total time: 11.73 minutes
total words: 1592
[Matt Leming]: Hello, my name is Matt Leming. I'm one of your city councilors here in Medford, Massachusetts. For this recap, I'm going to be talking about a couple of the housing proposals, specifically home rule petitions, that were discussed at recent city council meetings and which will be discussed in the future. I'm going to discuss what these policies are, Why they're practically needed in Medford and why many of them at this point are state level debates Just as much as they are local. So to recap at the February 14th planning and permitting committee We discussed a home rule petition for rent Stabilization. This is was something that was put forward two years ago by councillor Collins and councillor bears which which is basically asking the state for permission to implement rent stabilization, a softer form of rent control. Essentially, it prevents landlords from raising rents by more than 5% in a given year. At the February 20th meeting, we were supposed to discuss a Home Rule petition for a real estate transfer fee that was tabled until March 12th, because by the time we actually got to that point on the agenda, it was midnight. And that will be coming up as a point of discussion next month. Real estate transfer fee, that was brought forward by myself and Council Vice President Collins. It is essentially a tax for buying and selling homes. Now, there will be a lot of exemptions into this, but essentially, It means that if you decide to sell a home, you put 2% of that into the Affordable Housing Trust, which was only instituted in Medford last year and currently doesn't have any substantial revenue streams. Real estate transfer fee almost definitely will have exemptions included in it, including for vulnerable seniors. So if you're a vulnerable senior and you are trying to sell your home to pay for, for instance, a nursing home, you will not have to put any money into the Affordable Housing Trust. you are giving the home to a family member, a transfer of convenience, and there's no actual cash transfer going on there, so if you're giving it to your child for instance, you do not have to put money into the Affordable Housing Trust because again, if there's no cash, then you're not just gonna put $24,000 and you don't have $24,000 in your bank account, but you want to give a home that is worth $1.2 million to a family member, then you don't suddenly have to come up with that money. And it almost definitely will apply to only homes above a certain price. So the normal threshold that is typically thrown around is homes that are above a million dollars will be subject to a real estate transfer fee. Anything's cheaper than that, no. So the Real estate transfer fee is a proposed tax. If the Home Rule petition passes city council and is then signed by the mayor and passed to the state, that does not mean that Medford will get a real estate transfer fee, and the same is true for any of these home rule petitions. What they mean is that the state would then give us permission potentially to implement it, our own real estate transfer fee in the future. So to offer some context here, 18 other communities have put forward their own home rule petitions for real estate transfer fee. If this makes it through, Medford would be number 19. Currently, none of them have passed yet. What's happening at the state level is the governor and leadership in the state house are working on the Affordable Homes Act. This is a very big piece of legislation that is meant to address the housing crisis in the state of Massachusetts. One piece of that legislation could be a real estate transfer fee option. It may not look like everything that I've just talked about. Again, it could be a 2% tax, it could be a 0.5% tax, it could come in a different form, but if the Affordable Homes Act does end up including that in its final form, then all of these Home Rule petitions would essentially be moot. This Home Rule petition would have a practical effect if the Affordable Homes Act didn't include the local option for a real estate transfer fee, but the state decided to just pass all of the Home Rule petitions that communities have brought forward to them in one slate. My personal opinion is that this practically offers our state delegation evidence that towns and communities and cities around Massachusetts really want the real estate transfer fee. They really need mechanisms to fund affordable housing in the city. If you go around Medford, the absolute bare minimum that you can find for any house in the city is $600,000. Currently, we have almost no money going to affordable housing. The city council approved on February 20th the final zoning approval for the Loughlin Court redevelopment. That is a project that cost over a hundred million dollars and only about two percent of that is being paid for by the city. The rest is state and federal grants. The city's putting forth about $2.4 million from our Community Preservation Act funding, which is a fund that also goes towards historic preservation and open space projects around the city as well. And again, we're only putting 2% towards that. Other communities like Somerville, they're able to fund things like a community land trust, which is where the city buys a bit of property and is able to put affordable housing on that because they've had their own affordable housing trust since the 80s or 90s, I think, and they were able to just fork out millions of dollars from that to fund these affordable housing developments within the city. Medford never did anything like that. What would I like to see for the city, you know, bigger picture in terms of funding the Affordable Housing Trust? Again, we instituted the AHT, I should say the previous city council instituted the AHT in the last term, it's still being set up, we're still looking for applicants to actually sit on the board of it, and we need funding We need revenue streams in order to actually build up money over time in the Affordable Housing Trust. The real estate transfer fee is one potential mechanism of doing so. And frankly, it's not entirely clear right now that the state will approve that, and it's not entirely clear that if they do approve it, sort of what the policy will look like in the future. Almost definitely Community Preservation Act funds will go to the Affordable Housing Trust so that it can accumulate over time. One other mechanism that I am looking to implement, which I'm preparing a resolution for the March 12th meeting related to this as well, are linkage fees. Medford has linkage, which is basically money that developers have to pay whenever they build anything in Medford. Right now it goes towards things like water and sewage and roads. It does not go towards affordable housing at all. This is because, again, Medford didn't even have an affordable housing trust until last year. So something else I'm going to be doing is asking Medford, sorry, the Community Development Board specifically to update its linkage fees, which haven't been updated since the 1990s. So that's very relatively little money coming in. from those and I'm going to be asking them and I'm going to be working on an ordinance which would make it so that some of those linkage fees, some of the money from developers, will also go into the Affordable Housing Trust. So that is what's going on with a lot of these Home Rule petitions right now. My personal opinion about some of the state-level debates is I think that I think that the real estate transfer fee would pass through the state before rent stabilization does. And it is unclear to me whether either of them will, but the scenario where the state ends up saying, okay, Medford, you can implement rent stabilization, but we're not going to prove the transfer fee is very unlikely in my mind. What I'm also looking at right now is sort of the likelihood of this real estate transfer fee being passed in the first place. I'm trying to talk to people that sort of know about this to keep up with it and just trying to really see what we end up being allowed to do in the first place. My intention behind putting out this Home Rule petition is to give the state delegation in Medford tools to show the leadership in Beacon Hill that, yes, communities really need to put more money towards affordable housing. And that is something that Medford has completely failed to do in the past. So that's where I'm coming from here. You know, to be totally honest, that's about all I have to say about this. I'm looking forward to what people bring to the meeting on March 12th when we actually do get to discussing this. Apologize to folks that sat for a long period of time at the February 20th meeting But didn't actually get to talk about any of these homeworld petitions And it should be brought up pretty early in the meeting on March 12. So thank you very much Thank you for listening and have a have a wonderful week
|
total time: 11.73 minutes total words: 1592 |
|||