“It takes a town to create a village,” said Brenda Torpy, CEO of Champlain Housing Trust, to the roughly 100 people in attendance.
Representatives from Champlain Housing Trust, Cathedral Square Corporation and Housing Vermont praised each other’s contributions and the work of Shelburne officials and the local faith community for persevering on their vision of Harrington Village: a mixed income housing development on 22 acres along U.S. 7 on the edge of downtown Shelburne. The development is slated for completion in August 2014.
Five apartment buildings comprised of 42 units, plus a senior housing project with 36 one-bedroom apartments, will back up to 13 acres of conservation land by the LaPlatte River. Additionally, infrastructure will be laid for four homes to be sold at a later date.
And that’s only what’s planned for the Harrington Village property, which was purchased from resident Peg Dyer after at least eight years of false starts due to permitting complications, a developer backing out, and even “quicksand” being discovered onsite, requiring last-minute modifications to the design.
Adjoining the future village is more land that’s recently changed hands, including a trailer park bought by 95-year-old Vermont real estate giant Tony Pomerleau.
Shumlin praised Pomerleau for stepping in to purchase the land Shelburnewood mobile home park is on, after owners Marvin and Sue Thomas announced plans to sell the property, meaning residents would have been forced to move on relatively short notice. Pomerleau is mum about his long-term plans for the park, but those in attendance were assured that residents would not have to leave any time soon.
One neighbor of the future village on U.S. 7, however, said he has to be out by the end of July. Scott Metevier rents a single-family home from the Thomases, but the property is being sold and Metevier has been given 60-days notice, he said.
The single father of two young children, both of whom were born with severe disabilities, will lose his project-based Section 8 housing voucher. He’s counting on a unit at a Champlain Housing Trust’s property elsewhere in town, but hasn’t signed paperwork for it yet.
Neighbors Cullen and Edith Bullard are more sanguine about the changes. The two lived in the trailer park for 19 years before moving to their home next to the Meteviers in the mid-1980s.
Bullard said the location of the housing development is enhanced by the city recreation center across the street. And while the job market is slim in town, Mrs. Bullard thinks the bus line to South Burlington and Burlington will help the younger new residents commute to work.
The importance of any new housing in Chittenden County is hard to overstate. According to this month’s rental market study by the South Burlington firm Allen & Brooks, the vacancy rate is only 1.2 percent.
That’s even lower than the long-term average vacancy of 1.4 percent, despite a relative boom in housing construction last year, when 390 new units became available in Chittenden County. This year, 421 new apartments are slated for completion, but that will still leave much pent-up demand for rentals.
The equation contributes to high costs for apartments in the Burlington area. Champlain Housing Trust says the area “has a higher percentage of cost-burdened renters than any county in New England, save a county on Cape Cod.”
Paying for housing
The sources of money to make Harrington Village possible are as diverse as the planners hope the residents will be once they move in.
“We should be an example for the other 49 states on how to do this right,” Shumlin said.
The senior apartments at Wright House will all be “affordable,” with 33 of the 36 receiving rental assistance through USDA Rural Development. The remaining three units will cost approximately $880 per month, including heat, hot water and electricity.
The rest of the buildings in Harrington Village will be mixed income: 25 apartments affordable to households earning less than 60 percent of the median income, 11 affordable to households earning less than half the median, and six units to be rented at fair market rates with no income or rent restrictions. The projected range for rent is about $740 to $1,225, although Chris Donnelly, director of community relations for Champlain Housing Trust, points out that it’s impossible to name the price with precision at this time.
About $20 million was raised from several sources to fund both projects. TD Bank invested $6.3 million in federal housing tax credit equity — meaning the bank paid that much for tax credits that are worth a bit more than that amount — and is providing construction and permanent loans for Harrington Village. The bank’s affordable housing investment in Vermont, to date, is $80 million, according to Nancy Owens, president of Housing Vermont.
Enterprise Community Investment, Inc., invested more than $6.5 million in tax credit equity for Wright House, which is named for former Cathedral Square development director Amy Wright.
Vermont Housing Finance Authority allocated $1.45 million in tax credits for the project. David Adams, chief of program operations for VHFA, said that’s the majority of the agency’s $2.5 million in tax credits available for the year.
USDA Rural Development chipped in $1 million in permanent financing plus rental assistance. Other funders include NeighborWorks America, Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, Vermont Department of Housing and Community Development, the Vermont Community Development Program, the Town of Shelburne, Efficiency Vermont, Vermont Gas, and the federal HOME program.
Construction of both projects is contracted to Wright & Morrissey Inc., and both are designed by Duncan Wisniewski Architecture.
