Mind the gap
On March 12th, I received a signed letter from a group of 21 tenants living in 208 Main Street and Brooks Park Apartments, just down the road from where I live. Their apartments were purchased by Charlesgate Realty Group, who planned to renovate the buildings. Charlesgate told them to leave by March or April, providing no plans to provide alternative housing during the renovations or a plan to allow them to return to their apartments at the same rents. (Over email, I pressed Charlesgate on this issue.) During the previous term, others had attempted to negotiate the sale of those apartment buildings to an affordable housing nonprofit, but because Medford had no money to supplement the deal — we only instituted an Affordable Housing Trust last year — that fell through. A similar thing happened two years ago with tenants on Bradlee Road.
That same evening, I attended a City Council meeting in which Council Vice President Collins and I put forward a resolution to draft a home-rule petition for a real estate transfer fee. This would potentially — if the state approves it — provide one revenue stream to the Affordable Housing Trust, so that we could start to fund it. It is one of only three potential funding sources for the Trust that I know about.
The real-estate transfer fee meeting was so contentious that it was covered in the Boston Herald (paywalled, unfortunately). Many people who showed up thought that we were passing an ordinance that evening to apply a 2% tax to all real estate transactions, full stop. This was never true — most transfer fee proposals contain thresholds and exemptions that minimize their effects on average homeowners — and we were only starting the discussion to send it to committee. But many people thought otherwise because that’s what they were told. They were told this because there had been so much time for misinformation to circulate in the community. And that was possible because the resolution had been sitting on the agenda for three weeks without discussion — a factor that, I think, was most critical in fuelling misinformation and anxiety. It was meant to be discussed at the February 20th City Council meeting, but because that meeting was occupied by the Mayor's request to remove the Fire Chief from Civil Service, it was tabled. The March 5th election prevented a City Council meeting from being held then, so the meeting to start discussions on the transfer fee took place on the 12th of March, a full three weeks later.
During the meeting, I explained that, first, the resolution was just to discuss the formation of a real estate transfer fee policy. Nothing would be passed that night. It would be sent to committee, then to the state, which may or may not approve it. If the state did approve it, we would then get the option to develop a transfer fee. Second, I explained that there are so many exemptions and thresholds in most serious transfer fee policies that the average homeowner sees little effect, though what these exemptions are — whether it's an owner-occupied threshold or a price threshold — would need to be discussed in committee.
That meeting ended around 1:00 AM the next day. About a third of those in attendance spoke in support of the proposal, and of those that did not support it, I counted two who addressed details of the policy itself: a woman who suggested that the thresholds be tied to jumbo loan amounts, and a real estate agent who'd clearly spent time doing his homework and combing over spreadsheets about property transactions in Medford before talking. Others had ideas that were reasonable suggestions (infill zoning, funds from the CPA for the Trust) that didn't necessarily contradict the policy. Many of the negative reactions, however, were not really based on the transfer fee proposal. To them, this meeting was nothing more than a catalyst for deeper issues these residents had with the Council itself.
Medford's a city that is quite literally — geographically — divided down the middle, sitting on the border of the dense, renter-occupied parts of Greater Boston as it turns into more spread-out suburbs with longtime homeowners. Changing demographics and heightened interest in local government have shifted city politics dramatically in the past few years. This is a common phenomenon in other cities in Greater Boston — it’s touched on in the coverage of the Commonwealth Beacon around the bribery trial of a former politician in Somerville. Pre-2023 City Councilors, since at least 2005, mostly lived above the river, while the current City Council is different because most of us live below it, in areas more occupied by renters (all seven Councilors in Medford are at-large and can potentially live in any part of the City).
In other words, for the first time in at least 18 years (that’s how far back elections data goes), most of the Councilors come from the other side of town. There are other ways to describe this change — it's another generation, another set of demographics, et cetera. And the newer generation is intimately aware of how broken the housing market is at the moment and thus how much we need to address that. A graphic I keep going back to, which illustrates this perfectly, is home price to median income ratio in the United States since World War II:
And this economic reality affects a lot of people in Medford, Greater Boston, and the rest of the world.
Regardless — in Medford, demographics and politics have changed, and that’s caused a few residents to get anxious, which we saw manifest at the March 12th meeting. How do I feel about all of this? Not great, of course. I don't like to see people feel alienated from their representatives, whatever the reason. During the fifteen-minute recess in the middle of the March 12th meeting, I put myself in the middle of the crowd and engaged their questions as best I could, attempting to set the record straight. They didn't like the transfer fee proposal — I knew that. I just wanted them to have correct information, at least, and to be aware that this wasn’t the only thing City Council was doing to address affordable housing. But I also had a letter on my desk signed by 21 other people who did not have the time or the empowerment to show up and defend their case, and I was perfectly aware that if the policy had been instituted 30 years ago, I wouldn't have that letter. The transfer fee wouldn't necessarily prevent the eviction if it were enacted today, but it could prevent others in the future from being kicked out of their homes.
