This story by Tommy Gardner was published by the News & Citizen on June 29.
They don’t make them like they used to. And, when it comes to the addition of two dozen new affordable apartments in the heart of Lamoille County’s most populous downtown, that’s a good thing.
The phrase “affordable housing” invokes for some people a vision of cheap, crowded, segregated buildings, whether they be tenement high-rises in urban settings or trailer parks far away from grocery stores and necessary services.
The Village Center Apartments in Morrisville bucks that expectation, with 24 apartments — a mix of studio, one- and two-bedroom units — packed into four floors of a brand-new building on Hutchins Street. The units are spacious and modern, and some upper-level windows look out on sweeping urban-mountain landscapes that perhaps beat the best views of any other place in the village.
Jim Lovinsky, executive director of the Lamoille Housing Partnership, said as sleek and shiny as the new building is, and as packed with dignitaries as Tuesday’s ribbon cutting may have been, it will soon simply be seen for what it was always meant to be: a much-needed place to live.
The fact that tenants will be spending between $680 and $1,200 a month for brand new, modern apartments in the year 2023 is a bonus.
“As the building was completed, it’s starting to look like it’s always been there, and by this time next year, I think that is exactly how it will be,” Lovinsky said. “This will be affordable housing forever, and a community asset for Morrisville forever.”
Six of the apartments will be reserved for people who are experiencing homelessness or in danger of doing so. Kerrie Lohr, the advancement and communications director for the partnership, said her organization partners with groups like Lamoille Community House and Capstone Community Action, who are already working with the homeless population, to refer eligible people.
The apartments abound with little touches like fold-up dish racks in the kitchens, bicycle storage in the shared ground-level space and color-coded hallways with each floor meant to evoke natural landscapes.
A high-tech control room on the bottom level controls the entirely electric building.
The energy efficiency doesn’t just benefit the people living in the apartments. It helps the partnership keep expenses down. Lovinsky argues it helps the town, too.
“If we put a building like that in the middle of town and it’s got oil boilers in it, we’re putting all that smoke into the air right in the middle of town,” he said. “This one is all electric and we don’t have any carbon footprint in town, so it’s just healthy for everybody in the community.”
During a private tour of the building in mid-June with Lohr, several workers were putting the finishing touches on some of the safety and health-related features of the building. In one room, a worker had a laptop open on the kitchen counter, monitoring the air flow, which is palpable. There’s a sense of movement in the air — not enough to ruffle your hair, but in the way a room feels different when there’s a window open on a nice day — except the windows were shut that day.
Lovinsky said another key difference in 21st century affordable housing is that it features amenities like air conditioning, not often implemented in affordable housing in northern states like Vermont.
“A/C used to be seen as a luxury, but now it’s got to do with people’s health,” he said. “If you have seniors, well, the heat gets harder and harder on older folks and younger kids. So, we’re trying to make buildings that are healthier.”
High costs of affordability
Affordable housing does not come cheap, and development of the Village Center Apartments was far from smooth sailing.
The total price tag on the project was $7.9 million, most of it coming from a $5.1 million low-income housing tax credit allocated by the Vermont Housing Finance Agency, with Housing New England as the investor.
The Vermont Housing and Conservation Board chipped in $1.9 million, and the Vermont Community Development Fund provided $550,000 through the town of Morrisville.
The Morrisville-based Union Bank also provided a loan for the project. Bank president David Silverman said at Tuesday’s ribbon cutting for the project that the bank has an obligation “to be part of the solution, not part of the problem in housing,” and investments like this one are ideal.
“Vermonters can’t find homes,” Silverman said. He said he serves on the Copley Hospital board of directors, which has heard from employees who can’t find places to live, “which is impacting health care, potentially, in our communities.”
Some costs weren’t just the cost of building. The most impactful occurred almost exactly a year ago, when someone allegedly lit a fire in a ground-level room in the nearly complete building. The entire thing had to be gutted to the studs.
Lovinsky said he couldn’t bring himself to enter the place for months because the emotional trauma was too much. He said Tuesday the insurers and workers didn’t balk and got right back to work.
“They never blinked,” he said. “They said, ‘Don’t worry, Jim. We’re not going anywhere. We’re with you. We’ll put this back together.’”
