Feoffees to sell land for $32.5M » Local News » SalemNews.com, Salem, MA. December 21, 2011

By Paul Leighton Staff writer IPSWICH —

The School Committee announced yesterday that it has reached a settlement with the Feoffees in the long-running dispute over the Colonial-era land trust and its obligations to the town’s schools.

Under the terms of the settlement, the Feoffees will sell the 36-acre Little Neck peninsula to Little Neck homeowners for $32.5 million and provide for a permanent endowment for the Ipswich schools.

School Committee Chairman Jeffrey Loeb said the deal should result in $750,000 to $800,000 per year for the schools.

What a shame! This fine perpetual gift to the public schools of Ipswich, made over 350 years ago, has been sold – and cheap! – to a group of private individuals. All the future growth goes to those individuals and their heirs.

Amazing.

What could the sellers have been thinking? Who do they think they are? Their names should be engraved in stone so that future generations of Ipswich children will know exactly who it was that sold their joint patrimony, instead of seeing that it continued to be managed for their benefit.

I hope the courts will intervene.

This is a half vast “solution” to a vast problem. Yes, some recent Feoffees have done a very poor job managing this asset and recalling who the beneficiaries were intended to be, but selling the asset is a dumb way to “solve” the problem.

Think long term. Ours is not the finest, greatest or last generation, and there are certain things we owe to future generations. Not squandering their patrimony is one of them.

I won’t reiterate the arguments I’ve made in earlier posts, but if you’ll click on the “Little Neck Feoffees of Ipswich” link at left, you’ll have them all on a single page.

And you can watch the asking prices of these homes rise by huge amounts. $32,500,000 works out to an average of $195,000 per lot – some likely quite a bit more (location, size, views), some less. Most of these modest old cottages would be worth $60,000 or less anywhere else; I predict you’ll see asking prices in the $500,000 range soon. The only current listing I see is $225,000 for an 853 square foot cottage built in 1935. Its address is 24 Baycrest. Check back to see what that rises to if the land sale closes.

Here’s the assessor’s data:

Year Tax Paid Building Assessment Land Assessment Total Assessment
2011 $3,455 $120,500 $167,400 $287,900
2010 $3,666 $121,900 $195,800 $317,700
2009 $3,057 $115,500 $180,100 $295,600

Source: Public Records

$120,500 seems a rather high valuation for a 75-year-old cottage of 853 square feet. Note that the current asking price is twice that, and that all the seller is able to sell is the cottage itself – plus the hope of acquiring the land, or continuing to pay a ridiculously low land rent.

This blog has more observations and history on this story. See them collected at http://lvtfan.typepad.com/lvtfans_blog/feoffees-land/.