Mount Vernon Co.'s Rent Stabilization Advisory Cmte. Connection-Pt. 1

In a March 7, 2022 letter to Boston Planning & Development Agency Director Brian Golden, a managing partner of National Development, Tufts University Trustee Ted Tye, and the chairman and founder of the Mount Vernon Company, Bruce Percelay, noted that “1170 SFR Associates, LLC (the “Proponent”), an affiliate of National Development and Mount Vernon Company, is pleased to submit the enclosed Supplemental Information Document (SID) for the 1170 – 1190 Soldiers Field Road Project,” located “in Boston’s Allston neighborhood;” and that National Development and Mount Vernon Company’s affiliate was adding “a residential use to the Project,” wherein “the newly proposed residential building would add 85 apartments.”

And four days later, coincidentally, a managing partner of National Development--Tufts University Trustee Emeritus, Massachusetts Development Finance Agency Vice Chair and Greater Boston Real Estate Board Member and Past Chair Brian Kavoogian—was appointed on March 11, 2022 to be a member of the current Boston mayor’s “Rent Stabilization Advisory Committee.”

According to the March 7, 2022 SID submitted by the affiliate of Mount Vernon Company and Rent Stabilization Advisory Committee Member Kavoogian’s National Development firm, of the “approximately 10 studio, 56 one-bedroom, 14 two-bedroom, and 5 three bedroom units,” in a 6-story, 75-feet tall building, it’s now including on the site of its proposed 1170-1190 Soldiers Field Project, 68 of the units will be market-rate rental apartments.

So if rent regulation of all market-rate units in all Boston apartment buildings containing over 6 units, for example, is not re-established during the current decade, the affiliate of Mount Vernon Company and the real estate deal-making firm that Rent Stabilization Advisory Committee Member Kavoogian is managing partner of will be able to overcharge 80 percent of the tenants who eventually move into any newly-constructed market-rate apartments at 1170-1190 Soldiers Field in Allston-Brighton.

According to the website of the Mount Vernon Company that Rent Stabilization Advisory Committee Member Kavoogian’s National Development firm is partnering with, Mount Vernon Company Chairman Bruce Percelay’s “real estate investment firm” is “considered among the leading apartment landlords in Massachusetts” and includes “approximately 1,600 apartments.”

In Boston’s rapidly-gentrifying Allston-Brighton neighborhood, for example, Mount Vernon Company’s portfolio of real estate investment properties already includes the following apartment buildings which contain non-rent stabilized rental units and/or for-sale condominiums: The Arthaus building at 37 North Beacon St.; The Radius building at 530 Western Ave. ; The Evo building at 10 Brainerd Rd.; The Gateway building at 1298-1302 Commonwealth Ave.; The Matrix building at 8 Griggs St; The Metro building at 74-86 Brainerd Rd.; 6, 10,14 Orkney Rd. & 42 Strathmore Rd.; 61-87 Brighton Ave; 11 Embassy Rd.; 110 Warren St. & 6 Camelot Court; 1304 -1312 Commonwealth Ave.; 1322 Commonwealth Ave.; and 1848-1850 Commonwealth Ave..

In addition the portfolio of real estate investment properties of Rent Stabilization Advisory Committee Member Kavoogian’s real estate deal-making Mount Vernon business partner also includes 4 residential buildings in South Boston, 4 residential buildings in the Back Bay, 4 residential buildings in Beacon Hill, 2 residential buildings in the North End, and 4 residential buildings and “The Revolution Hotel” in the South End, according to the Mount Vernon Company’s website.

Not surprisingly, the chairman of the “real investment firm” that is “considered among the leading apartment landlords in Massachusetts” and which partners in the real estate deal-making industry with Rent Stabilization Advisory Committee Member Kavoogian’s National Development firm—Bruce Percelay—did not recommend that the City of Boston respond to the affordable housing crisis which Boston’s tenant majority suffers from by restoring rent control, in his July 27, 2021 op-ed column that was published in the Boston Globe.

Instead, the business partner of Rent Stabilization Advisory Committee Member Kavoogian’s National Development mainly proposed purported “solutions” to Boston’s affordable housing crisis--that would, coincidentally, mainly profit Boston landlords and real estate deal-making industry firms-- like the following: providing “a 10-year property tax abatement” to affordable housing real estate deal-makers involved in arranging “middle-market apartments;” “relax zoning and variance hurdles that make the conversion of basement units” less profitable for landlords and real estate-deal-making industry firms; and “reassess affordable housing requirements in luxury buildings” so that “a luxury housing” real estate deal-maker is not required “to provide up to 18 percent of its units as affordable” and allow real estate deal-makers to just “cash payments in lieu” of including a token number of “affordable units” in newly-constructed Boston luxury apartment buildings.

In addition, in his July 27, 2021 Globe article, Mount Vernon Company Chairman Percelay proposed that Boston’s mayor should “streamline the permitting process” to increase the profitability of real estate deals in Boston; stop requiring real estate deal-makers “to make mitigation payments to the neighborhood as compensation” for “impacts of higher traffic, more competition for street parking, and more density; “and “sell” the city of Boston’s approximately 1,ooo “vacant parcels AT A NOMINAL FEE” to for-profit, private real estate investment deal-making firms (like National Development and Mount Vernon , etc.) “ in exchange for the creation of middle-market/affordable housing.”

Yet if the members of the Boston mayor’s “Stalling Rent Stabilization Advisory Committee” spend the next 5 months in 2022 just mainly discussing the “affordable housing crisis solution” proposals of a real estate industry business partner of one of this committee’s members, don’t be surprised if—in the continued absence of rent regulation in Boston—the market rent your Boston landlord demands from you in June 2022 turns out to be 27 percent higher than the market rent you were charged in June 2021. (end of Pt. 1)