News & Announcements

The Community Action Agency of Somerville (CAAS) and the Somerville Renters Committee have a great campaign underway to encourage Mayor Ballantyne and the City Council to boost Somerville's affordable housing programs.The city currently has $34 million in what’s called “Free Cash” — unallocated money we can spend on various municipal priorities. CAAS and the Somerville Renters Committee are asking the city to allocate 30% of it, or $12 million, to affordable housing, since that’s roughly the maximum percentage of income a household should spend on their own housing.

We think that's a great idea, and we’d like to encourage everyone to join in asking the city to make it happen. CAAS has prepared a very nice how-to guide, or you can just send a quick email to [email protected] and your city councilor to say you want to see 30% of the free cash available used to fund the city's urgent need for affordable housing. (Please put [email protected] and [email protected] on the BCC line to help us keep track!)The Finance Committee's next meeting will be on March 7, so they recommend sending your note by March 3 to make sure your councilor and the mayor have time to read it beforehand.

Q&A About Free Cash

What is Free Cash? City budgets aren’t exactly like household budgets, but Free Cash is roughly equivalent to a checking account: we can definitely spend the money, but we probably shouldn't spend it all at once, and we don't want it to hit $0 or go negative.

Big picture, how much money is this? $34 million is a lot of money! It's equivalent to just over ten percent of the city's $293 million annual budget. By comparison, we spend $20 million a year on the fire department and $17 million on the police. Last year, we spent only $8.3M on affordable housing, so adding $12 million would be a pretty substantial boost. Given how dire the affordability situation is in Somerville, we think that kind of increase would be more than appropriate.How would it be spent? The exact details would be up to the mayor and city council, but the Somerville Renters Committee and CAAS are asking the mayor to put some of it into rental assistance funding and quite a lot into the new Affordable Housing Acquisition Fund to pay for the creation of new affordable housing.

Is this a one-time deal? Tax revenue will keep coming into the Free Cash column over the course of the next year. If things go well, we will have the opportunity to make similar decisions about how to allocate those funds in 2024.