10 More Affordable Units Added to East Street School Project
Architect's rendering of proposed affordable housing at 70 Belchertown Road site. Photo: amherstma.gov
Report on the Meeting of the Amherst Municipal Affordable Housing Trust
By Maura Keene
This meeting was held over Zoom and was recorded.
Present
Gaston de los Reyes (chair), Hejae Kim, Bob Pomeroy, Karla Rasche, Eason Zhou, Mayen Thorsen, and Paul Bockelman (town manager). (2 vacancies) Staff: Greg Richane (housing coordinator)
Planned Way Finders Projects Adds Affordable Units
Way Finders plans to build apartments through adaptive reuse of the East Street School and on property the town purchased at 70 Belchertown Road. The original plans called for 10 of the 31 units planned for the East Street School site to be offered at market rate. Jamie Gruber, project manager for Way Finders, said the new plans make all units at both sites affordable at varying levels.
Gruber said making the entire project affordable will help it obtain public funding and will also allow both sites to be constructed as a single project. Because the Amherst Municipal Affordable Housing Trust (AMAHT) sponsored the 2022 request for proposals that selected Way Finders, it had to approve the change in the proposal, which it did unanimously.
Both sites will have studios, one-, two-, and three-bedroom units affordable to those earning a maximum of 30% to 80% of area median income (AMI). Of the 10 additional affordable units, five will be affordable at the 50% AMI level and five at the 60% AMI level.
The East Street School site will adapt the historic school building for apartments and add a new addition to the north of the school. The Belchertown Road site will be entirely new construction, with 47 units. All units will have elevator access, and several units at each site will be fully accessible.
Local funding for the project includes $135,000 from AMAHT, $600,000 from Community Preservation Act funds, and $1 million in ARPA funds.
Way Finders hopes to complete the units by fall 2029 if funding is secured this year. Applications will be accepted starting six months before completion, with a lottery held to choose residents.
AMAHT members supported the affordability change. Housing Coordinator Greg Richane will draft letters of support: one to the state’s Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities, a funding source, and another to the Zoning Board of Appeals, which approved the project’s comprehensive permit.
Two Amherst College Undergraduates Appointed to the Trust
Town Manager Paul Bockelman appointed two Amherst College students to fill vacancies on the AMAHT created by the departure of Allegra Clark and Alex Cox, whose terms ended in June. Amherst College junior Eason Zhou and sophomore Mayen Thorsen were appointed to one-year terms.
Zhou has worked as a caseworker at Amherst Community Connections and is especially interested in helping people leaving the prison system find housing. Thorsen is majoring in economics and French. The trust still has two vacancies.
ACLT Withdraws Request for Additional Funds for Amity Street Project
Higher-than-anticipated bids from subcontractors led Amherst Community Land Trust (ACLT) to request an additional $30,000 from AMAHT for its planned affordable homeownership project at 174 Amity Street. AMAHT has already committed $300,000 to acquire the property.
ACLT President Linda Slakey told committee members that all funders required ACLT to demonstrate that all funding was in place before releasing funds. With the closing on the property scheduled for Aug. 31, ACLT realized last month that it was $190,000 short of covering all costs. As a result, it launched an ambitious fundraising campaign and cut some costs. The campaign exceeded expectations, so the extra money from AMAHT was not needed.
Slakey stressed that the uncertain economy, especially regarding interest rates, may mean the project will still need more funding. Although AMAHT members expressed strong support for the project, they preferred to conserve their funds for now. They encouraged ACLT to submit another request if circumstances warrant, especially if needed to increase the affordability of the units.
I find it crazy that affordable units are only for no more than 80 percent of AMI. Even people earning 100 percent cannot afford to rent in Amherst. That formula should be adjusted.
If they are going to have 78 units there, in a totally electrically dependent development, in buildings where there may be physically disabled people on upper floors, are they going to have an emergency generator?
Some of us remember the Halloween storm of 2011 and the resulting power failure.
This really is a public safety issue, every one of these large developments that has its own generator is one less headache for AFD/APD in the chaos of an extended townwide power failure. And those that don’t remember 2011, there were so many wires down that the utility simply turned off Amherst.
Hopefully, something like that will never happen again, but I remember being told the 1938 hurricane took down all the trees on the Amherst College campus, and while it may not be in our lifetimes, it will happen again and possibly worse.
And retrofitting generator circuits and the rest is expensive — not as much if you do it when you’re planning the initial building and installing the original wiring because you can put certain things on certain circuits and those become the ones that the emergency generator powers, as it then doesn’t have to power everything.