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Not just the middle class being priced out of Boston

The Patriot Ledger reports that Ras Labs, which is developing synthetic muscles, found itself priced out of its original Innovation District digs and has moved to Quincy.

"I can see Quincy becoming the next Cambridge," the Patriot Ledger quotes the company CEO as saying.

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Comments

Except it's Quincy.

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It is likely near transit, near a major highway, near good cheap food places, near the beach ...

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The worst transit

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does the B line extend to Quincy?

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the redline has always extended to quincy.

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the Red Line with delays is still better than the B line with "normal service"

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the greenline is flawless, I agree. never over crowded and certainly never breaks down.

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Are you getting enough air in there?

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*woosh*

Also, to be serious, the red line never reached Quincy until the 1970s extension to Quincy Center. And then it was extended to Braintree in the 80s.

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that's a long time. you know what I meant. the redline have been a commuting option for decades. and is no worse than the greenline...

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The Redline: Still not the Orange line or the Greenline

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And more reasonable housing costs. I can actually see this happening and could in fact help Quincy move forward with their revitalizing plans that have since been put on hold.

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Seriously, Quincy, the next Cambridge? It's the next Medford and that is being mean to Medford.

Have any of you gone through this city? This spin by the company moving to Quincy is pure we don't want to pay high rents. There is ample office space available in North Quincy only because Slave Street has moved or is moving people into their 108 SF per worker digs on A Street in South Boston.

Quincy is a collection of proto suburban office parks which are lovely to walk to on a windy 23 degree day from North Quincy or Quincy Adams station, nice two family houses, a massive amount of rat warren apartment buildings, lousy traffic, and beaches with no waves. It does boast some good quality Asian food, some high octane drinking, plenty o'heroin, and a daft city government where the nearly continuous war between the Koch and Phelan factions borders on watching the Judean People's Front fighting the People's Front of Judea for it comic value.

Have fun in Quincy guys. I can't wait for the spin from HR to recruits telling them about the Zagat rating at Cathay Pacific.

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as a native Quincy-an I love this. Also I don't want it to turn into Cambridge. I like being able to afford to live here :(

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whats ur deal with quincy man? are u confused with Weymouth?

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Perfectly.

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point made. moving truck are on their way so I can movie somewhere along the green line

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Wellington isn't meaningfully connected with the rest of the city.

Otherwise, I would agree with you to the point where I'm eying it as a possible next move when my fledglings fly.

Oh, and Medford doesn't have a nice beach front in walking distance to those transit stops, either. Even if it doesn't have waves, you can drive or bike to Nantasket or Egypt to get some.

The transit to Boston may be key for the reasons that you state about living in Quincy, though ... people can still live in the city and reverse commute.

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Swirls , Kingston right up your alley, not Quincy.....

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I want public transit and city access and cycling access. That would be a hellish commute.

Swampscott would probably be my outer limit.

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Swirls , bike to Kingston CR station , Plymouth is your new city ( even though it is a town ) , new adventures with your kayak , and if you get homesick , it has a Budweiser house. Just chill out and you could dig it. With respect to other public trans. , it is in GATRA .

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I covered Kingston's part of the Bay Circuit Trail two years ago. I know the place cold.

The Cranberry Watershed Preserve is fairly confusing, a dead cranberry operation now gone wild.

I got lost there 3 times. http://youtu.be/vEYORIx7m8c

The town is an uneasy mix of newbie home buyers generally resented by the old standbys even though it made their remote dumps more valuable.

The rail station is in a remote backwater and it is another burb where a pedestrian is a sore thumb pariah.

The road net is sweet for road biking but a bit crowded.

I usually do my south shore stuff catching commuter rail out of either Quincy or Brantree stations cause the interzone rate is way lower.

I like them for all the reasons they are disparaged. North Quincy has Squantum and a whole converted array of properties with a great bike grid that flows readily to Wollaston.

Squantum was where Harriet Quimby died in an early aviator accident. She was a close friend of Earhart and a glamorous figure in her own right.

The navy used it as an air strip after that but canned it once the switch to jets began because the strip was too short and it would be a hazard to Logan.

That's when it moved to South Weymouth.

The area is the early epicenter for Arabic American settlement and the surf guitarist Dick Dale came from a family there that moved west.

I totally love the complex evolving ethnic mix there. It is a typical sharp elbow masshole city but it has a lot of heart and the fact that it is the butt of jokes from turned up noses makes me like it more.

It is inversion. Having people think it is hot is the kiss of death.

And Quincy has a restaurant named after Gunther Toody!!! http://youtu.be/cSxfBlEB3kQ

https://flic.kr/p/ohMfPu It is spelled differently but we know.

It is that kind of place.

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Gunther is in Plymouth too , oo oo oo ! But Quincy was the home of the world famous Morey Pearl's .

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Just want to let you know this is a post of epic beauty. I laughed, I cried, I got food poisoning at the Clam Box.

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It's very sad that Quincy offends you so very much. You shouldn't have to deal with that.

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The beach! You're kidding right?

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I do it every day... And I don't take the 'T' because I live in Boston...

Walk to Orange line station, Orange line to Downtown Crossing, Red Line to Quincy center, #222 us to Shipyard area. That takes about 90 minutes.

So I drive... 30-45min

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And Quincy has plenty of on street and off street parking.

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I thought it was talking about rats being priced out

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Why do you think we're starting to see a rise in sidewalk problems related to rats burrowing?

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especially seeing as a good number of these biotech,IT or sciency types already reside in"Little Asia"(Quincy has had a heavy Asian populatin before the influx of many Indians,Pakistanis,Bangladeshi etc in recent years).

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It's too far from Boston either by train or car, a good 40 minutes, it's the South shore "Irish Riviera" the only good thing about living in Quincy is your not going to drive 2 hours to Ikea.

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India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh are part of Asia.

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For Quincy to be the next Cambridge they have to redo the areas around their T stops. Kendall Square T is right in the middle of all the employers their (and increasingly housing) so its easy to take the T to a job in Cambridge. The Quincy stops are surrounded by vast surface lots similar to many suburban commuter rail stops, which make it convenient for residents with cars to drive and park at the T, but inconvenient to get off the T and get around. This could obviously easily to done if Quincy wanted to redevelop the surface lots (which are subsidized by the state) into something like office buildings that generates taxes for the city, but we shall see.

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many apartment or developments have free shuttles to take commuters to the T

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I really hate how the land around T stops in Quincy is wasted, but except for Quincy Adams (which is aggressively horrible) I don't think they're really all that inconvenient for pedestrian usage. Uninviting, perhaps, but it's easy enough to walk from the stations to the surrounding area. Quincy Center doesn't even have surface parking, although it has its own issues.

But Quincy Adams (which is the area Ras Labs is moving to anyway) is indeed horrible. The more east side of the tracks aren't even connected to the station, (apparently for traffic concerns) and to get anywhere other than the Home Depot you have to cross the massive Burgin Parkway right as it feeds into the Braintree Split. Still, it would require quite a lot of work to turn that into a more sensible train station, while North Quincy and Wollaston could be improved just by dropping some buildings into the parking lots.

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Moral of the story: don't eat the brown acid, man.

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What if someone told you then that Somerville would one day be a hip, sought after, and expensive place to live? A place with numerous eateries, watering holes, and a vibrant local arts culture ... and about to get a rapid transit line that served most of the city to make it even more desirable. Would you have believed them?

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My friends moved to Somerville in 1985 and I moved there in 1987. It was obvious by then that the Red Line was gentrifying (or whatever you call it) Davis Square, and by 1987 or 88 you already had the "No Barnies" bullshit, so it was obvious that there was a new population moving in. The local arts culture was already putting down roots by that time, although it took longer for that to be reflected in the city's retail establishment.

I'm not sure if this is really relevant to the question of Quincy in any case, as I know next to nothing about that part of the South Shore. If younger people are starting to choose it now as a public-transit-accessible alternative to Cambridge and Somerville, then, yeah, maybe it could become "the next Cambridge" in 20 or 30 years (lord knows we need one, since the real Cambridge has been a shadow of its former self for longer than I'd like to think about).

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So much of public perception is received opinion and status injection into things of marginal value.

I just see the area as a certain mix of ecotones with a certain set of settlement patterns and so on.

A warbler doesn't know from Cambridge or Quincy as long as the thickets have lots of fat inchworms.

I only live in Cambridge cause it's free and I get paid. The minute that changes it's Fitchburg Ho!!
Or maybe Brockton.

The lower the entry level cost, the greater the room for value growth.

And if it stagnates, hey, I got a roof over my head with a low carrying cost structure.

I've been involved with Cambridge since 1962, so it isn't like I need much more of it.

And as you move toward retirement, empty nests and such, there is no longer much need to live in a status youth zone, particularly when disruptive tech has undermined many of the former practical advantages.

Those I know who cling to places like Cambridge past mid life are often like some batty uncle wearing a lampshade at a kids kegger unless they are paid very well to be here.

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Medford will become the new Cambridge. Think about it for a minute. We have the Fellsway and Mystic lake and river system, in time two green line stations (Tufts and route 16) and we are accessible to 93 and 95. Plans are underway to link Medford up both to the minute man bike path and the new common path. We have two historic town centers, West medford and Medford Sq and best of all we are a 10-20 minute driving commute to both somerville and cambridge. To top it off we're anchored by one of bosons finest school and a thriving research institution, Tufts University.

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it is still not Cambridge in the sense that this CEO is talking about: a center of gravity for biotech, life sciences, high tech, and so on. It's entirely possible that Quincy could go the way of Somerville in terms of leisure amenities and an arts scene in another 25 years or so, too. As an investor, I still wouldn't remotely bet on it developing its own Kendall / Tech / Central Square-like nexus of venture-backed companies and outposts of Silicon Valley.

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... because I lived in West Somerville from 1987 to 2002. The gentrification was well underway by 1990, since the Davis Square stop came in in 1984.

When we started house-hunting in 2001, we realized that we were priced out of Somerville unless we wanted to be landlords. We ended up in Watertown.

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No , but then again I thought that the First National warehouse ( former Ford Motor assembly plant ) would never make it as a mall . There is still a remnant of the grocery business still standing in the area though.

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on Quincy. As for being like Cambridge, Cambridge ceased being Cambridge a long time ago. Ditto Somerville.

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Its just a matter of time before Quincy gets gentrified too and loses all of it's character. I was in Teele Square earlier tonight and was in utter shock. Just a bunch of lily white kids from CT or Ohio, or some other bland generic American suburbia, wearing a uniform of flannels and boat shoes. These people move here for the ethnic diversity they so deeply crave, but they're only destroying it and turning into the urban equivalent of say an Andover.

I'm personally getting very tired of the tech crowd and their elitist attitude. I can't count how many times they mock the accent, or find some way to knock the Boston mentality. This is our culture and our history. I'm sure if they traveled and stayed in a different country they wouldn't behave in this fashion.

I'm the end, though, money talks. Let's face it, either you're forced out of your neighborhood, or you're stuck in the crummy apartments or projects. You're just one of the "locals" these outsiders loathe for trying to hold onto a past identity, and thus become the outsider. Times are changing all around here and the idea of an ethnic enclave, somewhat unique to the East coast, is being eradicated slowly but surely.

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Boston has never been defined by the accents we play up to rope in tourists, but precisely by our pointy-headed elitists. Boston has for centuries been a global city where people from all around the world come to pursue science and culture. To ignore that in favor of wicked hardcore Beantown stereotypes is to ignore what makes Boston really great. It is only by being a dynamic progressive community that Greater Boston really has character. Quincy has gotten a huge injection of character by the relatively recent influx of Asian immigrants, and if hipsters want to add something else to the mix, the more the merrier. What we need to worry about is to make sure we build enough housing that everyone can afford to live here, but the problem isn't outsiders taking "our" turf.

At the end of the day, Boston was founded by elitists, and although that particular breed of Puritanism died off long ago, there will continue to be elitists until the city sinks into the ocean.

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A large part of Boston's character has been it's ethnic, blue collar neighborhoods - even if they are beneath you. And I lived here for a lo if years when everybody was leaving. We always had our academia and medicine, but Boston was NO. "Global" city back then.

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