Hey Paul, Do You Think It Might Have Had Anything to Do With the Rent Controls at the Time?

Paul Krugman writes:

 I was young — both as a graduate student and as an assistant professor — I and my friends lived in Boston area triple-deckers; let me tell you, they were not well built. Some of my friends had a rope tied around their refrigerator door, because otherwise it would swing open thanks to their slanting floor …

Oh, and not everything worth doing is doing well. Cheap construction makes sense if you suspect that changing land use will make expensively built structure obsolete fairly soon.

Yeah Paul and cheap construction makes sense if you suspect price controls will limit what you will be able to charge in rent.

Boston Curbed explains what happen when the controls were taken off:

In 1994, Massachusetts residents voted 51 percent to 49 percent to do away with rent control in Boston, Cambridge and Brookline. Rents jumped, driving tenants to cheaper digs, but so did housing quality, as landlords were able to make capital improvements with the higher rents in hand. 

-RW