Today I learned:

Brookline is home to a 280+ acre country club. 280 acres is approximately the size of Mid-Cambridge. Mid-Cambridge is home to approximately 13,000 residents.

Last year, the country club paid a total of only ~$1M in tax on this massive, largely vacant land.

The name of the country club in question?

"The Country Club."

Total membership of The Country Club--membership that does not always result in these folks spending any time at the club, mind you--is around 1300.

The club is too exclusive to have any kind of public fee structure.

1300 members of the Club. 13,000 residents of Mid-Cambridge.

Other similar clubs have initiation fees in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, with maintenance fees of tens of thousands per year.

A fair valuation of this land if redeveloped *even as sparse single family homes* would be hundreds of times higher than its current valuation.

Looking at "land value" assessments in comparable S-40 zones in Brookline only, the median assessment / square foot is $46.

This property is assessed at $3.54/sqft.

The land on this property is under-assessed by *$443M*.

The people of Brookline are subsidizing the uber-rich.

The median Brookline resident living in a 2-bedroom condo is paying $132 a year to subsidize the reduced tax burden from the under-assessment of The Country Club, a club that didn't allow Blacks to join until 1994.