By now, with just a week left before the vote, I’m sure you’ve heard the many arguments for why voting Yes for Lex is good for our children, teachers, and community. Perhaps the promise of a better educational environment hasn’t convinced you. Maybe the school’s environmental features don’t sway you. Or you may have concerns about higher taxes — though these increases are modest and spread over many years.
I have two children, ages 12 and 10. With luck, my older daughter will spend one year in the new school, while my younger one will enjoy the facilities for longer. But regardless of my family’s situation, I’ll be voting Yes for Lex on December 8 for one simple reason: it’s the financially smart choice.
Lexington is a premium real estate market. The foundation of our home values is the perception of a strong, highly desirable school system. We now face a stark choice: invest to maintain the quality and reputation that sustain our property values, or allow that perception to decline. Even if you don’t agree with every design detail, a yes vote protects a core driver of the value of our homes.
A no vote, by contrast, risks slower growth — or even depreciation — in property values. With the entry price for Lexington homes now exceeding $1 million, it doesn’t take much for diminished appreciation to outweigh any tax increase.
We compete with neighboring towns like Arlington, Belmont, and Newton — all of which have recently built new schools. Voting yes on December 8 keeps Lexington on par with these communities and ensures we remain an attractive destination for homebuyers.
Most of us will sell and move on someday; others will leave our homes to our children. In either case, a yes vote next week means safeguarding our investment and strengthening our community’s future.
When all is said and done, voting yes makes sense on many levels — educationally, environmentally, and financially. But even if you strip all that away, one truth remains: in the long run, we’ll all be better off with a yes vote on December 8.
Re your “A no vote, by contrast, risks slower growth — or even depreciation — in property values”: taxes next year for us, residents, will increase by 4.5% overall, not the usually expected 2.5% (per Prop 2 1/2) because residential assessments will be rising as usual (even with our decrepit LHS as is…) while commercial assessments will decline, because of higher vacancy rates post-Covid and of Trump’s angry retaliation against anything scientific including Massachusetts’ academic institutions and biotech companies which are vital to the Boston/Lexington economy.
Such tax increases, independent of whether or not Bloom is built, are modeled (by me: the Town doesn’t yet understand this problem, so it is ignoring it) at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1SaRJxW_jGMUfFGnfg9bLutwuot0aKyjV/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=116971253884586510151&rtpof=true&sd=true where you can enter your assumptions about rate of increase or decrease of residential and commercial assessments from one year to the next to see how your assumptions will impact our residential taxes overall.
These types of arguments make me ashamed to call Lexington my home. The values of the people that have moved to Lexington in the past 10 years leave a lot to be desired. Lexington has become a town of elites. We want the best school. We need to compete with Arlington, Belmont, Newton. We want the value of our homes to keep going to the moon for when we sell right after our kids finish high school. We don’t care if only the rich will be able to afford the taxes.
I’ve got news for you Mr. Thomas, high taxes impact the values of homes. The tax burden on homeowners will cause many future house shoppers to look elsewhere, leading to slower growth of home values or even declines.
Eleanor and Patrick – the reality is that the high cost of entry into Lexington is deeply anchored in the school system’s reputation. While long-term residents may have significant equity or financial security, those of us who moved here in the last decade paid a steep premium to be here.
We stretched to buy a modest $1.2M home, and if that value were to drop to $900K, it would devastate our finances far more than the Bloom tax increase over the next 30 years. In today’s economic uncertainty, I can’t guarantee I’ll live here forever; I may need to move for work in 5,10 or 15 years – I have limited control over when or where. I am not trying to be elitist, but I simply cannot afford the loss in property value that would likely follow if this vote fails and our schools lose their standing.