I. Our Trip to Court
a. Spent the beginning of class disusing the trip to court last week
b. Discussed a case where a man is living in the basement apartment in a house and the landlady seems to be renting
out each room in a single-family house (might be an illegal rooming house). It was a complicated case and we got the sense there was some shady things happening at this residence. The
Judge kept telling the two parties to go see the mediator, but the landlady
kept saying no, seeming to think the mediator’s decision wouldn’t be binding.
i. Trial is likely going to be dismissed because
the landlady did not follow summary process
c. Overall, the relations between the landlords and tenants were amicable.
d. Professional tenant - knows the law so well that they look for landlords who have violations. They move in and exploit landlord’s mistakes.
II. Home Ownership
a. As
a case study, we looked at a couple who bought a house in 1977 with a budget of
$20,000. They were able to purchase half of a duplex, with an
interest rate of 18%.
i. Interest rates are now at 4%, but the price of
the house is up significantly.
ii. One of them was a teacher making $9,000 a year
and the other was a machinist with a salary of $11,000.
b. Income
to cost ratio is not what it used to be. (See image below)
III.
Housing report
Housing report
a. How
do you convince developers to build more middle-class housing?
i. There is little to no profit margin on middle
income housing because the cost of building is so high.
c. Example: E+
Green Building Program is a city sponsored program to create small affordable
housing projects that have to be sold to people who qualify for affordable
housing. For this program, the developer still fronts money for building, and
the building has to be net energy positive.
ii. The design of four units for this program was
stuck in zoning for four months because the neighbor contested the paint color
from a rendering.
1. Architect
and developer lost all their profit from the project because of how long the
zoning process took. They had to finish the project at their loss.
V.
Outstanding Questions
Outstanding Questions
a. Can
you cancel a court date once you have one?
b. What
happens when you are caught lying in court?
c. How
much is the Judge reading between the lines? How much is by the book and
literal? What is quantitative and what is qualitative?
Conclusions
Seeing the housing court process was an eye-opening experience. We appreciated how fair the Chief Justice was and how civil the relations between most of the landlords and tenants were. We discussed the disparity between income and rent/ownership prices. Many say the middle class doesn’t really exist anymore and we might be in a new gilded age. Our class feels the strategies for increasing ownership provided in the Boston Housing report were not sufficient, since they mainly expect developers to take losses in profit without much incentive.