This story, by Report for America corps member Carly Berlin, was produced through a partnership between VTDigger and Vermont Public.
A new affordable housing complex will soon be home to more than two dozen residents in the heart of downtown Waterbury.
Local and state officials celebrated the opening of the Marsh House Apartments on Wednesday afternoon. The newly constructed building, co-developed by the central Vermont nonprofit Downstreet Housing & Community Development along with Evernoth, has 26 mixed-income apartments.
Housing Commissioner Alex Farrell said the three-story apartment building — situated along the town’s main commercial stretch — should serve as a model for other towns.
“A lot of communities have some consternation, some discomfort, some fear with the idea that homes that are in a building like this could be next to homes that are in buildings like that,” Farrell said, pointing to the single-family homes and small apartment buildings that line a residential street behind Marsh House. “But thank you, Waterbury, you’re proving with a building like this that it looks great, that this is just what we need in Vermont.”
Three of the new apartments are reserved for people with intellectual or developmental disabilities, and five are set aside for people experiencing or at risk of homelessness. The organizations Upper Valley Services and Good Samaritan Haven are slated to provide support for these residents.
Monthly rents for the new studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments range from $960 to $1,980, according to Downstreet. Tenants have already begun to move in.
They include a single mother and her children who had recently become unhoused, said Angie Harbin, executive director of Downstreet. A neighbor offered the family a temporary place to stay, and got in touch with the housing agency.
“Because there was a home available, we were able to help that family move from crisis into housing,” Harbin said.
The apartment building is named after the family of James Marsh, who is believed to be the town’s first permanent settler in the 18th century. His son later lived at the site of the new apartments, according to the Waterbury Roundabout. Later, a home at the property was turned into municipal offices, which were heavily damaged by flooding during Tropical Storm Irene in 2011.
The office building was ultimately torn down and the site was used as a parking lot. Voters in Waterbury’s downtown utility district overwhelmingly approved the lot’s sale to the affordable housing developers in 2022. And while some neighboring residents showed up at local hearings to express their concerns about the look of the apartment building and noise associated with construction, the project eventually scored its local approvals.
Only a portion of the parking lot for the new apartments lies in the flood zone, Harbin said, and the building itself is elevated and lacks a basement. Flooding did not impact the property in 2023 or 2024, Harbin said.
The new apartment complex is situated along a bus route. It has all-electric utilities and a rooftop solar array.
The project cost $15.3 million to build, or about $588,000 per apartment — in line with the steep cost per unit of new affordable housing construction in Vermont. Public funding came from federal low-income tax credits, an earmark by former Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, and Covid-era relief funding set aside by the town of Waterbury, among other sources.
