In the shadow of Boston’s gleaming high-end high-rises – The Boston Globe

The high-end crowd will always be taken care of, since that is where the money is for builders and developers. There are some opportunities for the other end of the market in the form of housing lotteries and programs for first-time home buyers. That’s how I bought my first home in the 1980s. But much more needs to be done. I support the transfer fee on sales of high-end properties that has been proposed by both Mayor Michelle Wu and Governor Maura Healey.

Until housing is built as a commodity rather than an investment for the wealthy, we’ll continue to have a problem and see younger people with little choice but to leave Massachusetts.

Jim O’Brien

Arlington

The writer is a retired mortgage banker.

How the other percentage point lives

The Spotlight Team’s front-page article last Sunday presented all the data and facts that one could want regarding the level of wealth contributing to the luxury condominium boom of the last several years. However, perhaps the most telling (and tone deaf) comments came from John Thibault, the retired high-tech executive who owns a unit at the Four Seasons One Dalton, and Theresa Hatton, CEO of the Massachusetts Association of Realtors.

Thibault “said increasing developers’ affordable set-asides is ‘a great idea’ as long as affordable units are not inside luxury buildings.”

Oh, the horror of affordable units in a building that he stays at only “some of the time.” It’s a great idea as long as it’s applied at a distance from him.

Hatton goes a step further in defending vacancies in luxury buildings and opposing vacancy taxes by presenting the vacancies as a net positive to the community. Her justification: “If they’re vacant, they’re not using the schools, contributing to the traffic problem, putting extra burdens on the resources of the city. Why would you want to disincentivize that?”

You want to disincentivize that because you want to create actual communities for the common good.

Hatton’s argument reads as: Build condos, they’ll buy them, they won’t come, and we all make money anyway.

The only people who are incentivized by that theory are the very wealthy and investors, whose interest is not in civic action, developing community, and certainly not in affordable housing.

Maxine Dolle

Brookline

A humble request for a little sharing of the wealth

Thank you for the good piece about the lofty place of those glittering “towers of wealth” in the ever-widening wealth gap of Boston. If any of those lucky folks in their plush pads would care to share some of their wealth and help ensure housing for the less fortunate, they might consider donating to one of the many community development corporations that provide affordable housing and a host of other services in the low-income communities of Greater Boston.

Scott Ruescher

Cambridge

A few luxury condos are not the source of our area’s housing woes

The Spotlight Team’s article on Boston’s new luxury high-rises is a captivating look into how the city’s haves and have-nots experience the housing market.

Unfortunately, it also perpetuates certain popular but misleading tropes about what, exactly, is the reason behind the region’s high housing costs. While gleaming towers such as One Dalton might be visually jarring to Bostonians accustomed to the city’s brick row houses, and the flashy wealth of their tenants might offend those concerned with income inequality, they are statistically insignificant in the grand scheme of the metropolitan area’s 2 million homes. Indeed, the multimillion-dollar sales prices mentioned in the article are barely noteworthy to anyone who has tried to buy a house recently in places like Cambridge, Belmont, or Brookline.

No, the root cause of our current housing problem is not a few luxury condos. It is that, for the better part of 50 years now, the region as a whole has collectively failed to build enough new homes — luxury or otherwise— to accommodate the insatiable and still-growing demand to live in the Boston area. The cost-of-living crisis will not abate until we recognize this fact and stop trying to lay the blame on the latest shiny metal object.

Jacob Anbinder

Ithaca, N.Y.

The writer is a Klarman Fellow in the history department at Cornell University writing a book about the origins of the modern urban housing shortage.