Can't install Brew formulae correctly (Permission denied in /usr/local/lib)

Question

I am installing a few Homebrew packages on a brand new Mac. However, there are some errors while linking:

ln: ./libsvn_wc-1.dylib: Permission denied
Error: The linking step did not complete successfully
The package built, but is not symlinked into /usr/local
You can try again using `brew link subversion'
Error: Could not create symlink /usr/local/lib/libsvn_wc-1.dylib.
Check that you have permssions on /usr/local/lib
==> Summary
/usr/local/Cellar/subversion/1.6.15: 88 files, 6.0M, built in 38 seconds

So SVN isn't really installed correctly, as we can see here:

charon:~ werner$ which svn
/usr/bin/svn

Same error for Git:

charon:~ werner$ brew link git
Error: Permission denied - /usr/local/lib/python2.6

However, this one's installed correctly:

charon:~ werner$ which git
/usr/local/bin/git

Should I just chmod the lib directory or is there anything else I should preferably do?

charon:~ werner$ ls -l /usr/local/
total 8
drwxr-xr-x   7 werner  staff   238 Mar  8 15:58 Cellar
drwxr-xr-x   6 werner  staff   204 Mar  8 14:21 Library
-rw-r--r--   1 werner  staff  1614 Mar  8 14:21 README.md
drwxr-xr-x  56 werner  staff  1904 Mar  8 15:59 bin
drwxr-xr-x   4 werner  staff   136 Mar  8 15:46 etc
drwxr-xr-x   3 werner  staff   102 Mar  8 15:59 include
drwxr-xr-x   3 root    wheel   102 Apr 17  2010 lib
drwxr-xr-x  12 werner  staff   408 Mar  8 15:57 share
drwxr-xr-x   4 root    wheel   136 Mar  8 14:43 texlive

Answer 1

As of writing, Homebrew requires the contents of /usr/local to be chown'd to your username. This doesn't seem like a great solution, but it works, and is evidently the recommended use. See: https://github.com/mxcl/homebrew/issues/9953#issuecomment-3800557

You can do:

sudo chown -R `whoami` /usr/local