There’s lots of excitement across the country — and in Brookline — as the (partial) Solar Eclipse approaches Monday afternoon, starting at 2:16 pm, with maximum coverage (93%) at 3:30 pm. Amazingly, it looks like we will have a sunny day here in Brookline, and many of us will be gathering in Larz Anderson Park for the viewing. You can find more information here, including important advice and details about eye protection. See you there!
Update on the Real Estate Transfer Fee
Getting back to housing, we’ve written many times about the Real Estate Transfer Fee (RETF), which is a modest fee on the value of real estate sales to fund affordable housing. A “local option” Real Estate Transfer Fee is currently part of Governor Healey’s Affordable Homes Act, which we strongly support. In 2019, Brookline Town Meeting overwhelmingly passed a Home Rule Petition for a RETF, similar to bills passed in about a dozen other cities and towns, but it has never advanced in the legislature. Brookline’s proposal would have imposed a modest fee of 2% (1% each on the buyer and the seller) on the value of sales in excess of $500,000, with some exemptions. (The Governor’s RETF bill raises the threshold to $1,000,000, which we think makes sense.) Thanks to former Select Board member Raul Fernandez, who contacted Brookline’s assessor Rachid Belhocine, we’re recently learned that, had the legislature promptly approved our Home Rule Petition in 2019, Brookline would have raised almost $18,000,000 per year, for a total of over $70,000,000 since 2020! Of course, with the higher $1,000,000 threshold in the current bill, the amounts raised would be less; according to Massachusetts Budget & Policy Center’s RETF calculator, Brookline would raise almost $11,000,000 per year simply by charging a 2% fee on the amount of each sale over $1 million. That amount dwarfs the amounts we raise for our Affordable Housing Trust (which currently has only about $3,000,000 in unencumbered funds) and from the Community Preservation Act (which raises about $3,000,000 a year to be split among historic preservation, open space and recreation, and community housing). That additional funding could make a huge impact on the lives of Broolkine’s public housing residents, by providing funding to rapidly renovate and replace our aging public housing buildings, and would incentivize nonprofit and mission driven for-profit developers to build hundreds of new affordable homes in Brookline. We think it is an excellent plan, already supported in concept by Brookline’s Town Meeting, and we’ll keep you posted on what you can do as it works its way through the legislature.
Election Update
Election season is heating up, with early in-person voting starting in less than three weeks on April 17, and election day on May 7, 2024. You can find B4E’s endorsements here for Select Board (Alec Leibovitz), Housing Authority Commissioner (Kimberly Richardson), and Town Meeting Members. We’ll be texting voters, knocking on doors, tabling in Coolidge Corner, and building precinct teams to help get out the vote. Let us know how you want to be involved by filling out this simple volunteer form. We also continue to need your financial help to run a strong campaign to elect pro-housing candidates, so please consider a generous donation to the Brookline for Everyone PAC (and thank you to everyone who has contributed so far!).
Meetings this Week
The Community Preservation Act Committee (CPAC) will be meeting on Monday, April 8, at 6:30-8:00 pm via Zoom (link here; no pre registration required) to make final decisions on all the 2024 applications, including two from the Brookline Housing Authority and three from the Brookline CDC. You can find the full agenda here and the meeting materials here. We encourage you to attend and speak in favor of the housing recommendations.
GBIO Housing Justice Lobby Day is coming up this Thursday, April 11, from 10:30 am to 12:00 pm. This is the follow up to GBIO’s very successful event several weeks ago where over 1,700 of us (including 100+ from Brookline) showed up to support housing justice. Join our friends at GBIO on the steps of the State House (24 Beacon Street, Boston) to advocate for the RETF and to remind our legislators of their commitments to the critical legislative and budget asks to support public and other affordable housing. If you can make it, please register here; all are welcome, and you need not be a GBIO member to participate.
What We’re Reading This Week
This Small New Jersey Town Became a Different Type of Suburb. We loved this NYT article about Palisades Park, NJ, which allows two-family homes throughout the town. While we are not suggesting this as a solution for Brookline, we think it shows how more creativity about what can be built on each lot can have a big impact over time, create more housing, and even reduce taxes! It’s vital that we continue learning from cities and towns across the country as we attempt to address our housing shortage.
America’s Magical Thinking about Housing, by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic, shows how the solution to increasing rents and prices is pretty straightforward: building more housing. Austin is adding homes at more than twice the national average (based on its existing stock) and rents have come down 7% in the past year. As we’ve pointed out before, Brookline can’t do that on our own, since we are part of a larger region, but we can contribute meaningfully to the Boston area’s effort to create the housing supply we need.