Partnerships
A local voice, a labor of love
Noquochoke Village in Westport is a fitting tribute to Westport’s Liz Collins and the value of having local leaders who talk about affordable housing night after night, year after year.
“This is the first affordable housing development initiated by the town and that’s what makes this unique and lasting,” she said. “Everyone deserves a home. If we all keep doing this, the world will be a better place.”
Collins said she never doubted this would happen during the 14 years she worked on it. “It’s like going on a long bus trip,” she said. “There were a lot of bumps, but we knew we were going to get there.”
Noquochoke Village was built on town land and was supported financially by the town with Community Preservation Act and affordable housing trust funds. That’s why The Community Builders (TCB) – the developer of the 50-unit mixed-income development – named the community room after Collins, the driving force behind the town’s support.
Born to give back
One could say that Collins had been preparing for this all her life. She grew up in the Corky Row section of Fall River, the daughter of a seamstress and a state worker whose duties included plowing snow and painting Fall River’s Braga Bridge. After high school, she became a labor and delivery nurse at various area hospitals. She married, moved to Somerset, had three boys, got divorced and settled in Westport where she raised her family.
Around 2000, she began getting interested in equal rights, social justice and politics. She was elected to the select board in 2003, convinced the board to establish a needle exchange program and was voted out in the aftermath of a town backlash against her idea. She then focused on housing, partly because as a nurse, she saw over and over the connection between a stable home and good health.
It’s not a stretch to say Collins’ experience as a labor and delivery nurse prepared her for what it takes to deliver affordable housing. She learned everything she could, attending conferences all over the state, many of them offered by MHP’s community assistance team.
Focus on town land
In Westport, she and her fellow members on the local housing partnership began focusing on 31 acres owned by the town. MHP entered the picture again, overseeing pre-development and helping the town issue a request for proposals to develop seven acres while leaving the rest as open space.
Various factors – including the recession – slowed progress for a few years before TCB was selected to develop Noquochoke, financing it primarily with federal and state low-income housing tax credits. MHP played a key financing role, providing a $1.4 million, 40-year permanent loan.
For MHP, Noquochoke Village represents what it has done in every corner of the Commonwealth. “A big part of our mission is working with cities and towns,” said Clark Ziegler, MHP’s executive director. “We’ve helped over 60 towns utilize town land for housing. Noquochoke is a trifecta. It’s built on town land, it received local funds and it utilized MHP’s low-cost, long-term financing. This is the world MHP strives to work in and there’s no better example than Westport.”
For Liz Collins, cutting the ribbon at the grand opening in the summer of 2019 was the thrill of a lifetime as was the experience a month later when she came back to help TCB management give out free school supplies to children living there.
“At the ribbon cutting, I wanted to cry so many times,” she said. “And then to come back and see all those kids come up to our table to get notebooks, pencils and paper and see how happy they were, that just did it for me. I have delivered a lot of babies and that was always a wonderful feeling, but this was something else.”
“I have delivered a lot of babies and that was always a wonderful feeling, but this was something else.”– Liz Collins