure, Archstone Boston Common “provides a catalyst for the revitalization of Boston’s Chinatown and strengthens the integrity and vitality of the community.” But does it provide a view of Boston Common? [The Chinatown Blogger]
• Fairmont Hotels and Resorts took over management of Battery Wharf. [Hanover and Prince]
• “The numbers are looking bad.” [The Boston Real Estate Blog]
• I don’t know if Barking Crab owners are wicked sleazy or wicked smart. [Universal Hub]
• Service with a smile? Not on the T. [Boston Herald]
• I never attended BC, but I learned nothing good can come of a barbecue on the roof. [7 News]
• Menino wants to turn Park Drive into a lifestyle center. Isn’t that just double-speak for a shopping mall? [Boston Daily]
• If a fire department captain says “When you open the door the smell just hits you right in the face. You can smell it six feet out,” perhaps it’s time to crack open a window to get some fresh air [wbz tv]
• Why is a program to have artists paint utility boxes in the city limited to ten locations? Don’t we have thousands of these things throughout the city? [Allston Brighton Community Blog]

Dine And Dash: Bay Village and Masa

Boston Sweet Digs Home 

And You Were Worried About Risk In Real Estate? (Arrrrrrrr….)

First, happy Talk Like a Pirate Day.  Uh…maties.

It was only last weekend that I told a friend of mine about my ill-fated attempt to buy an investment property/vacation camp in the Adirondacks, and she replied, “Just keep your money in investments — then you’ll have more when the next one comes along.”  She’s right about the “next one,” but if I were in a position to do it, I would move every cent I had into real estate. My retirement portfolio lost 12.4% this year, and we’ll see what it looks like in a week.

I hate the stock market — I hate the very idea of it.  The price of a stock has nothing — nothing! — whatsoever to do with the actual value of a company.  How many stock market crashes can you have during an 8-year period before you admit you’re just gambling, and that the house cheats?

Funny thing, though — any house on the market is still worth exactly 1 place to live and 1 place to keep your junk. If it’s a nice house, a house you like, maybe a place with the intangible qualities of both “my” and “home” attached to it, then it is worth significantly more.

Which is why Real Estate is where everyone ran to after 2001-2002.  People need to put money somewhere, and Real Estate was the place to do it — this is another factor that fed the mythic bubble, changing the faces of entire rural communities in Upstate New York (for instance), encouraging the gamblers to look north of Wall Street for a place to sit and safely tremble before the TV screen.  Now, people who could buy are wary of a market that, well, has to bottom out somewhere.  And, yeah, we’re all kind of worried about how bad it can get. But real estate is REAL — it isn’t some crazy made-up social contract like the stock market or currency.  It isn’t a piggy bank — equity stripping got a lot of people into the mess they’re in — but you can touch it and stand on it and use it while you bet that there will be more people every year who need places to live.

So, for those of you holding a bunch of worthless paper (I’m not even going to look at my 403b statements until after the election — I worked really hard for that money….), or feeling good about not owning any stock (even owning American dollars is that much better right now) — consider going to some open houses this weekend.  Kick some metaphorical tires, and think about what an investment does for you, vs. what a home — or a second home — can do for you.

9 Beach Street
Beverly, MA 01915
Beds: 3/Baths: 2.5
SQ.FT.: 2080
$650,000
Open House: Sunday, September 21, 2008 1:00 PM – 3:00 PM

94 McKay Street
Beverly, MA 01915 
Beds:3 /Baths: 1
SQ.FT.:1590
$288,000
Open House: Sunday, September 21, 2008 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM

7 Fayette Street Address
Beverly, MA 01915
Beds: 4/Baths: 1
SQ.FT.: 2325
$329,000
Open House: Sunday, September 21, 2008 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM

August Sales In Salem

Boston Sweet Digs Home

Why Hardship Never Trickles Up…and some Open Houses

Hardship never trickles up. If someone hasn’t coined that phrase by now, I’m taking it.

People wonder at the growing gap between rich and poor in this country. In fact, our current Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson (at right), said he aimed to suture that festering gash when he took the office two years ago. I guess he can pat himself on the back now for a very Bushian “mission accomplished” with today’s bailout plan.

Yes, this bailout will almost certainly cost taxpayers less than the protracted recession and possible collapse that would occur otherwise. But what it won’t do is stop another population of return-hungry fund managers from making similarly idiotic decisions in the future; if anything, it encourages the short-sighted, win-that-bonus culture that brought us here in the first place.

So while we as a nation may suffer less collectively, the people who lost thousands of dollars for millions of Americans still get to the keep the sky-high wages they earned in doing so.  This lack of accountability incentivizes irresponsible behavior in the future, while punishing those who saved prudently and limited their market exposure.

I don’t have numbers on this, but I’m willing to bet the average incomes of those heavily invested in financial firms are several orders of magnitude above those squirreling funds away in savings accounts.  It’s taxes on those same savings accounts that will keep the firms of rich investors afloat through the current financial crisis.

I love the free market as much as anyone, but as they say in Spiderman, “with great power comes great responsibility.” Irresponsible abuse of lightly-regulated markets leads to catastrophic loss.  Intentionally sloppy bookkeeping doesn’t help. And sometimes (IHMO)  you’ve just gotta make people pay for their own mistakes.

But no one wants the blood of another Great Depression on their hands, and so the cycle of boom and bust continues. The good news, I guess, is that for those wealthy enough to buy a house in the toniest of neighborhoods, there will likely be someone else willing to pay more a few years down the line. So that having been said, here are some open houses that rich people will continue to be able to afford:

24 Marlborough St #5
Back Bay, MA 02116
2 beds, 1.5 baths
980 sq. ft.
$949,900
Open House, Sunday, September 21, 2008 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM

15 River St #602
Beacon Hill, MA 02108
2 beds, 1 bath
797  sq. ft.
$679,000
Open House: Sunday, September 21, 2008 12:30 PM – 2:00 PM

108 Mount Vernon St #1
Beacon Hill, MA 02108
3 beds, 3 baths
1,640  sq. ft.
$1,595,000
Open House: Sunday, September 21, 2008 12:00 PM – 2:00 PM

And You Thought Politics was Boring

Boston Sweet Digs Home