Proposed Charles River commuter boat hits DCR brick wall | One-time blue collar towns go upscale with million-dollar homes | When quiet heroes walked among us | Quick hits |
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Talk about price shock: It’s not just posh suburbs like Weston, Wellesley, and Winchester where seven-figure home prices have become the norm
If you don’t believe home prices in Greater Boston can get any crazier, think again.
Meet the newest member of what was once one of the most exclusive clubs around, featuring towns where the median sale price of a home tops $1 million.
That would be Natick, home to a densely packed stretch of Route 9 retail stores and restaurants, which includes the largest mall in New England.
Long known as the blue-collar cousin to upscale Wellesley, Natick saw the median price of a single-family home cross the $1 million mark in April, up 5.6 percent over the same month last year, per The Warren Group.
Natick is just the latest town to get crossed off the fast-shrinking list of affordable towns for middle-class home buyers, with Watertown’s median home price now over $1 million after a 9 percent bump since last year.
But it seems doubtful that Natick will ever overtake or even rival Wellesley in price, as the rich suburbs get even richer. The median price in Wellesley? Just under $2 million.
It’s no secret how we got here. A Massachusetts economy that was booming until recently, combined with decades of anemic residential construction, has left lots of buyers with healthy incomes chasing far too few homes.
Dream crushers: Gridlock-weary commuters may soon glide to work on a Charles River water shuttle, no thanks to obtuse state bureaucrats, who have sat on a young entrepreneur’s brilliant idea for years
It’s a tale of blue state bureaucratic bumbling, seemingly ripped from the pages of Ezra Klein’s “Abundance,” and it’s happening right on our doorstep.
Our story starts with a young Watertown entrepreneur, Drew Rollert, and his out-of-the-box proposal to ease the Boston area’s hellish gridlock, born out of a miserable summer evening in which he tried, and failed, to make it to a Sox game at Fenway.
After an Uber ride fell through, Rollert waited nearly an hour in Watertown Square in the sweltering heat before a jam-packed, slow-moving MBTA bus pulled up, at which point he threw in the towel.
As he started to walk away and cross a bridge over the Charles, Rollert spotted an unused dock. His interest piqued, the software engineer soon found himself immersed in a deep dive online, reading about all the ferries that plied the Charles in centuries past.
Before long, Rollert drafted plans for the Wada Hoppah, a small, electric water shuttle that would ferry passengers from Watertown to Cambridge and Boston, and back.
Rollert spent years talking with the state Department of Recreation & Conservation, whose sign-off he needed, and by August of 2023, it was all systems go, or so it seemed.
In an interview with Axios at that time, Rollert predicted it would be just a couple of months before the Wada Hoppah would be up and running on the Charles.
That was then, and this is now. Three years later, DCR, rather inexplicably, is still reviewing the proposal.
We are not talking about the Queen Mary or even the Charles River Boat Co., which has a small fleet of eight sightseeing boats, the largest of which can carry up to 145 passengers.
