I lived in a 6 bed unit on the top level of a 3-story duplex that had 4 people living on the ground floor. It was a massive house that allowed for ten non-related people to live together on a street filled with similar houses, lined with massive oak trees and a five minute walk from a lovely pond. Gorgeous neighborhood.
Edit: I’ll add that I never experienced any negative effects in JP that I’d associate with such dense living. Unlike the more rowdy student oriented neighborhoods like Allston that were far more rough and messy.
Also, for those not from the area, JP is indeed a "Boston neighborhood" but it's on the outskirts around parkland, the Arnold Arboretum, etc. and is about a 30 minute public transit ride [edit: on the Orange line not Green line]. So don't imagine this is in Boston in the way many might imagine. It probably has more in common with close in suburbs like Arlington than downtown.
Of course, the reason that Arlington doesn't have better transit links is that they didn't want it when the Red line was extended to Alewife. JP is certainly less suburban than Arlington but it also doesn't (to me) really feel like it's in "the city."
If I go into Cambridge after work, it takes me something like 45 minutes to get to Alewife near the Arlington line in pretty nominal reverse commute traffic. It takes me a good other half hour to go the last few miles. (And that's Cambridge. Boston would take even longer although I'd normally take a different route from my house)
But what I'm more interested in is this:
> Nearly every single home is multi-family, and the single families that do exist are usually $2 million and up.
SFH are already 1 million and up in LA, really in SD, LA, SF, Seattle, and Vancouver. It will be interesting to see what happens to SFH values if they become scarcer. It seems like it might have the opposite effect that the NIMBYs generally fear, and make them even _more_ wealthy.
SFH's or rather, the underlying land the house sits on, is going to become insanely valuable as the amount available dwindles and population grows.
There is no unwinding this trend. The only thing that can be done is to ignore and not worry about the price of a SFH, and subdivide the land into more apartments so that more people can afford to live on that parcel of land.
JP isn't quite a suburb but I look to it as a fantastic example of how suburban development could be condensed without losing its character. With proper upzoning, suburbs could have denser cores of multi-family housing without impacting those that want less dense housing outside the core. These towns would be more walkable and prettier places to live.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/is-mass-timber-the-buildin...
I remember that Sanbornton quake. We lived in rural NH. At first I thought it was the clothes washer...then the house really started shaking.
From my understanding wood is actually pretty good for earthquakes.
>It is dense
It's absolutely not dense, probably less dense than newer suburbs with smaller lots.
>walkable, and extremely beautiful.
I'll give you that, it definitely looks beautiful.
You're comparing a neighborhood of Boston to one of the largest cities in the US.
A more apt comparison would be the West University Place suburb of Houston that has roughly the same population density and similar size as JP. It's an older Houston suburb.
A "dense" suburban area would be something Jamaica in Queens, NYC. That has something like 6 times the density of JP.
It is dense, walkable, and extremely beautiful. There is no reason every neighborhood with duplexes has to look like cookie cutter sprawl that makes people unhappy.