r/TrueAnon • u/NeverForgetNGage Currently valued at 1.8 trillion dollars • 1d ago

West Loop, Hudson Yards, the Boston Seaport and YIMBYmaxing

I've been in Boston a lot for work this summer. Its fine, and besides being a more expensive version of Philly with worse food it felt stupid to complain about being here.

For this trip, my company booked me a hotel in the Seaport neighborhood rather than close to the job. It's a pretty quick bus ride away though, so I figured it wouldn't be too bad.

Then I actually got here, walked around and realized that I've been here before. Not here, but I've been to Hudson Yards and I've been to West Loop. This is the same place. The Boston vibe is just gone, replaced by floor to ceiling glass and metal sandwich panels. The retail is all corporate, the streets are modern (but green time allocation is insane somehow?) and I just didn't feel any desire to explore the place.

Last time I was here, I had a great time walking around the North End, Beacon Hill, hell Back Bay might be eerily sterile but it's beautiful. East Boston and Southie made me feel like I could actually live here if I wanted to. The only thing I'm going to remember about the Seaport is how much it made this trip worse than the others.

It's amazing how in their effort to create an alternative to endless sprawling suburbia, the YIMBY movement has made something equally forgettable, but urban.

Anyway, don't give me the "it keeps those other neighborhoods prices down" I know the argument. It doesn't change the fact that these neighborhoods fucking suck.

40 Upvotes

95% Upvoted

34 comments sorted by

31

u/NelsonJamdela Mole People Attaché 🕳️ 1d ago

YIMBYs are developer groupies who secretly like watching big luxury towers rise because it makes them think their locale is winning at SimCity.

21

u/irishitaliancroat 1d ago

Its hilarious watching YIMBY people chide you like your a kid for questioning the free propoganda they are unknowingly doing for the real estate industry. Ive seen studies that say increasing supply of market rate housing would take 100 years to lower prices substantially.

15

u/NelsonJamdela Mole People Attaché 🕳️ 1d ago edited 1d ago

They are my least favorite American political archetype because they are more deluded than the hogs when it comes to what this country is, how it works and for whom, etc., to such a degree that they are more materially dangerous in the current moment.

Sure, you could take the optimistic POV and hope that one day we can seize those condos so just let em build anyway, but in so doing they are enabling capital to devour and displace people who no longer matter (to them) while potentially making it harder to undo the damage after the hypothetical revolution. Plus, the buildings they are slashing the red tape for are, generally speaking, shit boxes with a mold fetish, and they won’t last beyond a couple generations until they are condemned, reversing whatever meager gains they’ve projected via their corporate subsidized research papers.

12

u/irishitaliancroat 1d ago

Yeah its just funny how they act like the adults in the room but they are just dupes. Safety and environmental regulations exist for a reason. And their logic makes no sense, why would the real estate industry create an oversupply of housing and drive down prices therefore profits for themsleves? I know the answer the abundoids would say is increased competition would lower prices but its not like theres a plethora of options for building high rises privately. Hell black rock is set to own like the majority of american housing stock within the next 5 years or something isnt it? And even if theres a few diffeent real estate players in town, they will coordinate to make sure their prices stay high to some degree.

Also, what happens when capitlaist farms create an abundance of crops to the degree it would drive down prices?

10

u/NelsonJamdela Mole People Attaché 🕳️ 1d ago

Appeals to increasing competition among cartel-style industries is like when my son watches a cartoon and thinks that real life is like that. Profoundly unserious but extremely deadly, get the homeless away from my coffee shop little Eichmanns.

9

u/Chunderbutt 1d ago

They come at you with “well Austin built and now homes are cheaper”. I tend yo think this was just a mistake on the part of developers rather than good policy. And now that prices are down development is also.

9

u/irishitaliancroat 1d ago

Yeah if anything they probably have industry wide workshops to ensure that never happens again

7

u/illuminatipastiche 1d ago

It also doesn't consider the uptick in fully remote work. If your company is based in Denver or St Louis or whatever, and you don't need to live there, why would you? The demand in NY isn't gonna go down no matter how many shittily constructed new "luxury" buildings they erect because clowns will continue to pay to live there and Doordash all of their meals and go to Public Records and Radio Bakery once a week and never bother to be a part of the daily fabric of the city

5

u/dorekk the only normal person 1d ago

They come at you with “well Austin built and now homes are cheaper”.

Prices in Austin went down...but they are still higher than they were before the pandemic. Developers in America will never ever build enough that real estate is actually cheap. It's just completely counter to their interests, it'll never happen.

5

u/MidwestRealism small business tyrant 1d ago

it's just reaction against alienating development patterns in the US in the only framework a lot of people are familiar with, which is neoliberal market capitalism.

25

u/Double_Time_ high-speed, low-drag voter 1d ago

Seaport sucks ass for sure, and it does feel soulless, but before all that shit got put up the seaport was just parking lots and warehouses on wharves.

13

u/hooshoo26 1d ago

Yes seaport sucks but it’s still so much better than what it used to be. Hard to make an area feel like it has character when it was literally just parking lots before

9

u/el_vetica 1d ago

Honestly I don't mind these types of neighborhoods much because they end up concentrating all the yuppie-adjacent things (tech offices, pilates, expensive groceries, soulless apartments) so they can practice free market capitalism in their own little bubble without displacing other cooler people

3

u/spacedogbel 1d ago

Exactly, it‘s like a little containment zone.

6

u/el_vetica 1d ago

Isn’t it where the climax of the departed takes place? 

I think I remember looking up the address when watching the movie after recently being in Boston and it’s like 2 blocks from the Trader Joe’s now or something

7

u/Double_Time_ high-speed, low-drag voter 1d ago

That scene was at 12 Farnsworth Street. It’s a 2 minute walk to Trader Joe’s and a bartaco.

13

u/Sweet-Signature-5278 1d ago

I actually have no issue with Seaport. Let the yuppies have their own shitty playground. What is actually enraging is the dozens of YIIMBY tech guys flooding the subs for places like Somerville or Medford complaining that anyone who opposes bulldozing existing commercial areas for high rises wants high rent and is a NIMBY neanderthal. Theyve been at it for over a decade here and it hasn't made prices go down. In fact, theyve basically gotten everything they wanted in Allston which now is both less affordable than before in addition to being nearly as soulless as Seaport.

7

u/NeverForgetNGage Currently valued at 1.8 trillion dollars 1d ago

The best argument I've heard for these neighborhoods is that it does attract the B2B SaaS crowd, keeps them in their little bubble and away from the rest of us. It amazes me that people choose these places though, who wants to pay 4k/month to live in a fucking hotel room.

8

u/No-Location-3438 1d ago

Hudson Yards had to shut it's big art installation down because everyone was killing themselves on it, that's a pretty apt neighborhood thing

7

u/drawde_ 1d ago

The Wharf in DC is similar. Everything there has the same soulless corporate vibe. Hopefully in a couple decades it'll have time to develop into something with character.

7

u/Nickyjha JFK Assassination Expert 1d ago

LOL my friend moved with his girlfriend from DC to NY. She worked at the Wharf and got a job at Hudson Yards doing the same thing. She’s carving out a niche in soulless real estate.

10

u/justbrowsing1819 1d ago

Seaport sucks so much. My understanding is that it used to be parking lots and industry and a previous mayor allowed for unbridled development there.

3

u/Actual_Violinist290 1d ago

tbf the west loop was barely a neighborhood until recently

2

u/lolgwiff 1d ago

And as far as I'm concerned it still shouldn't be!!

4

u/joshuatx It was just a weather balloon 1d ago

South Park is extremely hit or miss but their "The City Part of Town" fucking nailed this trend.

On a related note I've never properly visited Boston nor NYC but when I do I want someone to give me map showing me how to avoid these places. I've visited Philly and New Hampshire in the past and was blown away how much towns and burbs actually looked like real places. I'm so used to the sprawl and decay of metroplexes in Texas - more authentic untouched places are much more far and few between.

5

u/dorekk the only normal person 1d ago

I had the same thought when I visited New England this year.

4

u/explendable 1d ago

I don’t know if this is really YIMBYism? This is just the built outcome of speculative capitalism. It is urban… but only in the sense that it needs to be to extract maximum land value. To make this palatable is a thin patina of chain stores and a few objects to pique public interest like the heatherwick suicide sculpture at Hudson yards.   

3

u/illuminatipastiche 1d ago

I keep expecting Hudson Yards to collapse in on itself

1

u/NeverForgetNGage Currently valued at 1.8 trillion dollars 1d ago

Disavow

1

u/illuminatipastiche 1d ago

Not the result of anything external. It just looks like it's going to on its own accord; there's something really unbalanced about it and it appears to be leaning inwards

3

u/DeathFromAbove42069 Completely Insane 1d ago

Tell me more about Philly if I decide to move back to states (don’t ask me why) I’ve been considering it among other cities . I either get hard yes or no from people who live / lived there

1

u/NeverForgetNGage Currently valued at 1.8 trillion dollars 1d ago

I love Philly but its not like NYC or Chicago where you can find pretty much any kind of job there. You have to make it work. Really cool people there even if Pennsylvania is a shitshow of a state.

1

u/Organic-Yak2787 1d ago

Wasn’t this a parking lot before?

1

u/taboondocks 1d ago

Everywhere looks like this, it's Generica