CAMBRIDGE — The flier featured a picture of Mr. Monopoly, holding a crimson-red bag of cash, dashing toward a map of Harvard Square.
It beckoned people to a community meeting in a high school library, and posed the question residents here have been asking for many years: “What does Harvard owe?”
That was in long-ago March, when the people calling for Harvard University to pay more in taxes were unions, elected officials, and neighborhood associations.
Now, someone else is joining that chorus: Donald Trump, who last month suggested the IRS should consider revoking Harvard’s tax-exempt status entirely. Friday morning on social media, Trump made a more forceful pledge: “We are going to be taking away Harvard’s Tax Exempt Status,” he posted on his social media site. “It’s what they deserve!”
It’s been a common refrain across Cambridge for decades that Harvard — which does not have to pay property tax on its billions of dollars’ worth of institutional buildings in Cambridge and Boston — should have to share more of its vast wealth with its neighbors. But not like this.
Many at the March gathering acknowledged how Harvard enriches Cambridge in ways large and small, even as they discussed how the institution could give more.
“It definitely wasn’t like, ‘Harvard is the evil empire’ kind of thing,” said Lee Farris, a Cambridge resident and local activist who attended the meeting.
But Trump took a different approach: “Remember,” he wrote on Truth Social on April 15, “Tax Exempt Status is totally contingent on acting in the PUBLIC INTEREST!”
A similar sentiment, perhaps, but in most other ways, Trump’s battle with Harvard — purportedly over its handling of on-campus antisemitism — and those of the people who’ve pushed for Harvard to pay more couldn’t be further apart.
“It’s just a strange situation,” said Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, a Cambridge city councilor. “The person pushing it is someone almost everyone in Cambridge disagrees with. But the idea that Harvard should pay more is something I think the vast majority of people in Cambridge would agree with.”
As is the same for almost all universities, hospitals, and religious organizations, Harvard’s tax-exempt status allows it to forgo paying local property taxes on institutional buildings in municipalities where it owns buildings or land. (It is still on the hook for tax payments on its many commercial properties, such as its Harvard Square retail storefronts.)
If Harvard were paying property tax like a for-profit business, its taxes would be substantial. Bloomberg last year estimated the bill in Boston and Cambridge would total around $158 million a year.
Instead, Harvard voluntarily pays the cities a fraction of what it would otherwise owe, in the form of payments in lieu of taxes, or PILOT. For the upcoming fiscal year, Harvard has agreed to pay $6 million in PILOT payments to Cambridge.
Among the dozens who showed up to the March community meeting, most knew someone who worked at Harvard, or worked there themselves. The university and its hometown have an undeniably symbiotic relationship; Harvard is both Cambridge‘s largest employer and arguably the most well-known institution of higher education on the planet. It directly funds local charitable initiatives and nonprofits, works in Cambridge Public Schools, and provides programming and free admission to its museums.
But still, many believe that’s not enough. Last year, Sobrinho-Wheeler called for Harvard’s PILOT payments to be increased to $100 million, which he said would help the city pay for things such as public safety, afterschool programs, homeless shelters, and some of the more ambitious progressive priorities, like the guaranteed income pilot program. That doesn’t mean he‘s on board with Trump’s latest push.
“I think Harvard should be paying more to the citizens of Cambridge,” Sobrinho-Wheeler said. But it shouldn’t be ”because Harvard stood up to the Trump administration’s threats to their students.”
It’s not as if a potential tax windfall is right around the corner. Massachusetts law does not require a 501(c)(3) nonprofit status for a charity to qualify for a property tax exemption, said Ray Lyons, a conservation attorney based in Harvard, Mass., in an email.
What’s more, City Manager Yi-An Huang told the Harvard Crimson he wouldn’t want the city to tax Harvard even if it could.
At any rate, revoking Harvard’s status would be nearly unprecedented, and, experts say, face long odds in court.
“It will never happen,” said John Graham, tax lawyer at the Boston firm Sullivan & Worcester. “If there is any semblance of the rule of law left, Harvard is not going to lose its tax-exempt status.”
There have been efforts at the state level to make Harvard and institutions like it pay more, albeit with a much more measured approach.
Representative Erika Uyterhoeven, of Somerville, since 2021 has pushed a bill that would let cities enforce minimum PILOT payments at 25 percent of what the tax bills for large nonprofits, including universities, would be if their properties were taxable. The cities could then allow exemptions if organizations paid into community benefits such as athletic fields.
The idea, Uyterhoeven said, would be to give cities new leverage.
“We‘re facing an affordable housing crisis. We‘re facing turmoil in our local economies,” Uyterhoeven said. “This provides a path forward to be like, ‘Look, you all need to come to the table here. Let’s work together.’ ”
Is it odd to see homegrown progressive policy ideas echoed, in a way, by the Trump administration, albeit for very different reasons? Yes, Uyterhoeven said. But her idea, she said, is about maximizing benefits to communities where colleges are located; the president’s is about maximizing harm.
“I think he‘s just grasping for every tool in the toolbox,” she said, “and he happened to pick up a tool we‘ve all been organizing around.”
Diti Kohli of the Globe staff contributed reporting.
Spencer Buell can be reached at spencer.buell@globe.com. Follow him @SpencerBuell. Catherine Carlock can be reached at catherine.carlock@globe.com. Follow her @bycathcarlock.