An Open Letter to the Architect Who Invented Open-Concept Floor Plans on McSweeney's by Alice Lahoda, who lives in Jamaica Plain, where, yes, she was inspired by the South Street condo without a door or walls around the bathroom.
Home 'n' hearth
The spite house of Hull Street in the North End can be yours for $1.2 million.
H/t Cara.
Airbnb usage across Boston in 2018, from the study.
Two researchers at Northeastern University compared Airbnb data and crime stats for Boston neighborhoods and found that an increase in Airbnb units is followed a year or so later by an increase in violent crime. Read more.
Patrick Roath reports a pair of junior trash pandas found themselves some good eatin' sometime overnight in JP's Pondside neighborhood, then couldn't get out - at least not without a helping hand.
The Zoning Board of Appeal today approved a family's plans to build a second house on a vacant lot next to their current home on Avalon Road in West Roxbury. Read more.
The Massachusetts Appeals Court ruled today that the state can decide whether to force the owners of condos at Commercial Wharf to abandon the wharf space they now use for parking, because they never received a formal state license to use the waterfront land for stowing cars. Read more.
Jamaica Plain News reports on tomorrow's rally by the Forbes Building Tenants Association tomorrow outside their current home at 545 Centre St.
Collapsed porch. Photo by BFD.
The Boston Fire Department reports one worker was injured when the front porch at 34 Pleasant St. in Hyde Park collapsed this afternoon. The cause is under investigation.
The contractors I've contacted disappear once they learn that this is an apartment in downtown with no parking.
Any ideas?
Thank you.
A citizen who has somehow not been driven completely insane file a 311 complaint about a smoke detector on East 2nd Street in South Boston:
[The building] which appears vacant, had had a smoke detector dead battery chirp going off 24x7 for the last 2 years. Can we do something get the chirp to stop? Thank you!
1924 map showing Park Front Road, via Leventhal Map Center's Atlascope.
WCVB reports that residents who have always thought they lived on West Roxbury Parkway near Weld Street woke up this week to find new city street signs IDing their street as Park Front Road and now they're having trouble getting deliveries, so they've resorted to putting up paper signs reading "West Roxbury Parkway." Read more.
WBUR reports on a financing issue that could affect some 400 South End residents living in apartments owned by the Tenants’ Development Corp.
The Zoning Board of Appeal today granted permission to the owner of a Harvard Avenue apartment building to convert one of the area's ubiquitous basement real-estate offices into an apartment, but rejected his request to do the same thing to a laundromat on the other side of his building's main entrance. Read more.
At 5:34 a.m., Ross Levanto reported:
Major water leak at the Troy Boston building, 266 East Berkeley in Ink Block, South End. Power is off and residents (including me) displaced.
Zoning Board of Appeal members said today that they had nothing against the technical aspects of a landlord's plans to convert his two-family house with eight bedrooms into a three-family house with nine bedrooms, but rejected the proposal after neighbors objected to the sort of tenants now living there: Pot-smoking, beer-swilling, rowdy partiers they say spent much of the summer carousing late into the night. Read more.
The Boston Fire Department reports it evacuated the 27 apartments at 6 Hamilton Pl., the alley that leads to the Orpheum off Tremont Street, early Sunday morning because of high carbon-monoxide readings. No residents were reported ill.
A water main burst Monday afternoon at Spring Park and Chestnut avenues, leaving residents near the Stony Brook T stop without water all night and into this morning. BWSC reports it hopes to have the water restored by noon.
The challenges faced by the Boston housing market have been well documented in 2020. The pandemic has caused massive shifts in urban population distribution in metropolitan areas all across the country, and Boston is no exception. It effectively took one of the nation’s hottest real estate markets and caused it to come to a grinding halt as apartment vacancies soar all over the city.
