When I first moved to Somerville in 1988, I lived in an apartment with four roommates, so it was sort-of communal, though we did each have our own bedroom. We were paying, as I recall, on the order of $250 each. At that time is was not uncommon to see student ghetto apartments with every room converted to a bedroom, and illegal subdivisions of rooms (our place wasn&#x27;t that bad; we actually had a living room and a dining room). So they&#x27;ve basically taken the skanky absentee landlord model and put a high-tech veneer on it. (A lot of those apartments got converted to condos during the Great Bubble.)<p>It should also be noted that while Boston, Cambridge, and Somerville remain among the most densely-populated cities in  the country, before WWII they actually had more people living in fewer units of housing--essentially double the number of occupants per unit as we have now. One of the reasons housing costs don&#x27;t come down as you build more housing, is that people tend to take as much as they can afford, so as more housing becomes available, each person takes more.