Town Council Candidates Talk About Housing and CRESS at UMass Student Forum

Questions about affordable housing,  the University of Massachusetts housing crisis, and the Community Responders for Equity, Safety and Service (CRESS) were posed to candidates for District 1 and at-large seats on the Amherst Town Council at a student-led forum at UMass on October 27.

Pi Sigma Alpha, the Political Science Honor Society, hosted the forum on the UMass campus for seven candidates running for election and reelection to the town council. Co-sponsors of this event were the Commonwealth Honors College, UMass School of Public Policy, UMass Department of Political Science, and UMass College of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

About 25 UMass students gathered for food and friendly conversation with candidates before the forum began. 

Grace Thompson, Diko Karim, Hunter Proulx and Dylan Gratiano, students in the honor society, moderated the event and asked the candidates a series of questions. 

Participating candidates were Andrew Churchill (At-Large), Ndifreke “Freke” Ette (District 1), Mandi Jo Hanneke (At-Large), Ellisha May Walker (At-Large), Jill Brevik (District 1), Cathy Schoen (District 1) and Vincent J. O’Connor (District 1).

Question: If you were elected, what would you do differently to foster significant action on the housing issue?

Ette: “One of the things that we as councilors do is push for certain changes that would expand the housing options that exist in town. We have a lot of plans. We have housing plans. We have a master plan, and all these different plans have pointed out that we need to make zoning changes. I think, on behalf of what you could do is express that desire.” 

Hanneke: “The biggest thing the council can do is propose and vote for zoning changes. Now everyone disagrees about what  the zoning changes need to be, but zoning is what controls the regulations around building housing and can then control how expensive and inexpensive it might be to actually get housing built. So I would look at proposing legislation to create the “missing middle” housing, redefining apartment uses, facilitating infill development and engineering zoning to encourage more low-income housing units. And my record as a counselor shows that I’ve actually proposed that legislation, because in the last seven years I’ve been here, I’ve actually co-sponsored legislation to do zoning reform, to lower barriers to building two or three family homes in town, to reform our rental housing laws, and to support state legislation on transfer fees.”

Walker: “As someone who has grown up in this town and who has seen the housing market over the years and has seen families and more members of our workforce pushed out of our town and because of this brings a very important perspective to the table, I think zoning is an important consideration. I would like to talk about establishing affordability standards. We have to be sure that what we’re building is affordable for folks, and I think that’s where the value of my perspective as a renter comes into play here on the council, making sure that all the decisions we’re making related to housing are rooted in the experiences of the people who live in this town, and not just the folks that are going to be invited here to be building the buildings,” she said.

Brevik: thinking about what actionable steps we could take in addition to zoning changes and regulations, I think, yeah, really focusing on increasing housing stock in a way that we’re increasing affordability and accessibility. Those two things have to be intrinsically tied together, and I feel like a lot of development in recent years hasn’t really had that kind of an impact on affordability in our town. So I think it’s looking at the housing production plan that we have, adopting standards, and getting on the same page before we move forward with any new development, and really making sure that any future plans, any future projects, really have an impact on making sure that working class families can stay in Amherst, and also keeping in mind our conservation goals and thinking about climate change and development.

Schoen: We have to think about what we’re doing and where we’re going with housing; because housing also comes with costs, roads, sewer, sidewalks, so we need to plan. Amherst right now has fairly limited land that doesn’t already have something on it, or isn’t wet, very wet with flood plains. So when we’re looking at what land we have, if it’s already developed, can it be developed more to have more housing on it? But then we think of what does that come with? So I think the council has control over zoning. We can vote zoning, but we also have control over planning, sewer and all the services that come with more density in town.

O’Connor: I see my role as directly providing and encouraging family housing. But I also think that we have to take a look at the housing the students occupy and protect students from real estate speculators, like people who are buying single family homes and charging an outrageous amount of money. I have a friend who rents out her former home to a family of three and she rents it for $1700 a month. If you know any group of students here, who rent single family, four bedroom home for $1700 a month, I’d like to meet them. We need to also deal with some of the older apartment complexes that have essentially raised their rent ridiculously in response to some of the new construction in the center of town.

Churchill: “Recently, we’ve had a lot of competition for housing, and that has ended up with students being booked into neighborhoods with elders who are living in their own homes when their kids are gone but they can’t think of another place to live. But I think we really need to to identify areas for all different types of housing, whether it’s student housing, senior housing, workforce housing, family housing. And I think if we build more student housing in areas that aren’t directly in conflict with family neighborhoods, things like University Drive or Olympia drive, that will reduce some of the pressure on family homes.”

Question: I live in a 1500 square foot home with three others in Amherst. Our rent totals $3,600/month. While bringing students back on campus could free up these houses for permanent residents, such as families, workers, etc., rent prices around Amherst would likely remain high. You have spoken about this a little bit already, but what policies or initiatives would you pursue to make housing more affordable for families and workers in Amherst and generally speaking, what steps would you as council members take to ease the cost pressures associated with living here?

Hanneke: “Economics says increase supply when demand is high and cost will go down. That does not mean it will go down a lot, and it doesn’t mean it’s guaranteed to go down. That’s just one of many things affecting costs, but there’s a lot of demand in Amherst for housing even  outside of the student population. But we need to be looking at finding places to build housing for students. That is where students want to live – in town.”

Walker: “I think this is definitely going to require some type of partnership with the colleges and universities in order to sort of solve this issue, because I did hear from students recently that students moving back on campus may not even necessarily be the resolution, because on campus, housing is more expensive for them, so there’s an affordability challenge there as well, and so I think really making sure that the homes that we’re building in town are affordable, and we’re encouraging the university to also be building affordable housing. That’s really important. I think at the council level, we need to look at more ways so we can partner with the Amherst housing authority to ensure that we’re building more subsidized and low income housing, and that will really make sure that folks aren’t spending more than 30% of their income on housing, which is the statewide sort of standard for affordable housing. And so I think that that’s going to take a level of collaboration with the university that doesn’t necessarily exist.

Brevik: I think there are things that we can control here, and there are things that are out of our control. As a councilor, I would also advocate for, on the state level, there’s a rent control ballot initiative that would help ease some of these challenges, as we see here, but I think it’s important for us to stay aware of and understand how we can use our positions of power to advocate for larger systemic changes. The housing crisis is something that we’re having all over the country. And I’ll just echo also what Ellisha said too. I think, building stronger collaborations with the university and having really honest conversations about what the need is and how we can work together to ensure that in this, this type of a town, that we’re meeting everybody’s needs at the same time: seniors, working families and students all together.

Schoen: “So one of the issues about housing costs is that it costs a lot to build a house. The construction costs have soared in recent years. We have the North Amherst library that has the the community room that isn’t very large. The original estimate was $800,000 and when they built it, it was $2 million so it was pretty startling. So for it to be more affordable, one of the things the town has the power over is we have a surcharge on our taxes that pays for something called the Community Preservation Act, and that can leverage state dollars for subsidized housing. We’re building some duplexes that will all be affordable. That is with town money plus state money. And as Jill said, there is a bill on rent control in the legislature. Amherst had that decades ago, and it was taken away from us.”

O’Connor: “Let me say this: we’ve had more than cooperation with the university for the last number of years, because the Assistant Director of Planning for the university is the chair of the Amherst Planning Board. And in that time period, all sorts of five story buildings have been built, primarily for students, where the starting price for one bedroom apartment is $2,000 a month. So that is part of our problem and part of your problem. I think we ought to be joining with Mayor Wu of Boston and with Springfield, East Hampton, Northampton, to both limit the rent increases in this state to the cost of living, the documented cost of living.”

Churchill:  “I think we need to look at the whole housing ecosystem and find ways of providing housing for each sort of sector of renter or home owner. Our housing implementation plan talks

about there really being a need for low and moderate income housing, in particular, at the lower level, public housing and housing authority can develop more public funded housing. We can engage nonprofit developers.. I mean, the low income home residential development being built in North Amherst is a nice example of building equity for lower income folks. But really, all housing supply helps. If you don’t have enough housing in common, then some of the wealthier folks are pushing into the middle income level. And if you don’t have housing for students or seniors, then they start pushing into family housing.”

Ette: “The town has plans that already outline what the issues are with housing and also what some of these solutions are is the housing production plan, this master plan. These are things that we can look at. And I think in this audience, you are well agreed to look at some of those things yourself. I think it is important to recognize that what is affordable is for different people, and so that requires looking at housing that will be open different sort of housing for those who are single, those who are college students, those who are seniors, and besides that, specifically for students, I think what we can do is again, walk on developments in perhaps places like downtown, where students want to stay and we can have a denser population.”

Question: What steps would you take in developing the CRESS program and would you support expanding its engagement with students?

Brevik: “I’m a big supporter of the CRESS program. I think we were one of the first in the country to establish something like this, and I think that is something that we can be really proud of…and we have a Community Safety Working Group who put out a study or report on ways to improve the program and improve utilization of the program, and I think that you know, a lot of that will be helpful in terms of how to partner with others, with the university, more, I think that utilization requires community engagement. It requires people knowing that this is an option and that this is something you call whenever you call for help.”

Schoen: “I think we need to be looking at what is working well or hasn’t worked well. We haven’t taken that time yet, and we’ve been waiting for an evaluation to come back, including from the leaders of the program. The hours have not been what we thought they would be in terms of times of the day that people are available. They’re available during the day, not the evening. We haven’t linked up to a dispatch system where calls come in, and there’s been a lack of clarity on which calls should go where and which calls could be handled by CRESS. For years, I worked on healthcare when we wanted nurse practitioners and physicians assistants, it was changing how the doctor’s practices worked, and those were incredibly innovative, and everybody learned in terms of the teamwork, and I see my time’s up. It is this larger question, after we rethink, what can we think about what the police department does these days, when it’s so much what we don’t need and can we shift services around?”

O’Connor: “So my analysis of why this program has not been what the council wanted it to be, because the council does not have a committee that exercises proper oversight over the public safety departments; to the town, the police, the fire and the CRESS program. We need a council committee, three council members and two members of the public to meet monthly with leadership individuals from each of those departments and find out. We don’t want to report every two years from them. We want to find out.  Let’s say, okay, why isn’t this program working? And we’ll come back next month and ask you the same question. We expect progress, not progress after two years, but progress after each month. The failure of the council to exercise proper oversight leads to a lack of accountability of those departments to the public, and this is what we have. The public wanted this program and it has not functioned properly because the council has not exerted proper oversight, continuous with the leadership people, and not waiting for the manager to say wonderful things every six months or a year.”

Churchill: “I came out of some work that was done by retired public safety officials who looked at our police department and mapped out the number of certain calls that required an armed response versus ones that could be handled differently. And it was really a small, enough, relatively small number that actually required an armed response. So it makes sense to be thinking about a model that has unarmed response and skills in de-escalating and connecting people to services and so on. I don’t think we’ve gotten it right yet, as others mentioned, the current hours, 8am-4pm which is not the prime time for people needing deescalation.”

Ette: “So we’re still waiting on reports from the town about what CRESS has been doing without that report, it’s hard to actually know how effective CRESS is, and without knowing how effective it is, it would be hasty to say that extra funding will make CRESS more effective. So once we get the report, once we look at this, then we can know where funding is supposed to go. Something else is that CRESS had a risk in a mission, at least in its inception, it is possible that, as it has grown, times have changed, and we may need to adjust what CRESS is going to be. There is no, it doesn’t have to be the case that CRESS isn’t what we imagined it to be, I think something the council can do is encourage CRESS and the town manager, to collaborate better with the police and UMass police, that’s an area that I think the council can work on. And just as a final note, who gets to oversee an oversight board?”

Hanneke: We found out from Finance Committee last year that our police department has a grant for a CSO officer, which is a social worker, to sit in a police department for about eight hours a day, a couple days a week. They share it between two people, and they don’t dispatch directly from dispatch. Dispatch doesn’t say “hey, CSO officer, go out with the police officer.” The CSO officer listens, they listen to the calls that are being dispatched and say, “hey, that sounds like something that I would be very helpful at. I’m going to go out and respond to that call too.” And in their time during the week, they have responded to approximately the same number of calls as all of our CRESS department together, and what I would like to see is CRESS doing that until we can get dispatch working with CRESS, for dispatch to directly go and call CRESS and say, “this one’s yours”, I’m at a loss to say, why isn’t our CRESS department doing the same thing; listening to the call, seeing what’s being dispatched and coming in and say, “hey, we might be able to help. Let’s go out and do that”. I think that failure on CRESS department and that failure of sort of collaboration and cooperation and thinking outside the box when things haven’t worked out the way they expected it to, has hampered their ability.”

Walker: “Before my time on the council, I co-chaired the Community Safety Working Group, which was where the CRESS recommendation originated from. And so to be very clear, we were tasked by the town of Amherst to study the town’s public safety services and figure out how we can sort of work to restore trust within the BIPOC community in our town. And what we found, after two years of extensive research and community outreach, was that BIPOC populations and other marginalized folks in the town do not trust the police department and do not feel safe calling the police when they are in crisis. And so that is why there was a need for an alternative for folks to call and have an unarmed officer respond to nonviolent calls. So this is very much intended to be a public safety response. I will say that this has not been successful because it has been underfunded and understaffed from the beginning. So it has never had the chance to live up to its full potential, or to be able to do what it was intended to do from the beginning. And so I think that that is what has been the failure. It’s very interesting to think about a partnership with UMass. I think the reason why they haven’t been considering responding to calls on campus is because of the funding issue, but maybe, if there were opportunities for a partnership, maybe we asked to provide some funding for the CRESS department. And that might help to sort of look at how we can resolve these issues and allow for us to be fully functional and to address the calls that we had intended for it to address. Some of those things again, staffing, funding, call times, being able to answer dispatch calls, are all things that the department was never actually able to do.”

Allegra Clark was unable to attend but her campaign sent a statement that was read aloud.

My name is Allegra Clark-  On the ballot, my name will be Charlotte Allegra Rice Clark. I am a proud graduate of the Amherst Public Schools and a proud public school parent. I’m a social worker with a certificate in urban leadership, which has taught me to listen and to meet people where they are to reach collaborative solutions. And I’ve worked grassroots organizing in this community, including with UMass students. I sit on both the Affordable Housing Trust and the Community Safety and Social Justice Committee, which I co-chair. I really want community involvement, and to bridge between campus and community. Transparency in the processes that we go through are paramount, and I hope to improve them. I will view things from an equity lens. So, I ask for one of your at-large votes. You can check more about me on my website allegraforamherst.org or instagram @allegraforamherst

After these statements were read aloud, candidates continued to mingle with students present. The event which began at 6:00 p.m. concluded at around 8:30 p.m.