Turning public land into affordable housing
After her husband died way too young at age 54, Dottie Anderson left her job as a purchasing agent for a newspaper supply company and moved from her longtime Millbury home to Brewster to be near her son and his family. For over 25 years, she lived in a condominium, made new friends, watched her grandchildren grow up, and became involved in the community as a library volunteer and a summer employee in the town’s beach permit office.
About five years ago, she started thinking she needed a change. Living costs at her condo community were rising and climbing the stairs to her second-floor unit was getting harder. She started looking for affordable housing in the area, but nobody called back.
That changed in 2022 when Anderson saw a flyer at Town Hall about a lottery for a new development called Brewster Woods. She put her name in along with 240 other applicants, was chosen and moved into a quiet one-bedroom apartment in February 2023.
On Cape Cod, where housing is expensive and year-round housing is in short supply, Anderson is one of the lucky ones. Now 82, she has a greater sense of housing security in a quiet, safe ground floor apartment she can afford.
Dottie Anderson
Working together
Her good fortune is due to the Town of Brewster, its citizens, and its housing authority, which have made concerted efforts to identify public land as sites for affordable housing. Brewster Woods features 30 one-, two- and three-bedroom affordable apartments. It was built on a 5.8-acre housing authority site that was leased for 99 years to the project’s developers, the Housing Assistance Corporation of Cape Cod and Preservation of Affordable Housing (POAH), a Boston-based national non-profit that has developed affordable housing all over Massachusetts and the Cape. The development is on the same street as two other housing authority affordable senior housing developments totaling 50 units.
Financed with private and public funds, Brewster Woods also benefitted from the town and housing authority working together. The town provided the zoning via the approval of a Ch. 40B comprehensive land-use permit, and $550,000 in Community Preservation Act funds. In addition, Assistant Town Manager Donna Kalinick led the town’s successful application for a $1.68 million MassWorks grant. These funds were used to support road and sidewalk improvements as well as the installation of an innovative alternative septic system which is designed to prevent excess nutrients from entering estuaries and freshwater ponds.
MHP played an integral role in Brewster Woods. Its community assistance team guided the housing authority through the process of assessing the site to determine what would be the most feasible development and crafted a Request for Proposal (RFP) for developers to respond to. Once HAC and POAH were selected, MHP’s rental financing team entered the picture, providing the development with a $2.4 million permanent loan commitment from its bank-funded loan pool.
Helping communities and housing authorities use vacant land for affordable housing is one of MHP’s top priorities. In the last 30 years, it has provided direct staff support and third-party consultants to create more than 4,800 units of affordable housing on public land in over 60 communities. MHP has supported most of these efforts with permanent loans as well.
Brewster understands need
MHP’s Director of Community Assistance Laura Shufelt says public land is one of the most effective ways to produce more housing because communities approve the use of land up front, and that means public support is already in place when developers are selected. Building on public land also helps developers save on land and carrying costs as they go through the permitting process. “It's really important for towns, housing authorities, and the state to recognize that land they are not using can help solve the housing crisis,” said Shufelt.
Brewster gets it. On the heels of Brewster Woods, it’s working with MHP on using a 15-acre town-owned site to create 45 affordable apartments which will be known as Spring Rock Village. MHP helped the town issue the RFP. Once again, POAH and HAC were selected. The development will be built on 30 percent of the land, with the rest left as open space.
The town’s voters were integral to making this happen, okaying the use of CPA funds to purchase one additional acre of roadside land so that the 15-acre town parcel could be accessed from the street. MHP asked the town’s housing coordinator Jill Scalise why Brewster voters have time and again OK’d measures to promote affordable housing so that residents like Dottie Anderson can remain in the community they love.
“Obviously, there are a wide range of feelings and views about housing but I think the difference here is so many people have been impacted by the lack of housing and everyone knows somebody who has struggled,” said Scalise, who has lived in the town for over 25 years and has been its housing coordinator since 2017. “Costs have increased dramatically, and 42 percent of our homes are seasonal second homes. I think the town has risen to the challenge to do the best it can to sustain a year-round community.”
At MHP’s 17th Annual Housing Institute, we recognized the Town of Brewster as a Housing Hero in honor of their longstanding, dedicated efforts to increase the supply of affordable housing in their community.
“Costs have increased dramatically, and 42 percent of our homes are seasonal second homes.”
– Jill Scalise