Topic

Revenue, FY2005 to FY2025

Why did revenue fall behind spending, and which parts?

From FY2005 to FY2025 the levy, with Brookline's own new growth, kept pace with spending, but state aid grew far more slowly, and four overrides made up the difference. Brookline's new growth ran in the bottom third of the state.

Twenty years of revenue and spending

Start with the founding fact behind this whole project: Brookline's General Fund revenue grew from $168 million in FY2005 to $390 million in FY2025, more than doubled, while spending grew right alongside it, from $169 million to $365 million. Neither number moved smoothly or automatically. Both were shaped, year after year, by the same tension described in How Brookline's budget works: property tax growth is capped by state law at 2.5% a year plus whatever "new growth" (new construction, renovation, conversion) adds to the tax base, and Brookline's new growth has chronically fallen short of what similar towns manage.

That shortfall is real and measurable, not a rounding error: Brookline's tax base has grown from new construction and renovation at 1.37% a year since 2005, in the bottom third of the state. Why revenue didn't keep up below takes that apart properly.

Here are twenty years of Brookline's actual revenue and spending, against what the levy limit alone would have done:

Restacked as dollars rather than rates, the same three counterfactuals show where the $175 million of FY2005–FY2025 property tax growth actually came from, and how much of it came from asking voters.

Four times since 2005, that gap grew faster than new growth and the 2.5% cap alone could close it, and voters were asked to close it directly with an override, a permanent increase to the town's allowed tax levy, approved at the ballot:

A fifth override, $23.25 million, phased in over FY2027-2029, split $17.9 million for schools and $5.3 million for town departments, passed in May 2026, just after this twenty-year window closes; the forecast explains how it is treated.

Three of the four are explicitly schools-driven, and that's not a coincidence; it lines up with a separate, real wave of school construction and expansion happening on the capital side over the same twenty years. That side is funded differently: not by overrides, which permanently raise the tax base, but by debt exclusions, which raise taxes only for the life of a specific bond and then expire. Brookline voters approved debt exclusions for the Edward Devotion School expansion (2016), high school renovations (2019), and the Driscoll School expansion (2021), and, most recently, two large ones still underway: the Pierce School's full PreK-8 rebuild (approved 2024, with roughly $114 million of already-authorized borrowing beyond what even this project's own balance-sheet forecast currently accounts for) and new fire station construction (2025). Operating overrides and capital debt exclusions are two different mechanisms, but they're pointed at the same underlying cause: a growing, aging set of public facilities and a student population the town has had to keep building and staffing for, even as enrollment itself has recently started to fall, as Spending, FY2011 to FY2025 shows.

The other major driver of the gap sits on the benefits side, not schools, and it moves on its own separate, slower clock. Brookline's net pension liability swung from $184.5 million (2014) to as low as $125.3 million (2021, a strong investment year) and back up to $170.7 million (2023), genuinely volatile, not steadily rising or falling, and driven mostly by investment returns rather than the town falling behind on its own contributions. Net OPEB liability (retiree health benefits, the town's largest unfunded liability) tells a similar story: $254.5 million and only 12.9% funded in 2017, down to $189.6 million and 32.6% funded by 2023, then back up to $201.5 million in 2024, a reminder that this liability doesn't decline in a straight line either. The town's own funding schedule has the pension system reaching full funding by 2030, with the contribution capacity that frees up then redirected to OPEB, a real structural turning point the forecast relies on directly.

None of this reads as crisis or mismanagement on its own; the pattern is mechanical and explainable, and How Brookline's budget works lays out the machine that produces it. What this chronicle adds is the when and why now: four overrides, clustered mostly around school-driven need, layered on top of a tax base that grew more slowly than peer towns' because new growth chronically underperformed. Where the growth did and did not happen goes to the parcel level, to look at where, and where not, that growth actually happened.

Why revenue didn't keep up

How Brookline's budget works sets out that there are only two ways Brookline's allowed tax revenue can grow faster than 2.5% a year: ask voters for an override, or generate new growth. The section above covered the overrides, four of them in plain view, each one a ballot question. This section covers everything else.

Start by sorting the revenue side into what Brookline sets for itself and what the state sets for it.

Two dashed lines, two solid, and one benchmark. Read against operating expenditure, which grew 105% over the twenty years:

The levy did its job. With actual new growth and no overrides at all, the levy limit grew at 3.91% a year, faster than operating costs at 3.65%. Proposition 2½ plus Brookline's own construction and renovation was, on its own, enough to keep pace.

State aid did not. It grew at 1.99% a year, and the shape of that line is worth looking at rather than summarizing. State aid fell in absolute terms after 2008, bottoming at 15% below its FY2005 level in FY2012, and did not recover to its starting point until around FY2015. Ten years of a large revenue source going backwards.

Blend the two together, weight them by size, and automatic revenue grew at 3.52% a year against costs at 3.65%. Had state aid merely kept pace with cost growth, it would have been $34.4 million in FY2025 rather than $24.9 million. That single shortfall of $9.5 million a year accounts for 87% of the entire gap between automatic revenue and costs.

This is not a Brookline story. Statewide, unrestricted local aid has fallen 25% in real terms since 2002, and its share of local tax revenue has gone from 11.5% in FY2007 to 5.4% in FY2024. Brookline experienced the Massachusetts pattern.

It is also not a reason to stop pressing. The Massachusetts Municipal Association is currently seeking roughly $351 million in additional unrestricted aid, which would be worth real money to Brookline. The argument here is only that a plan cannot depend on winning it. The forecast grows state aid 2.5% a year from the adopted FY2027 figure, the rate in the Town's own long-range plan. From FY2015 to FY2025 it grew 3.5% a year, but that includes a one-year rise of 8.6% in FY2019; since FY2019 it has grown 2.0% a year.

Which brings the question back to new growth

Over FY2005–2025, Brookline's tax base grew from new construction and renovation at 1.37% a year. Checked against every one of the 351 Massachusetts municipalities' own new-growth filings with the Department of Local Services, that is the 26.6th percentile, the bottom third of the state.

What the distribution actually looks like

A percentile on its own is easy to wave away, so here is the shape of it. Across all 350 municipalities with a complete twenty-year series:

Brookline at 1.37% sits just above the 25th percentile. The 80th percentile, 2.03% a year, is the benchmark these pages use for the twenty-year comparison, and it is worth saying why: it is not a ceiling and not an aspiration, it is simply what the better-performing fifth of the state managed. Sixty-nine other municipalities did at least that well over the same twenty years, under the same state law, the same Proposition 2½, and the same economy.

Named comparisons, including the unflattering ones

Percentiles hide who is in them. Here are eight towns and cities comparable to Brookline, chosen to span the range, not to make a point:

Two things in that table matter more than the headline.

Brookline is not uniquely slow. Newton is barely ahead of it and Arlington is well behind, both dense, built-out, expensive inner suburbs facing the same constraints. Any account of Brookline's rate that treats it as a local failure has to explain Newton and Arlington too. An earlier version of this analysis cited only Cambridge, Boston, Needham and Lexington, which is a real comparison but a selected one; the full picture is that Brookline sits in a cluster of similar towns, and the cluster is slow.

But some very similar places are much faster. Somerville, Cambridge and Watertown are not less built-out than Brookline, not less expensive, and not less contested. They are two to three times faster at this. Whatever explains the gap, "there is no room" is not a sufficient answer, because places with no more room have done substantially better.

The recent five years, stated carefully

The trailing window tells a more complicated story, and it is easy to misreport in either direction. Over FY2021–2025 Brookline's rate fell, to 1.28%. Its percentile ranking improved, to the 40th.

Both are true because the bar came down. The 80th-percentile threshold fell from 2.03% to 1.97% and the median fell with it, from 1.62% to 1.40%. Brookline moved up the table by standing still while others slowed. That is worth knowing; it means the recent gap to strong performance is genuinely narrower than the twenty-year gap, and it is not a turnaround, and these pages do not present it as one.

Why the shortfall compounds

New growth is not an annual bonus that resets. A percentage point added this year permanently enlarges the base that the 2.5% cap applies to every year afterwards, so a year of slow growth is not a year of lost revenue; it is a permanent reduction in the size of every future year's 2.5%.

Twenty years of running roughly two-thirds of a percentage point behind the 80th percentile therefore compounds into a meaningfully smaller tax base today than Brookline would otherwise have. Would faster growth have avoided the overrides? below puts a number on exactly what that shortfall cost, by rebuilding the levy limit year by year under the alternative.

What this section cannot explain

It is worth being straight about the limits here. This section establishes that Brookline's new growth has run in the bottom third of the state and by how much. It does not establish why, and the honest answer is that the data can identify the composition of the shortfall but not its cause.

What the composition shows, set out fully in Growth: renovation and what faster growth is worth, is that Brookline's new growth is overwhelmingly investment in existing buildings rather than new ones, and that new commercial space contributes almost nothing measurable. Whether that reflects zoning, process, land economics, or simple demand is a question these pages deliberately leave open, as the forecast's limits say directly. It matters, because the growth lever there is sized on the assumption that the rate could move, and nothing here proves that it can.

Where the growth did and did not happen

The finding above, 1.37% a year, 26.6th-percentile new growth, statewide, is a townwide average. It says nothing about where in Brookline that growth did or didn't happen, or what it actually looked like on the ground: a torn-down house replaced with something larger, an old office building converted to housing, a kitchen renovation, or nothing changing at all. This project built a parcel-by-parcel map to answer exactly that (the land value and growth maps, a live, interactive version of everything below; it covers real estate only, while the town-wide new growth rate above also includes business and utility personal property), by comparing every one of Brookline's roughly 8,500 parcels' assessed value, year over year, against what that specific building or lot would be expected to do with no structural change at all, no addition, no conversion, no new unit, nothing but ordinary market movement. (251 of those parcels are permanently tax-exempt, schools, municipal buildings, religious institutions, housing authorities, and excluded from these growth figures entirely.)

Getting that "expected, nothing changed" baseline right mattered. Massachusetts' 2.5% cap limits the town's total tax levy, not any individual property's assessed value, so a naive 2.5%-a-year assumption badly understates real organic appreciation (this project's own data shows townwide assessed value actually grew roughly 5.9% a year, compounded, over the period examined). The map instead measures every parcel's growth against Brookline's own observed, real appreciation rate among parcels already confirmed to have had no structural change, not a stylized formula. That distinction turned out to matter: parcels in the top decile of growth-above-that-real-baseline are 4.0x over-represented among properties this project's own classifier independently flagged as having undergone real new construction or renovation, meaningfully stronger evidence that something real happened there than a raw dollar-growth or raw percent-growth ranking gives (2.3-2.6x and 3.8x respectively), because it's the only one of the views grounded in the town's own audited tax mechanics rather than an approximation.

Running that classifier across eight recent years of assessor data (FY2017-2025) finds real, physical change on a meaningful but modest share of the town: 287 parcel-years of new construction and 467 of identified renovation, against roughly 61,000 parcel-years that saw nothing but ordinary market movement. That's the parcel-level face of the finding above: real construction and renovation genuinely happening across Brookline, just not at the pace, or possibly not in the mix, that would have closed the gap to peer towns.

Real stories, not just an abstraction. This project's own design principle is to make findings concrete wherever possible, a specific parcel, not just an aggregate. Nine parcels were picked across Brookline's range of outcomes, and each one's story was checked against the town's actual building-permit records, not just its assessed-value history alone. Seven are done:

• A single-family home, vacant since at least 1994, was newly built out under a 2017 permit. The lot itself was reclassified as developable roughly a year before construction started, once local zoning approval was granted, a reminder that the assessor's books can move ahead of a shovel going into the ground, not just behind it. Value went from $27,100 (bare land) to $3.1 million; the town's own books had substantially caught up with the construction within about 15 months of the permit being filed, several months before the certificate of occupancy was even issued.
• A single-family home was torn down and rebuilt sometime between 1999 and 2011 (before this project's own assessor data begins in 2009, so the exact date isn't independently visible), confirmed instead via its own sale history: a 2011 sale price of $2.105 million lines up almost exactly with the rebuilt home's own assessed value that same year.
• A single-family home was converted into a two-family, via a $611,000, zoning-board-approved gut renovation (a lowered, underpinned basement; a new roof; a new porch). Town records show it had already been informally treated as a two-unit property for years beforehand, which is why this project's own classifier initially filed it as an ordinary renovation rather than new construction; the permit record confirmed a real, substantial project either way, landing on the books about 22 months after it was filed.
• A former church rectory, owned throughout by the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, stopped qualifying for its religious tax exemption on its own, not because of a sale, sometime before mid-2022, and then underwent a genuine $1.58 million renovation (kitchen, baths, a historic-district-approved exterior update) while the Diocese still owned it. Both events are real; only the second one is construction, and it landed on the books just six months after the permit was filed, a notably fast turnaround, since it was interior work on an already- standing building rather than new construction.
• A former private school, tax-exempt for over a decade, lost that exemption, was demolished within about five months of a 2021 construction permit filed by a healthcare/senior-living developer (Welltower/Balfour), and rebuilt as a 153-unit assisted-living building, the single largest new-growth story this project found so far. It took roughly 40 months from permit to substantially complete, about double the typical single-family timeline, consistent with a much larger, more complex project needing more time, not a sign anything went wrong.
• Two single-family homes showed no construction event of any kind across the entire period checked: no permits beyond routine maintenance, ordinary appreciation only, assessed value tracking the town's real baseline closely. These aren't gaps in the data; they're the genuine control cases every "did construction happen here" claim in this project needs, confirming the classifier isn't simply flagging every property as a story.

Two more of the nine, a hotel and a Chestnut Hill condominium redevelopment, have not yet been checked against permit records; nothing in the finding above depends on them. A tenth parcel, checked before this list of nine was formalized, turned out to be the most instructive messy case: an ordinary single-family home where a $200,000 renovation permit stalled for years, the property changed hands mid-project, a new contractor picked the same job back up at a reduced scope, and even after all that, part of the eventual assessed-value jump turned out to be an unrelated townwide land revaluation, not the renovation at all. Real projects are not always as clean as the other nine examples above, worth keeping in view alongside them.

One honest limitation surfaced while doing this work. Brookline's own parcel identifiers occasionally change when a property is physically assembled from more than one lot, one real example found this way merged a neighboring property into an existing address's parcel entirely, with the town's own current records showing no link at all back to the absorbed parcel's old identifier. This project's map only catches that kind of change correctly when it happens to land on the same underlying lot number by coincidence; a genuine merger across two different lot numbers, like that one, can otherwise look like an unexplained value jump rather than what it actually is. Worth keeping in mind as a limit on precision in a small number of cases, not a limit on the overall finding.

Together, the townwide numbers above and these parcels tell the same twenty-year story from two directions: townwide numbers, and the real buildings and permits behind a sample of them.

Would faster growth have avoided the overrides?

This is the counterfactual the whole argument turns on, and it is worth doing precisely rather than rhetorically. The quick version of the arithmetic is tempting and nearly right: overrides added about 0.8%/yr of levy growth, so 1.3% actual plus 0.8% needed is about 2.1%. But the levy limit is a compounding recursion, not a sum, so the answer has to be solved for rather than added up.

Rebuild the levy limit year by year from FY2005: compound it forward at 2.5%, add each year's real new growth, add each year's real override. That reproduces the actual FY2025 levy limit of $293.1 million. Now remove the four overrides and leave everything else alone: the levy limit lands at $254.4 million instead. The four overrides were worth $38.7 million a year of permanent levy capacity by FY2025, considerably more than the $32.4 million they raised on paper, because an override permanently enlarges the base that then compounds at 2.5% every year after.

So the question becomes: what rate of new growth, with no overrides at all, would have reached the same place?

2.15% a year. Against an actual average of 1.33% over the same twenty growth years, FY2006 to FY2025 (1.37% if FY2005 is counted too, as elsewhere on these pages), a gap of 0.82 percentage points, every year, for twenty years. The quick arithmetic above was right to within a rounding error, which is reassuring, but this figure is solved for rather than asserted.

That is the precise answer, and it comes with an important qualification. 2.15% is more than even strong peer performance would have delivered. The 80th-percentile rate across the 350 Massachusetts municipalities with a complete series over this period was 2.03%. Growing at that rate, with no overrides, gets Brookline to a FY2025 levy limit of $286.7 million, 83% of the way to where the overrides actually took it, not the whole way.

The honest statement is therefore slightly stronger than "growth could have replaced the overrides," and slightly weaker than it might first appear:

Matching the growth rate of the best-performing fifth of Massachusetts towns would have avoided roughly four-fifths of what Brookline asked its taxpayers for over twenty years. Avoiding all of it would have required doing somewhat better than the 80th percentile, sustained, for two decades.

Both halves matter. Growth is a genuinely large lever, large enough to have absorbed most of a $38.7 million annual burden. It is not, on the evidence of the last twenty years, a complete substitute for ever asking voters for anything.

Go deeper

• How Brookline got here, in full: Why has Brookline's budget kept outgrowing what Proposition 2½ allows it to collect?
• Growth: when a new home pays for itself: When does a new home, or new commercial space, add more tax than it costs the Town?
• How Brookline's budget works: Where does the Town's money come from, what is it allowed to collect, and what does "sustainable" mean?
• Data and sources: Where does each number come from?

Last updated 2026-10-14. What has changed.