The Apartment Hunt Continues (And These People Have Lost Touch With Reality)

Braintree Street at dusk

To bring you up to date, we have to move this year. We have most probably been priced out of Allston, but I look at listings sometimes. What I'm finding is astonishing. The housing prices have skyrocketed in the 15 years we've been living here. This is Allston we're talking about. People used to make fun of Allston. But we love it. I wrote about the neighborhood I've called home for two decades in 2016:

Allston is a thickly settled multi-generational, multi-cultural Boston neighborhood off the Mass Pike. It's a student ghetto, situated on the 57 and 66 bus routes, and the B train from Boston College to Boston University to Kenmore (Red Sox territory), and onward into Park Street, where you can change trains and get pretty much anywhere you want to go. Lower Allston, or "LA" so dubbed by its genial citizenry, is a comparatively quiet residential sprawl of vintage double and triple deckers. Upper Allston is the busy ramshackle Mah Jong board of brownstones and walk-ups and restaurants and coffee shops and tattoo boutiques and thrift stores and churches and a thousand other urban services and delicacies. Stand in the middle of Upper Allston any time of day and you're in the perfect spot to take the pulse of Rock City. It's a hopping hive of students and rockers and immigrants from everywhere, and when you stand on the corner at night, you think, "Excellent city." 

Well that's no longer accurate. We made it cool, now the wealthy people have taken over and priced us right out. Same old story. Happens all the time. It happened to Cambridge 25 years ago. Now it's Allston's turn.

Case in point. "The Indie" is a newer apartment building on Braintree Street in Allston. Braintree is a little street that goes from the restaurant that's currently called Hobson’s (the old Pizzeria Regina) to the Stop and Shop plaza. It’s located right beside the commuter rail tracks and highway. 

I walked the short length of Braintree every day for nine years because my work was in the last building on the end. 119 Braintree, you can see it from the Pike. Braintree was all industrial--plumbing parts and automotive and parking lots. Safe, quiet, but not much to look at, really.

So it's been redeveloped. Built up. The Indie is being heavily marketed to young people, and it's being touted as "affordable housing."  That's a laugh riot. Affordable for WHO?

I should mention, if you didn't know, that "indie" is a term likened to Allston back when it was still "Rock City" and populated with a ton of indie rock bands. There were rehearsal spaces and "band houses." 

That's all gone. 

Now "indie" is nothing but a marketing term to attract wealthy young people to an overpriced building. They offer “work pods” and a rooftop lounge, among other amenities. 

And you can rent a 348 sq ft studio for just $3425!

348 square feet. For $3425.

 

These people have lost touch with reality. This is just gross. 

 

Indie my ass.∎