Fighting an Opposition Campaign

I’ve made it no secret that I want to fund affordable housing, and I’ve written extensively about this. City Council heard a few hours of testimony from the tenants being evicted from 208 Main Street and Brooks Park Apartments at our most recent meeting, and a resident recently posted to Reddit about being forced out of Medford after rents were spiked. This housing market is displacing people, and it needs to be reeled in.

The road to passing any substantive policy is a bumpy one. On Thursday, April 25th, several thousand Medford homeowners received the following text from the Greater Boston Real Estate Board:

This was accompanied by a lot of mailers and robocalls, which someone took to Reddit to protest.

The URL, protectmedford.com, redirects to rentcontrolhurtshousing.com, at least at the time it was sent out. This then led to a link to send messages to City Council and the Mayor.

Over the next few weeks, I received a lot of form emails, which all looked like this:

Dear Councilor Leming,

I am a Medford resident writing to ask you to oppose rent control and new taxes on real estate. They are outdated ideas that would hurt our local economy, drive down property values, and do nothing to fix the housing crisis.

Please focus on innovative new solutions that won’t cause financial harm to our neighbors. We need to reduce barriers to housing creation, not introduce new ones.

My response to this was invariably some form of the following:

Hi everyone,

A mailer and a number of texts from the Greater Boston Real Estate Board went out to residents about transfer taxes and rent control, so I'm BCCing everyone who received those and sent an email. There's a lot of misinformation about these initiatives, so I'll use this opportunity to point out some more direct sources of information to keep the community informed and calm the waters a bit.

The policy being proposed isn't rent control, it's rent stabilization, which would cap annual rent increases at 5-10%, and it wouldn't apply to most owner-occupied properties. The idea is to prevent companies from suddenly raising rents by $500/month and displacing residents in the process, which has become common. I would also encourage everyone to read peer-reviewed research about past moderate rent control policies.

I wrote about the proposed transfer fee in my blog, as well as an additional post about the need for affordable housing in Medford.  It has cutouts that mean it will have minimal effect on the average homeowner while providing much-needed funding for affordable housing. These initiatives have also been studied by Boston and Somerville.

These are also largely state-level initiatives at this point, and Council is spending the majority of its time on a zoning overhaul. City Council very recently started to release an official newsletter on the City Council page detailing our initiatives, and the first one can be found here.

I also release a newsletter every two weeks that offers up-to-date information about what I'm doing, which you can sign up for here: https://www.mattleming.com/blog

If audio is your preferred means of communication, Council Vice President Collins and I discussed this topic in a recent podcast with Medford Bytes.

If anyone has any further questions about these specific initiatives, I would be pleased to answer them.

Thank you all!

Councilor Leming

To reiterate:

• Rent control isn’t being considered. The policy is called rent stabilization, which is different from the rent control that several cities in Massachusetts had between 1970 and 1994. It would essentially prevent large management companies from raising rents by more than 5% a year, though it could be as much as 10%. It would also prevent no-fault evictions. It also wouldn’t apply to owner-occupied properties. Essentially, it prevents large management companies from raising rents by $500 a month and kicking out all of their residents in the process — which is exactly what happened with 208 Main Street and Bradlee Road.

• The extent of City Council’s actual activity on the real estate transfer fee thus far has been a four-line resolution to discuss the topic, which we discussed back in March. Since then, no discussions have taken place. I’ve already written extensively about the need for a real estate transfer fee and what the policy would likely entail.

• Many of the alternatives presented by the website — such as strengthening the CPA — are actually good ideas, but the framing of them as one-or-the-other is dishonest. For instance, City Council is already working extensively on re-zoning, which will help with affordable housing, but there’s no reason we can’t do two things at the same time.

Given that our state delegation were also receiving these emails, I think that the purpose of these mailers was to get the State House to nix the real estate transfer fee in Governor Healey’s Affordable Homes Act (again, I’m not going to dedicate too much of this post explaining the ins and outs of transfer fee proposals, but the state’s analysis is the best source I’ve found for explaining the fee and the research behind it — essentially, it’s designed to have minimal impact on average homeowners). This opposition campaign appears to have been effective, since House Speaker Ron Mariano gave hints recently that he would not bring the transfer fee to the House floor for a vote. In response to this, I wrote a letter to the Boston Globe:

To be honest, I’m not wholly sure whether this campaign, in itself, really affected lawmakers’ decisions, or it just gave them a pretense to not act. The Greater Boston Real Estate Board PAC has been giving to many of our state lawmakers for years, including $500 to Mariano in January.

At any rate, it’s not OK to scare residents, and it’s not OK to spread misinformation. This is my biggest personal contention with this whole situation. Affordable housing policies are designed to help people — to help our neighbors from being displaced from their homes, to help the next generation afford houses. And the use of money to fund scare tactics to nix policy proposals before they’ve even gotten to the table is unacceptable.