AI-generated transcript of Real Estate Transfer Fee with Kit Collins and Matt Leming

[Danielle Balocca]: All right, thank you both for being with me today. If you don't mind just introducing yourselves with your name, pronouns, and who you are. Thank you so much.

[Kit Collins]: My name is Kit Collins. My pronouns are she, her, and I am the Vice President of the Medford City Council.

[Matt Leming]: Hello, my name is Matt Leming. My pronouns are he, him. I'm a member of the Medford City Council.

[Danielle Balocca]: All right, Ken, Matt, thanks for being with me. Today, I think we're going to get into like kind of the nuts and bolts about the real estate transfer fee that you've heard a lot about recently. But before we do that, I'm going to ask you the podcast's famous question. So if you could share your favorite place to eat in Medford and what you like to eat there.

[Matt Leming]: My favorite place to eat is, I'd say, Oasis Cafe. I have a cup of coffee of theirs right now, and I also like to get the pollen de chuva, which is the little doughnuts that they sell there. I typically will just go there and read a magazine every morning.

[Kit Collins]: That sounds so nice. Um, I try to have a different answer every time I come on the podcast. Uh, lately I've been thinking about, um, grep cafe bakery on Salem street. Last time I was there, I had like the most amazing banana bread and I need to get back there soon.

[Danielle Balocca]: Yeah. Lots of new options. Every time we talk, I think there's something new to, to try. Um, thank you. So yeah, if we could start by just, um, if one of you could explain a little bit about what, what we're talking about when we say the real estate transfer fee.

[Matt Leming]: Sure, I can get into some of the nuts and bolts of that. So basically, the real estate transfer fee is a proposed policy by which any time property above a certain price threshold or with certain exemptions is bought and sold within the city, between 0.5 and 2% of that would go into the Affordable Housing Trust. Now, this is a proposal that has been proposed in 18 other communities. Cities, by default, do not have the option to implement the real estate transfer fee on their own. They need to petition the state for that. So they've requested that the state give them the option to craft a real estate transfer fee policy, and Medford recently introduced a resolution by which we're going to develop our own Home Rule petition, and if it is successful and if we can agree on one, we will then pass that along to our state delegation and hope that it passes the State House. Concurrently, there's also a few other things happening with this. So, Governor Mara Healey is working with the State House as well to craft the Affordable Homes Act, and she is pushing to have a real estate transfer fee option by default in there, by which If it is included in the AHA, then municipalities within the state would get the option to implement their own real estate transfer fee by default. And so in that situation, presumably all the home rule petitions would be rejected and everybody would just get the option to craft the transfer fee on their own. This is pretty pertinent because we've seen in different cities in Massachusetts and across the country and the world that Real estate speculation has really taken off. The housing market's broken, supply is constrained, and it takes a lot of money to fund the development of affordable housing. A recent analysis by the Boston Globe's Spotlight team found that in greater Boston, it takes between $500,000 and $600,000 to make to develop one unit of housing. The reasons for that are very complicated, just it's reflective of the state of the economy, the shortage of labor, but we're at a point right now where there's historically been very little investment in this area and we need to come up with every revenue stream that we can to show that we're serious about addressing this problem. So that is an explanation of the nuts and bolts of it. Depending on the municipality, there tends to be a lot of exemptions to these things. So the debates around this are typically, you know, what are the thresholds above which the real estate transfer fee would apply? So typically municipalities will say, you don't, they might say, you know, this only applies to Residences above a million dollars, or others have proposed to have an owner-occupied exclusion, exclusions for vulnerable seniors, so on and so forth. Cambridge proposed one that has exclusions for first-time homebuyers. So it does tend to be crafted so that it doesn't target the average homeowner. It's really targeted more towards high-end real estate and speculation. So that is the sort of nuts and bolts, what we're seeing in City Hall at the moment. And yeah.

[Danielle Balocca]: Can I ask one question? So the fee is to the person who's selling the home?

[Matt Leming]: So typically, yeah. It's typically split between the buyer and the seller in most proposals. A lot of proposals are structured as having a 2% fee. I've never seen a proposal that has more than 2%. And it's split. And the way it's structured is 1% is paid by the buyer, 1% is paid by the seller. If there is an exclusion for vulnerable seniors, for instance, then in that case, the vulnerable senior selling the house wouldn't pay their 1%, but the buyer would still pay their 1%. And again, these are all just proposals, what I've seen in other, what I've seen other municipalities say.

[Kit Collins]: And if you don't mind, if I jump in here, I am one of those people who needs to hear everything phrased like at least two different ways to really understand it. So typically when I talk about home rule petitions, whether in this case, it's for the real estate transfer fee or for any other topic that we've brought up in the time that I've been on the city council, the way that I tend to think about it and talk about it to other folks, cause it's a bit of a, it's one of those like city terms that sounds a little wonky, Just to make it really clear, when we say a home rule petition, that's when a city, in this case ours, is asking the state for permission to do something that it ordinarily doesn't have permission to do. So when we talk about a real estate petition being granted at the state level, that's if the state were to say, okay, 18 cities and towns that have submitted these home rule petitions, we're granting them, that means you now have special permission to enact this real estate transfer fee that you have proposed for your community. And the alternative way that it could potentially go if it goes any of these ways that Matt was describing is if it's rendered as a local option under law, that means, okay, you don't have to raise your hand and ask for special permission anymore. Under state law, you can take this option, you can opt in if you want to, without passing a home rule petition. Of course, there's always the option that neither of these happen, but I just like to sort of frame it in a different way for folks who might be newer to these kind of technical terms about how legislation and policy gets done. And I think it's also just really important to underline you know, that these proposals for the home rule, even the proposal still in Maura Healey's, Governor Healey's Affordable Homes Act, these are tweakable. We're talking about a tool that the goal of which is to take a little tiny percentage off the top of just these real estate transactions that are luxury real estate transactions. We're trying to tailor it so that it is targeting really the luxury real estate transactions. We have to talk about know, how to tailor it so that it is capturing only those. But we're in a moment where housing, something that everybody in Bedford needs, something that is a human right, something that is non-negotiable, has become, as Councilor Leming said, this speculative item, this commodity. And we're trying to say, what can we do? How can we craft this? How can we phrase it so that this tool would target these sales that are really high ticket, that are really luxury, where there's really profits being made and say, for the good of our community, we need to capture a little bit of that profit that increasingly is going not to people, not to longtime residents, but to for profit developers and say, we need one or 2% of that. So that longtime Medford residents can stay in Medford, and so that we can welcome new neighbors of all economic backgrounds.

[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you. And so, so what's happening in city council, it sounds like maybe you can help me like understand kind of your your working on this whole new petition or you're gaining you're kind of gaining like insight into what you would ask for in the home of petition like how does that work like where are you kind of now with um with this kind of motion here right so so the only thing that's happened in city council in any official meeting is that

[Matt Leming]: We, at the March 12th meeting, we had a resolution to discuss the formation of the homeroom petition, and the resolution was about, was four lines long. We debated it, we heard public comment, the meeting lasted until 1am, and we ended up voting to refer it to the Planning and Permitting Committee. What would then happen is at a planning and permitting committee meeting, one of us would introduce a draft of what the home rule petition would look like. It would then be debated by different members in the planning and permitting committee and then Presumably, if we end up agreeing on it, it would then be referred out of committee to another regular session where it would then be voted on, then signed off by the mayor and handed to the state delegation. That's the full process. We're at step one. It was originally introduced at the February 20th meeting, but it was tabled at that meeting. So, you know, there was a bit of a delay prior to it actually being heard for the first time in regular session at all on March 12th.

[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you, yes, so a lot of steps and sounds like some room for input, but can you give us a sense about, I think the, when we, like the term affordable housing, like can bring up different things for people, but I don't really have a great sense of where Medford stands in terms of like affordable housing that already exists or what the sort of work looks like, or like kind of what, why is this so important to like, to affordable housing in Medford?

[Matt Leming]: So affordable housing is a, it's a legal term. Uh, it's actually defined under Massachusetts general law. It refers to, it refers at the, uh, at minimum to housing that people that is only occupied by people whose household income is at 80% of area median income. So in Medford, that would be, I think between 80 and $90,000. Um, and there's, there's other standards for it too. So there's a standard that I've heard, that I've heard referred to as a deeply affordable housing. And that's where it's for very low income people who put no more than 30% of their income towards rent and the rest is subsidized. And so that's where you start getting into like section eight housing, for instance. So when we say affordable housing, it's actually referring to a very specific legal term. Now, My colleague, Council Vice President Collins, and the previous City Council only implemented something called an affordable housing trust last year. Now this trust is basically it's a pool of, it's a pool of money that is used for affordable housing needs. And this could be development, it could be helping to, you know, if you're trying, if like for instance somebody wants to sell an apartment complex or a house, it's, you could potentially encourage them to sell it to an affordable housing non-profit with some money from the trust. uh if that's that's a perfectly legitimate way of using it uh or you could use it for i mean pretty much anything that would help affordable housing needs in the city but the point is medford is really kind of uh behind the ball uh behind the curve on this one you know there have been other other communities implemented affordable housing trusts 30, 40 years ago, and this whole time, these trusts have been collecting money to supplement affordable housing efforts, and Medford really needs to come up with the infrastructure to fund our own.

[Kit Collins]: I think that it's helpful to bring up sort of where we are at this point in time with, you know, having very recently implemented the affordable housing trust ordinance because when we zoom out and look at a big picture. Cities have the option to create affordable housing trusts, cause this is a problem that the market is not solving, like that is why we have that tool that is why we pass these ordinances here in Medford, as in a lot of the greater Boston region, you know we're certainly not unique in this regard. But we have way, way, way more people who need affordable housing who are by their income eligible for affordable or subsidized housing. And there's not enough to go around. This was captured in our housing production plan, which is a document that the city's planning department worked on for a few years and put out. a year ago, it captures kind of the percentage of Medford residents that by their income need affordable housing at some rate and can't access it because we don't have enough housing units that are affordable. And when we ask the question of like, what is affordable housing? Like when I look around the city, when I walk around my neighborhood, what is it? Will I know it when I see it? The answer is like, you know, inclusive, yes. I think a lot of people are familiar with Um, some of the public housing that exists in Medford because we're really lucky to have so much of it. Um, one of the real gems of the City Council for, like, this term and the past term has been being able to sign off on funding for the Walkland Court redevelopment, which will add, um, more units of affordable housing to the community. It will add new Um household size disabled accessible affordable housing to the community. Um it will renovate these public uh affordable housing units. This is really important like and that is that is something that we can be really proud of in terms of making progress towards our affordable housing goals and getting to a point where supply is meeting demand. But affordable housing can look like a lot of other things too. As Councilor Leming mentioned um you know some units um are advertised as, are intended to be affordable at different income levels. The apartment that I live in, I believe, or at least it was a couple years ago, was technically affordable at 80% AMI, which means it's affordable for people who make 80% of area median income. I didn't have to apply for that. Frankly, I got really lucky. I'm still, you know, candidly, and I share this because this is true for a lot, a lot, a lot of tenants like me in Medford. I'm still burdened by housing costs because I don't make 80% of area median income. But the point is, that is true for more people in Medford than there are affordable units to put them in. So some of them occur because of the market, because of what's being developed. Some of them occur because there's, sorry, because there's public housing. But overall, neither of those forces are getting us close to what we need. And under Chapter 40B of Mass General Law, cities have to have at least 10% of their housing units be affordable. We are not at that threshold. So even by that, I think really honestly, really minimal, kind of regional level statistic, we do not have as much as we need. And that is kind of the background for a lot of these measures that the council is debating for what can we do to try to push this in a direction where the housing in Medford is at a level where Medford residents can actually afford to live in it.

[Matt Leming]: Yeah, and just to get a little bit more into the nitty gritty numbers behind the chapter be chapter 40 be a 10% requirement so the as of 2020 Medford's housing production plan said that. we are about 671 units short of that 10% requirement. Now that's, I think, that's partially going to be mitigated by the Watling Court development. That's partially going to be mitigated by some of the 40B developments on on Fellsway in the future. But the point is that that 10% is very much a, is still very much a minimum and we're not even at that even if those, even if those do come through. The housing market is a little bit unique because in terms of just economics because the supply and like normally these things are kind of mitigated by supply and demand. The problem with real estate, especially in places like greater Boston, is that the supply is oftentimes artificially constrained, be it sometimes that's by zoning laws, sometimes that's just by cost, and oftentimes it's just by the cold hard reality that you can't make more land. And so what's sort of been happening in recent years is that a lot of people, like a lot of people, sort of private equity have been investing in real estate almost as like a gold bar. So just basically a storage of wealth. And in really high-end areas like New York, London, this has led to a lot of vacant units. I don't think that that's really quite as direct a problem in Medford, but because of our proximity to some of these areas where there is very high-end real estate, it tends to raise the price. Basically, what that means is that It is very much a priority for us to do something about the supply issue and try to come up with as many means as we can to raise the supply so that, you know, it's not just biotech workers, lawyers, white collar workers who can afford to live here. It's service workers, teachers, the people who repair our roads, who fix our infrastructure, who are able to afford to live here, and just make sure that they have a place here and they're not going to be priced out in the long term.

[Kit Collins]: I think that Councilor Leming summed it up really well. The point here is not that we, it's like nothing against biotech workers and white collar workers and all of that. I think that goes without saying, but when we talk about needing to meet and then truly we need to vastly exceed that threshold that we're almost 700 units below. It's certainly not the case that once we add 671, we're like good to go. The actual need is much greater. But, you know, I think that Councilor Leming has put this really well in meetings and it's about keeping Medford affordable for the working class. And another way that I think that I sometimes think about it is I know that Living in a diverse community is something that I think everybody in Medford really cherishes. People put that in different ways, but I know that that's a value for everybody who lives here. And having housing that is affordable to different types of people and people who work at different jobs and people who are in different situations is a necessary precondition for living in a community that is diverse.

[Danielle Balocca]: And it sounds like so to come full circle, it sounds like the the revenue from the real estate transfer fee could help to like both could help with funds to both kind of like upkeep some of the affordable units that you have, but also build more units. Yeah.

[Kit Collins]: Yeah, so. the real estate transfer fee revenue, should it pass, would be earmarked for the Affordable Housing Trust Fund. And what I have always found really exciting about the Affordable Housing Trust, you know, long before we started this particular conversation about one way to fund it, is that these tools are really flexible. The funds from the Affordable Housing Trust can be allocated to be, you know, seed money for public housing developments, They can help to recruit new affordable housing developers to Medford by providing seed money for those endeavors. They can also be used for affordable housing-related programs, such as rental assistance, but also for first-time homebuyer programs. So it's not just for building the literal units. It can be for lots of ways and avenues and different mechanisms for getting people into homes that they can afford in Medford, whether that's by helping to increase stock or by the activities and channels that get people there.

[Danielle Balocca]: It's really great. Yeah.

[Matt Leming]: And another thing that I do want to emphasize about this proposal is that the The real estate transfer fee proposal whatever form it does take it is one tool that city that city councils and other forms of local government have to address the housing crisis and. The housing crisis is a very complicated issue. It's affected by everything from zoning ordinances, which City Council is working to completely redo this term, to the local labor shortage. There's just fewer people going into construction these days. That is a reality. to the price of copper overseas, which is something that, of course, we have very little impact on. And this is just one single potential revenue stream to put into the Affordable Housing Trust. There's a lot of other things that we're doing. One thing that came up, for instance, was this idea of infill zoning which would allow us to put units that are smaller than normal in between pre-existing buildings even if they're not necessarily within zoning regulations. One thing that we discussed this past week in City Council is updating Medford's linkage fee ordinance to add affordable housing to that so that developers that are building in Medford would have to pay a certain amount into the Affordable Housing Trust. One thing that's also come up quite a bit is the Community Preservation Act, which is One of the very, very few existing sources of funding for affordable housing. This is a fee that's paid by residents of Medford to go towards affordable housing, open space, and and recreation and historic preservation projects. About 2.4 million dollars over a three-year period of CPA funds are being used for the Walkling Court redevelopments and so that's pretty much the only source of money that I know that Medford has put towards these developments. And that's still only about 2% of the full cost of the Waukland Court developments overall. The rest is coming from state and federal grants, which should give you an idea of just how pricey these things are. So the point of me saying that is that You know, the real estate transfer fee, it does tend to get a lot of attention, but it's just one potential tool in the toolbox of that city council has some impact over which can potentially address the housing crisis.

[Kit Collins]: Yeah, and I think it's so important to put it in those terms. Often when we talk about, on the city council, the crisis of the shortage of affordable housing, which really is a crisis proportions, and you see that in how many people are forced to move away from Medford, which I think, honestly, goes under-talked about. Often when we talk about any mechanism that we're currently proposing for funding affordable housing, trying to get at some aspect of this issue, What of course follows from that discussion is, well, but why don't we do this instead? But why don't we do this instead? But why don't we, you know, use zoning instead? But why don't we You know, can't, you know, appropriation of CPA funding fix this? Can't appropriation of, you know, linkage fees fix this? And I think it's really important to have those conversations because it is really important to try to do an audit of what is funding affordable housing and what would be the best solve. And I think what's really important to be really clear about is that we need all of it. We need all of it. No one of these things can solve this vast undersupply on its own. to the question of like, Why aren't we looking to zoning instead to solve the supply issue? We are. We are. We've been working up to that for, honestly, for more terms than I've been on the city council. We've been working up to this zoning recodification, this zoning overhaul. We're looking at other sources of funding. The problem is just the need for housing that is either affordable or just simply at rates that's sub-luxury prices is so endemic that we need to look at all of it. And there's no one revenue stream that is going to solve this problem for us.

[Matt Leming]: Yeah, and the other corollary to that too, and this is why I got into the Walkland Court funding example, is that a lot of funding and a lot of help for affordable housing does come from outside sources. So like I said, Of the, you know, hundred million plus price tag on the walkley court redevelopments only 2% of that came from Medford. Well, that not the other 98% would have never come to Medford if we had not ourselves put forth a 2% and this is a way of saying that. the state and federal government are more serious about dedicating resources to a community if they know that that community is itself serious about addressing this problem. So, you know, if we end up going through a zoning recodification, we come up with multiple revenue streams for the affordable housing trust, we show that we're serious about building, then suddenly, you know, HUD, state government will say, okay, Medford is really serious about actually trying to address this housing crisis. We can see that they're not just putting lip service to this problem. We should put more grant money to them. So this is, so, you know, these Yeah, when you're looking at fixing the housing crisis, you really need to look at the bigger picture. It's like, this is not just potentially a few hundred thousand dollars a year going into a trust. This is us showing other entities that we're serious about doing this, and therefore those other entities will then be more serious about helping Medford out in the future, and thus more money will come to the community.

[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you as you were talking about sort of the, you know, wanting to maintain like a diverse population of Medford people that do all sorts of jobs that are be able to live here and work here. It made me think about sort of like the rippling effects of that so like if I didn't have to. travel to Cambridge to work to make enough money to live in Medford, then maybe I could, wouldn't have to drive a car to work. And then that would cut down on like all sorts of other things. So it really, it makes a lot of sense. I wonder if there's any like other kind of like main points that you want people to understand about your work on the real estate transfer fee.

[Matt Leming]: It really, It really affects things locally here. So I know that Councilor, Council Vice President Collins can speak to this a little bit more, a little bit more intimately since she has done work on this previously. But what I can tell you is that the The same evening that we were going to just debate the initial resolution to introduce a discussion of the real estate transfer fee home rule petition, that same day I received a letter that was signed by 21 tenants from 208 Main Street and Brooks Park Apartments who had been told that they need to be, that they had to leave their homes by the next month because their properties had been acquired by a real estate, a realty group, Charles Gate Property, Charles Gate Realty, which had, basically acquired their apartments, wanted to renovate them, flip them, and then told them that they had to leave. They didn't show any plans to actually let them return at the same rents. And this is something that could have been Fix and addressed earlier if Medford had put more resources to affordable housing 10 years ago, but we've frankly we've never been serious about it.

[Kit Collins]: Yeah, if I could jump in here, you know. To the question, Danielle, about what's most important for people to understand here, what I really want residents to come away with is we're working on this because it's urgent and because this is something that so many of our 60,000 neighbors are being affected by unaffordable housing. It's affecting Working class people who are being displaced, it's affecting families who have kids in the public schools. It's affecting your neighbors. People are suffering because of high costs of housing. They don't want to have to move away from their community, their jobs, their schools, their friends, their family, but it's happening to people. And I don't think it's talked about enough, but we know that this is has been happening for years, and like Councilor Leming said, we've been behind the eight ball on the strategies that we can muster as a city to try and combat a regional problem. out of many, I think we're going to look at every tool that we have the jurisdiction to use as a city government, again, where it's kind of a David and Goliath situation here. We're a city with a housing and affordability crisis, and that crisis is regional. We're pretty hamstrung what we can do, but when we look around and we see people being forced out, yeah, we're going to look at every tool that we can use because, you know, I think that Medfordians are tired of being displaced and having their friends and neighbors and loved ones being displaced out of the community. I know that I am to that point. There are a lot of cases of displacement in the community that just go unreported on, and people just don't talk about them, because I think people think of it as an individual problem. Oh, this is a me problem. My rent went up by $400, and if I were able to afford that, I could stay here, but I can't. So now I live in Alston. Now I live in Lynn. It's not an individual problem. It's a market problem. So, you know, I think this was this was pretty publicized a couple years ago, a really similar situation to the one that Councilor Leming just introduced happened on Bradley Road, an apartment building, naturally occurring affordable housing, where just, you know, the rental rates were below market for a long time. So there were a lot of residents that lived there that had been there for years. It was fully their home. The building was sold. That's, you know, that's a real estate transaction that a city cannot trammel on. The new owner decided that they wanted to renovate, or I might put in air quotes, they wanted to quote unquote renovate, They said, everybody has to leave. And that was their legal right to say, everybody has to leave. And people lost their homes. People were displaced far away from Medford. And that is really a disruption. We know in a best case scenario, it's a disruption to work and school and community ties. And in a worst case scenario, that can be crippling for people. It can be absolutely financially crippling. What Councilwoman was just mentioning, This is something I became aware of last year, another building of naturally occurring affordable housing. When I say naturally occurring affordable housing, I mean it's not public housing, it's just a building where the units happen to be affordable because the land, the property order decides to keep them that way, and that's really important. So there's this building. in South Medford on Main Street, the Brooks Park Apartments, that for a really long time was naturally occurring affordable housing. Last summer, we were alerted, some other city officials were alerted, okay, this building has been put up for sale. We like worked super fast. We had this like frantic 72 hours where we said, okay, like there's an affordable housing developer, property owner that's interested in buying this building. you know, we did a letter of support from the mayor's office and a sign-on letter from the city council to say we support the sale to an affordable housing developer. We tried to see if there was some funding that we could put forward as sort of like seed money to say we support, you know, we'd support the funding of this sale to the affordable housing developer because they can't compete in market terms with a for-profit developer and property owner. We tried to work really fast to say, what can we do as a city to incentivize and encourage and support the sale of this naturally affordable housing to an owner that will keep it affordable? But we can't force that. And we didn't have any other tools at our disposal to make that happen. So it sold to just a regular property owner or regular corporate property owner. What's happened in the past couple of weeks is that property owners said, hey, we are alleging that we're going to do renovations. So some of you guys have 30 days to vacate your apartments and some of you guys have 60 days to vacate your apartments. What we know for a fact is that when affordable units go away in the community, people cannot find rents at similarly affordable rates within Medford because they don't exist. And so I think there's a way of having that conversation where it's like, well, they're just doing what they're allowed to do. They are allowed to act on the terms of the leases. They are allowed to renovate. Absolutely. As was the case in Bradley Road, nobody is doing anything illegal. We can't sit here and say... You know, we have to have the conversation about what we know to be true about what will happen to these people. And what we know will happen is that these people will be displaced. They'll be displaced away from the community. They have made their homes. They'll be displaced away from where their children go to school. They'll be displaced away from their family and their jobs. And I just don't think that that is something... that as city officials, we can really in good conscience say that we are okay with that status quo. And so when we talk about, well, what could have possibly gone differently if we had started this journey of taking affordable housing seriously 10 years ago or 20 years ago or 30 years ago, it would have given us, not for certain, it would have given us a fighting chance of keeping that housing as affordable in the city, either through a developer, an affordable housing developer, or by in some way trying to make it a city stewarded or owned property, or it would have given us a chance to earlier start that process of building up affordable housing stock in the community so that these residents could have a fighting chance of staying in the community at rates that they could afford.

[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you, that's a really helpful illustration about sort of the long-term impacts of this if we can, you know, all these different solutions coming together. And I think other cities do this, like the building that I work in in Cambridge was gonna be up for sale and it's full of social service agencies and they were all gonna be displaced. And like you said, like become less accessible to the community and the Cambridge redevelopment group was able to buy our building and keep us all there and renovate it. And so it does seem like, You know, there's there are fixes to this and it's it's hard to solve the problem of, like, people wanting to profit off the sales of these buildings. But if we can create a compelling case, or have like, a good 2nd option, that feels like it could be really useful. Thank you. Those are really helpful. Is there any way that, like. Residents can be involved in order to support your work on this. I think that.

[Kit Collins]: You know, my number one answer to that is always tell us how you feel. And there are a lot of ways to do that. I know for some people, the city council meetings are not easy to get to. Our regular meetings start at 7 p.m. every other Tuesday. We always welcome people to show up and comment. You could do that on Zoom. You can Zoom in. You can also show up in person. But you can also send email to your city councilors and the mayor. You can call us. Our contact information is on the city website. You can also send an email to the city clerk and have your comments read aloud at a city council meeting if you can't be there in person, but you still want your voice to literally be heard. It is just really important. you know, this is a controversial issue. And I don't want to, I don't think that, you know, we need to say much about that. But I think it's important to acknowledge it. This is a controversial issue. And I think that it is, it would be the healthy functioning of the city council chambers, if it's represented that people feel really strongly about this. I know that people feel really worried about, you know, what different mechanisms will do to change their life or to impact plans that they have. But I know that the community feels really strongly about keeping Medford diverse and keeping Medford affordable. And I think it's really important for us to hear that. And I think it's really important for people to let their voices be heard on that. So I would say, use all of those options and any others you can think of to let your voice be heard if you support the City Council at least considering every option at our disposal for adding tools to our toolbox to promote affordable housing.

[Matt Leming]: Thank you. Yeah, and it's It's very important for residents who are interested in these things to keep themselves in the loop, to let your representatives know, not just if you don't support things, but if you do support things as well. I think that people are more incentivized to come to City to council meetings to oppose certain things. And it's very useful to have people that You know, just that come along and make their voices heard if they are in support of a given initiatives. It's also just very important To have to make sure that you yourself are informed about the issues. I know that there's a bit of a, there's a lack of local news coverage within a lot of these municipalities that kind of like prevents that for a lot of people. But we are trying to increase transparency and make it so that people do have some resources to figure out what City Council is up to. We've updated the agenda and city council page to make those more accessible. I'm chair of the resident services and public engagement committee which is working on a monthly newsletter that we're going to start publicizing next month. I personally have a website newsletter and a blog that I maintain on them. MattLeming.com just to offer my own very editorialized opinions on kind of what's happening, what City Council's working on, and just the bigger picture behind these things. A lot of this, a lot of the things, the tools that City Council can use to address the housing crisis is enactable at the local level, like zoning recodification. But as we've been talking about in this episode, a lot of it also goes back to the state level. So writing your representatives and saying that you are in support of the Home Rule petition passing through the state house is also really critical for having for having a city council with all the appropriate tools at its disposal to address these issues.

[Danielle Balocca]: And is it similar? So I know we've talked about home rule petitions in other contexts where does the city council have to vote to send this to the statehouse? And do they look for like a super majority in that vote?

[Matt Leming]: Yeah. So any home rule petition that is sent can be, to be clear, in order to send it in the first place, you do need a majority vote. And then the mayor also has to sign off on it in order to officially send it to the state delegation, which is the state representatives and senators that fall inside of the municipality's jurisdiction. The state is free to pass it or ignore it as they please. And generally speaking, you do need a minimum of a majority vote, but it's more health. It makes a better case to get it passed if it's unanimous or a super majority at the very least.

[Danielle Balocca]: Thank you both. This has been really informative for me, hopefully for other folks listening. And if people can reach out to you if they have questions or if they want to support your work. And you've both had a very busy beginning of the year, so thank you for all of your work. Yeah, and thanks for being on today.

[Matt Leming]: It's been a lot of fun. But thank you. Thank you, Danielle. Thank you so much for having this very important outlet for local journalism in the community. And I look forward to the newest season of Medford Bites.

[Kit Collins]: Thank you. Thank you so much, Danielle. It's always a pleasure to speak with you. And thank you so much for providing a platform for us to talk about issues facing the community. And I just echo, folks can reach out to me anytime. I also have a recent blog post about the real estate transfer fee. And I really welcome folks to reach out to chat about it further and ask questions. Thank you so much.

Kit Collins total time: 19.83 minutes total words: 853	Matt Leming total time: 21.8 minutes total words: 1313