AI-generated transcript of On the real estate transfer fee meeting

[Matt Leming]: Hello everybody, City Councilor Matt Leming here. I'm just going to provide another video update to accompany my blog post. I'm mainly going to be talking about the very recent March 12th meeting that we went through this past two weeks and just really getting, just kind of sharing my thoughts on some of the broader political changes in Medford, where I think we're going and just have my own feelings about some of this stuff. So to provide a bit of a recap, At the February 20th City Council meeting, I put forward a resolution to discuss the formulation of a real estate transfer fee. Now, this is a fee that typically has a lot of exemptions. It's not designed to target the average homeowner, but on certain real estate transactions, you would get to charge up to 2% of that, 1% to the buyer and seller. between 0.5 and 2%, which would then go into the Affordable Housing Trust. Some versions of this exclude owner-occupied properties. Some versions of this only apply to properties above a certain threshold, like a million dollars. There are different forms of being discussed at the state level. 18 other communities have already passed it. It's only one of the ways that City Council is proposing to fund the Affordable Housing Trust, which is something that we really desperately need to do. So this was originally meant to be discussed at the February 12th meeting, or sorry, the February 20th meeting, and at that meeting they sort of got overtaken because We had we were dealing we ended up dealing with the mayor's proposal to remove the fire chief from civil service. So a lot of people actually showed up to the February 20 meeting. hoping to talk about the real estate transfer fee, but we ended up spending the entire meeting hearing about the fire chief issue. So that ended up getting tabled until the March 12th meeting, and normally it wouldn't have sat for so long on the agenda, but we had an election in the meantime, and so basically there was three weeks in between meetings where this very important issue which was again at the time just four lines of text just ended up sitting on the agenda for a very long period of time with no discussion and even the city councilors couldn't really say you know what it was what their own thoughts on it were discussing with their colleagues because it's meant to be discussed in city council. And so this meant that there's a lot of time for a lot of misinformation to circulate in the community. Some people I think a lot of people thought that we were going to, at the March 12th meeting, pass a 2% tax that would just apply straight up to any real estate transaction in Medford, which was not true. That wasn't what we were doing at all. It was a very preliminary tax to, or it was a very preliminary discussion to pursue one potential avenue of funding the affordable housing trust, which, again, we really need to fund, which would only apply to certain real estate transactions and definitely not be targeted at the average homeowner. And so I think a lot of people showed up to that meeting kind of hearing from their neighbors that, you know, this and that was what city council is going to do. So they showed up in opposition to it. And then a lot of people showed up just you know, having thought about what they're going to say for several weeks anyway, um, more or less understanding the policy and just being opposed to it regardless, which, you know, I can take, I can take opposition to policies that I propose. I think it's fine. I just want people to have correct information when they do it. And so this all, this all is kind of coming into the, in like there's, there's a lot of sort of context that's happening. That's happening around Medford as well. So earlier that day in the March 12th meeting, um, just at, at 12 p.m. I received an email. Again, this is several hours before the March 12th meeting, which everybody on City Council really knows is going to be a rough night. I received a letter, which was signed by 21 tenants at 208 Main Street in Brooks Park Estates, where they are basically being kicked out or asked to evict their apartments because their apartments had recently been purchased by a realty company. And the realty company, you know, wanted to flip the apartments, make them make them presumably jack up the rents and just tell them, you know, leave. The realty group told us that the tenants would have the option to return to the apartments after the renovations were done, but they didn't do anything to provide local housing in the meantime. They just told them to leave. And they didn't provide any promises to provide those apartments at the same rents they were before. And I pressed them on this over email. Now, previously, when the previous owner was selling off Brooks Park and 208 Main Street, others had attempted to make it so that that sale would be made to an affordable housing non-profit, which didn't have as much money to give. and not to this realty company that it ended up going to. Medford would have preferred the former case but we just didn't have any money to actually put towards that because we didn't have a funded affordable housing trust at the time. Other communities have had affordable housing trusts that they've been funding for decades and decades and so therefore they can pay for a lot of these cool housing projects around town, like community land trusts, co-ops, and really just address minor things, not minor things, but more transactional issues like this one, where if you're gonna sell off an apartment complex, does it go to a group that's a non-profit, or does it go to a group that really just wants to make money off of it and doesn't really care about the tenants and the property? And so I was going to this meeting perfectly aware that if a policy like this had been instituted 30 years before, we wouldn't have to be dealing with this. And I was also perfectly aware that this policy relied on that will future, like preventing future evictions from happening down the line would rely on this policy passing. Okay. And I think this, due to the way that Medford's distributed, people aren't always kind of aware of like the full, the full picture of what's happening. And this is another thing that I wrote about in the blog post, because, you know, there's a lot of talk about like the new composition of this city council, you know, people saying it's, it's, it's all renters. It's not homeowners. Um, so you don't really understand what we're going through. That was like a lot of the rhetoric that we were hearing in the meeting. Um, what, and, if you sort of look at the, if you sort of look at the geography of Medford, you kind of see how the, like how housing is distributed and how the representation of city council has kind of shifted this, particularly in this, particularly in this past election to, uh, people that live in just in a completely different area. So typically it's sort of like most city Councilors have kind of come from uh, the northern part of the city, um, kind of like the North Northwest part where there's like a lot of suburbs, a lot of like kind of spread out, um, homeowners. And there's been maybe one person previously who's come from South Medford and one person who's come from Wellington, um, just over, just over the, just over the years, at least since 2005. Now, Four city councilors are renters in South Medford, four out of seven, which is huge. And the one city councilor who now does live sort of in the suburb areas, she runs the homeless shelter over in Malden. So she's very intimately aware of some of these housing issues. So the point is that the new city council really cares about housing issues. We're really intimately aware that the affordability, that the housing market is crazy right now and affordability needs to be addressed. And this The real estate transfer fee issue, in my mind, it's something that's important. It's something that needs to be passed in a form that's acceptable to most of the city, because it really would benefit all of us. It's also not the only avenue that we're pursuing at the moment to fund the Affordable Housing Trust. I think that some of the linkage fee proposals that I'm going to be discussing on Tuesday in committee will do a lot more in the near term to fund the Affordable Housing Trust, but I'm going to pursue every possible avenue that I can. Just in general, I mean, I think if people wanted to, they could, you know, see the meeting itself, how it went. It was very contentious. I really like to, I really prefer to keep these discussions on the merits of the issues themselves. Obviously, that's not what happened at a lot of the meeting. I think that you know, it's more of a cultural and a generational Divide that's happening at the moment I'm trying my best to bridge that however, I can obviously a lot of people from You know a lot of people don't necessarily like this policy, but it's also something that I think would be beneficial to the city as a whole, because Medford's also done very little to fund affordable housing in the past. We had a 15-minute recess, you know, in the middle of it. In the middle of the meeting, I ended up taking a break. During that, I ended up putting myself just physically inside of the crowd that I would say most of whom showed up, the people who showed up in person were opposed to this, and I just tried to engage with the issues with them as best I could, you know, at the very least. just wanted to have correct information as well as context about other projects that City Council is working on at the moment to get this through. Whatever the reasons, I don't like to see people alienated or feeling alienated from City Council, and I don't like it when people are coming in with wrong information about policies that we're pushing forward. And I'm going to try to do what I can to bridge the various, very obvious political and generational divides that have happened in the city. At the same time, my bottom line is that there's a lot of people in the city who are very real, who are in reality very disempowered. So those 21 tenants and protecting their rights to stay in their homes is the absolute bottom line for me. I'm going to be doing whatever I can to fight for them and to make it so that we have the resources to deal with that in the future, make it so that Medford isn't so hamstrung in affordable housing issues that we can't take more steps to prevent other groups from being evicted, because this is already happening around the area. It's not just 208 Main Street. This happened two years ago with Bradley Road. If you just Google forum posts, you can see large real estate management companies just jacking rents up like 500 a month and effectively pushing people out of their out of their apartments and It's and those people that have to go through that Oftentimes aren't empowered oftentimes aren't knowledgeable enough about city politics to show up and make themselves heard at a City Council meeting so those are the people that a policy like this would Would really would really benefit So So yeah, dealing with meetings like that, it's not the easiest thing in the world. We're perfectly aware that a lot of people don't, that a lot of people showing up. Most people who show up to a city council meeting don't show up to voice support for what we're doing. We really, really appreciate it when people do show up to support the initiatives that are being passed. But the negative motivator in these things can obviously be a lot more powerful. when we're dealing with those sorts of meetings, most city councilors, and I know this from conversations, end up losing sleep over it. Just kind of being, you know, just engaging like that with the public can be a stressful thing, but it's also necessary to have conversations like these. moving forward, it's necessary to really listen to people when they're talking in order to try our best to help those people not feel as alienated as they are right now. But yeah, yeah. There's a lot more that can be said about this topic. And yeah, I hope that everybody tunes in for future city council meetings and can come along to show, to tell us what you think about not just the development of the real estate transfer fee, but also other policies that we're working on in the future. You know, there's a lot of things that are happening in terms of zoning, linkage fees. I'm personally working on making development easier around the city through a transportation demand management program. I've been reaching out to other residents who are affected by airplane noise, which is a thing that I've really been hearing about a lot. So yeah, no, I think that hopefully things will sort of calm down from here and we can have more productive conversations moving forward. Yeah, in any case, thank you all very much for your continued engagement and support. And yeah, have a wonderful week.

Matt Leming total time: 15.21 minutes total words: 2349