South Hadley to set up affordable housing trust

South Hadley

South Hadley

By EMILEE KLEIN

Staff Writer

Published: 07-15-2024 11:42 AM

SOUTH HADLEY — The Planning Department will establish an Affordable Housing Trust within the next year to support affordable and sustainable housing projects, an initiative being funded by grant money from the state’s Municipal Vunerability Preparedness 2.0 pilot program.

The grant program, also called MVP 2.0, is an extension of a prior program from 2019 that awarded cities and towns in the commonwealth with funds to begin building climate resiliency and implementing climate migration projects.

At the first public forum for the MVP 2.0 grant, South Hadley Planning Director Anne Capra explained that the original MVP program focused on how extreme weather conditions brought on by climate change impacts infrastructure, environment and society. The current program examines the effects of these conditions on people.

Once these potential consequences are identified, cities and towns in an MVP program can apply for action grants to remedy or prevent any catastrophic effects. For instance, residents previously identified flooding, ice and snow, drought and extreme precipitation, and extreme temperatures as the top four hazards affecting South Hadley, so the town designed and replaced several culverts around town to improve infrastructure for managing floods.

As part of the pilot of the second iteration of the MVP program, a MVP 2.0 Core Team has $50,000 to spend on a seed project related to managing climate impacts on town residents.

“Through our Core Team and our engagement with the public in multiple forums, what we heard from people as being their priorities were issues with housing (and) that housing affordability was a thing that people were most concerned with,” Capra told the Select Board at its July 9 meeting. “At first, we had a really hard time figuring out, well, how do we address that with this program is offering us $50,000 to fund a seed project.”

After three public forums and a year of planning, Capra said the Core Team decided to develop an Affordable Housing Trust with $20,000 of the money, including hiring a consultant, submitting a housing trust bylaw to the state, establishing a board of trustees and identifying goals of the trust. Then, the seated board can choose a community project to allocate the remaining $30,000 towards new affordable housing project.

“I know there are a couple folks in town or interested parties that do want to build deed restricted, affordable housing, and I know they’re in the initial feasibility phase. So for example, a group like that could probably use $30,000 to do some land survey, to bring in an architect to do some conceptual designs, you know, figure out how many units they could get on a piece of property, that kind of stuff,” Capra told the board.

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Normally, housing trusts receive funding from the Community Preservation Act, which Town Meeting has voted down twice in the past decade. When Select Board Member Jeff Cyr inquired into how the trust will acquire funds, Capra responded that part of the project will be locating possible money sources. She noted that local room taxes, grants and negotiations with developers are all ways to capitalize on the trust.

So far, South Hadley’s only affordable housing project currently in development is a 60-unit apartment building to a 3-acre site at the former Woodlawn Shopping Plaza. However, Capra sees many types of housing and housing developments as possibilities for South Hadley.

“To make 10% of our housing stock be 100% deed restricted, affordable, we still are short over 300 units,” she said. “And so the question is do we really want to see multiple 60-unit apartment buildings or do we want to see affordable housing integrate into the community in other ways.”

Capra gave a few examples from recent conversations with developers, including a 22-unit cottage-style, mixed one- and two-bedroom development.

“I think that that is something that would really fit well in South Hadley,” she said.

Emilee Klein can be reached at eklein@gazettenet.com.