🏡 Maybe ask your parents about this

It’s Thursday, Boston.

😎 Are your eclipse glasses going to be gathering dust until 2044? Brighton Public Library is offering to take them off your hands and donate them to Astronomers without Borders. Just make sure to drop them off by May 31! 

👀 What’s on tap today:

• TikTok’s ticking clock

• “Fast and Furious” in Back Bay

• The sweetest(?) neighbor

Up first…

HOUSING

A different kind of family discount

We have a proposition: You can finally buy a house. It’s at a discount. And you don’t have to compete with other buyers. The catch? It’s the house you grew up in. 

Turns out, this arrangement is more common than you might think.

🏡 Buying one’s childhood home is a lucrative way for some to break into the market. Not only is it opening the home-ownership door for young buyers (usually with a family discount), but it can also give parents a break from the hassles of homeowning as they consider downsizing. “We’ve seen this more in the last few years,” Bob Driscoll, a Rockland Trust executive, recently told The New York Times.

🆘 First-time buyers need all the help they can get in today’s market. The median sales price for a single-family home in Greater Boston jumped over 10% year over year in March to $740,000; listings are down; and the average 30-year mortgage rate is around 7.5%. Meaning, even if you still managed to throw 10% down on a $740,000 house, your monthly mortgage payment would be around $4,650 a month.

💰 For some, buying their family’s home is the only path to homeownership. That was true for Jeff Santos, a 31-year-old Rockport resident who purchased his grandmother’s house after she passed away. The market value of the home was between $575,000 and $600,000, but he purchased it at a family discount of $525,000 with roughly a 5% interest rate and 3% down. “I was lucky in that my family wasn’t trying to get rich, per se,” he said. “We would still be renting if we did not buy this house, because I don't think we would have been able to afford it otherwise.”

🏠 But the reality is, you need a home to sell to make this happen. And that’s not the case for many, particularly Black Americans. While homeownership rates increased among all demographics, between 2012 and 2022, the gap between Black American and other groups in the United States has grown, according to a recent report from the National Association of Realtors.

😬 And not all family deals are worth it. 33-year-old Brighton resident Greg Henkelson got an offer from his parents to buy his childhood home in Scranton, Penn. “Knowing my dad, no, it would have been full price,” Henkelson joked. He gave it some serious thought (Scranton home prices were in the $350,000 to $400,000 range), but ultimately passed on the home, saying he’d be trading career opportunities just to be a homeowner. Instead, he continues to split rent with a roommate in hopes of saving for a house in three to five years. 

🤔 Either way, there’s still a lot of fine print. Local probate and real estate attorney Stephen Agnatovech reminds folks looking into this arrangement that “if there’s a mortgage on the property, you’d have to refinance that mortgage and take over.” And if you’re lucky enough to be given a home, you’re still responsible for property taxes, which, depending on the area and the home’s value, likely run thousands of dollars a year.

QUICK QUESTION

🏡 Would you buy your parent’s house?

TOGETHER WITH THE MUSEUM OF SCIENCE

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CITY

Quick & dirty headlines

📲 The clock is ticking on TikTok. Apologies for interrupting your cat video-laden “For You” pages, but President Joe Biden has officially signed a bill into law that will ban TikTok in the U.S. within a year if the company isn’t sold. Why? Some officials believe the app may pose threats to national security, but a significant number of advocates and officials believe that a ban would suppress free speech. Mass.’ state Reps. were split on the measure, while Sen. Elizabeth Warren and Ed Markey voted in favor of the bill, despite their worries about free speech implications and preferences for blanket regulations.

⛺ Law enforcement may get involved in campus sit-ins. The Boston Police and Fire departments have warned Emerson College that “imminent law enforcement action” may be in store for students staging a pro-Palestine encampment at Boylston Place alley. The encampments’ location in a public right-of-way, as well as a human barricade protestors made to discourage police and university administrators from entering, puts them on the wrong side of city ordinances, according to law enforcement officials. In other news on the growing campus tensions, on Wednesday, a protest popped up on Harvard Yard days after the university closed off the area to the public.

🏎️ Comm. Ave. turned into a “Fast and Furious” scene this weekend. If you live in Back Bay and were woken up to the sounds of revving engines early Sunday morning, it was likely because more than 15 vehicles and a large crowd of onlookers gathered for some late-night drag racing through the neighborhood’s streets. Although this type of disturbance isn’t uncommon in Boston, the choice of Back Bay, both for its ritzy reputation and particularly narrow streets, brought significant attention from residents and Boston City Councilors. As of Wednesday evening, no arrests were made, although five parking tickets were doled out. 

🛍️ “Experiential retail” is now en vogue. The latest spot? Life Time Fitness Club, a self-described “athletic country club” which is opening in the Pru’s former Barnes & Noble space. The club will be decked out with everything from gym equipment, to a work lounge, to a wet spa. This development is the most recent in a surge of “experiential retail” experiences all over the city (think: pickleball clubs, Puttshack, Dick’s House of Sport), that have become popular since the pandemic. But for $200+ a month, it’s gonna be a “no” from us, dawg.

ONE LAST THING

The sweetest(?) neighbor

Of all the neighbors one could have in Boston, a Dunkin’ definitely isn’t the worst-case scenario. But often, it’s not as peachy as you’d think.

Proximity to a Dunkin’ has proven to be a genuine value booster for homes and apartment properties. And while it’s an undeniably nice perk to pop in for a quick donut or coffee, there are also major downsides, according to those who live there. 

Among them are relatively run-of-the-mill issues like loud delivery trucks and drive-thru lines blocking driveways, as well as more, shall we say, unexpected situations, like mysterious corpse smells (yes, really), and increased instances of public urination during large public events. Yikes!

Read all the truly wild stories of Dunkin’ neighbors here.

— Written by Gia Orsino and Emily Schario

🍩 Thanks for reading! But for an easy french cruller, we might take it anyway.

💜 Special shoutout to today’s sponsor, the Museum of Science, for supporting local journalism and empowering communities to reduce climate change. 

🚬 The results are in: 71% of B-Siders say that they’re for tobacco bans on Gen Z. One reader said: “I don't need Gen Z being able to use another thing to look cooler than me,” which is as good a reason as any.

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