Home-flipper tax? | Developers for Healey | Dempsey targets State Police | Election warning for Dems | About Contrarian Boston |
Time for a speculation tax? Home flippers on hot seat
Now here’s an idea that’s going over like a lead balloon in the real estate community: a speculation tax on homes resold in less than a year.
Homes sold in less than year for more than three times the state’s median price – or roughly $1.5 million – would be hit with a 6 percent “speculative sale” tax under a bill making its way through the State House.
The proposal would also carve out a number of exceptions, such as a seller forced to relocate because of a job transfer, though here’s betting that’s unlikely to mollify critics.
The bill would also give communities the option of imposing a fee ranging from 0.5 to 2 percent of the value of each sale on any residential property, regardless of price.
The proposal stands in contrast with legislation being pushed by Boston Mayor Michelle Wu, which would impose a fee on sales over $2 million and which, by contrast, looks fairly conservative.
Senate progressives are leading the charge, including state Sen. Pat Jehlen, vice chair of the Joint Committee on Housing, and the three other members of Somerville’s State House contingent
And that’s probably no coincidence, with rising concern in Somerville, at least among housing activists, over speculative buying as the median price of a single-family home nears $1 million.
Meanwhile, the deadline for the Joint Committee on Housing to report out the bill – S868 – has been extended until May.
Expect some heated debate over the proposal in the next few months.
Developers for Healey?
So far it’s 5-1, Healey over Diehl.
That’s the score when it comes to the number of campaign contributions from major developers to the two leading candidates for governor.
Dick Friedman, developer of the $850 million One Dalton luxury condo tower in Boston and longtime Democratic party stalwart, dropped $1,000, the legal limit, into state AG Maura Healey’s campaign coffers in January.
Bob Epstein, whose Abbey Group developed the 45 Province St. condo tower, and Mahmood Malihi, co-president of Leggat McCall Properties, a long-time powerhouse on the suburban development scene, also wrote checks for maximum contributions for Healey’s gubernatorial campaign.
Rounding things out, former state economic development chief Greg Bialecki, now a principal at Redgate, which has been heavily involved with the redevelopment of Quincy Center, and Sandra Edgerley, founder of Hexagon Properties, both gave $1,000 each.
For his part, Diehl, running for governor on the Republican side, collected a $1,000 check from Jim Rappaport, a one-time GOP candidate for Senate and whose father Jerome was a key player in the urban-renewal era ‘redevelopment’ of the West End.
Just fyi: Rich Gotham, president of the Celtics, also coughed up, as did Sam Kennedy, president and CEO of the Red Sox.
Dempsey on State Police probe: Nothing personal
State auditor candidate Chris Dempsey is no stranger to pissing off powerful people and institutions. After all, he led the No Boston No Boston Olympics campaign in 2015 that sank our chance to host the games later this decade.
Now he’s pledging to undertake a thorough review of the scandal plagued State Police bureaucracy if he wins election to the low-profile but potentially high impact state post.
Why? As he has made his pitch to Democratic town committees across the state, Dempsey said party activists have cited the State Police as a major concern.
A former state transportation official, Dempsey says he wants to look at ways at preventing future overtime pay abuses.
But Dempsey also wants to probe whether there have been racial disparities in traffic stops and arrests as well as potential bias in hiring and promotions within the force.
He’s also enlisted the help of a former top officer with the state law enforcement agency to help guide his review.
“I want to be clear I don’t approach that work with any hostility to that organization and have the greatest respect and reverence for the troopers who put themselves on the line,” Dempsey told Contrarian Boston. “We need to have a state police we can be proud of.”
He may be trying to be respectful, but we’re pretty sure State Police won’t be returning the sentiment.
Electoral disaster ahead? Report offers wakeup call for Dems
They warned Democrats of impending disaster in the late 1980s after Dukakis’s humiliating defeat.
Now the same researchers are back with a new study and an even more dire warning, Dan Balz at the Washington Post reports.
Far from being primed for a sweeping progressive remake of the economy and society, most voters want “evolutionary, not revolutionary, change,” policy analysts William A. Galston and Elaine Kamarck contend in their piece, which can be found on the website of the Progressive Policy Institute.
Democrats are also out of touch with too many voters on cultural issues, when in fact, “social, cultural, and religious issues are real and — in many cases — more important to them than economic considerations,” the Democratic analysts contend.
Galston and Kamarck, both scholars at the Brookings Institution, don’t mince words, and spell out quite clearly what they mean.
“They want government that respects their commonsense beliefs — for example, that defunding the police is not the path to public safety, abolishing immigration enforcement is not the cure for our southern border, and that it is wrong to exclude parents from decisions about the education of their children.”
File under: Shock therapy.
Wrenching changes ahead for Massachusetts weeklies
It’s a big day for reporters at weekly papers across the Boston area -- and by big we don’t necessarily mean good.
Gannet, the national, investor-owned chain that owns dozens of local papers across the state, under the banner Wicked Local, recently rolled out plans to replace local news with “regional” news at its weekly papers, as Dan Kennedy at Media Nation has reported.
And today is the day that reporters at papers ranging from the Bedford Minuteman to the Cape Ann Beacon were due to find out what their new beats are.
Gannet has apparently decided no one reads local news, so they are reassigning weekly reporters to broad beats like housing, climate, education, and “living in New England.”
“There is ample evidence that people will not subscribe to read a lot of the content currently being produced for the newspapers,” a top Gannet executive wrote internally, according to Kennedy.
Yet maybe it’s not a lack of appetite for local news, but the way Gannet and past investor-chain owners have driven these papers into the ground, forcing young, woefully underpaid reporters to cover multiple communities.
As it stands now, there’s no time for reporters to develop the relationships and sources needed to dig into what’s really going on in their communities and produce the kinds of stories that attract a devoted following.
Here’s betting readers would be more inclined to pay subscription fees in exchange for something of value: real local news.
Quick Hits
-- Thanks for the warning: “MIT Researcher: Don’t Ignore the Possibility That AI Is Becoming Conscious” (Futurism).
-- Fidelity Investments reports a record number of workers are becoming millionaires, thanks to their 401(k) and IRA savings over the course of their careers (Washington Post). We’ll assume they’re mostly Boomers.
-- Not so swift: “Man arrested after allegedly breaking into Franklin Park Zoo, trying to enter tiger enclosure” (Globe)
What is Contrarian Boston?
I have fielded emails over the past couple weeks asking what Contrarian Boston is about.
Here’s a link to our mission statement – you can find it in the “about” section.
For a more prosaic, nuts-and-bolts description, read on.
An online newsletter, Contrarian Boston publishes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. In Contrarian Boston you’ll find analysis of the day’s news, and original reporting as well.
Our focus is:
· Politics and all levels of governance, good and bad, with an emphasis on state and local, with some national mixed in;
· Economic growth and business, especially real estate, housing and new development projects;
· The media and why it does what it does;
· Education, from school board spats to the doings of multibillion-dollar university endowments;
· And whatever else catches our fancy.