At 91B Main, officials see path to more affordable housing
“Nothing’s going to happen in this town for five years in affordable housing, except this.”
Housing leaders think they’ve found a path to turning a wooded lot beside Route 2 into affordable units.
As town staff work to refresh cost estimates and Town Manager Kerry Lafleur warns of mounting legal fees, some say time is of the essence in making a call on 91B Main Street.
“Nothing’s going to happen in this town for five years in affordable housing, except this,” Municipal Affordable Housing Trust member Frank “Rich” Feeley said during a recent trust meeting.
MCI-Acton prison redevelopment and other sites, such as the old Peabody School, may yield housing, but those projects are years away.
The 91B purchase price is set at $600,000. But housing trustee and Select Board member Mary Hartman said she’s also waiting to see the new estimated construction costs.
She said Acton has added only seven new affordable units over the past four years, “and it’s because the cost per unit is so high.”
Long history
The town has had its eyes on 91B for years. Housing Trust Chair Keith Bergman announced a breakthrough last month.
After seeking Select Board approval, the trust could buy the 1.45-acre wooded plot from the state Department of Transportation. Other groups, including the Acton Housing Development Corp. and the Regional Housing Services Office, could help find a developer.
Housing trustee Matt Johnson said he hopes to create owner-occupied units because most state affordable housing programs focus on renters.
Previous projections envisioned building four units at a $700,000 cost to the trust. Those figures are more than a year old, and officials agree the market has changed.
Lafleur said, “This seems to be so complicated, and it’s getting more complicated.”
Her executive assistant, Matt Boiteau, told The Bridge that as of December 4, the town had spent $7,625 on roughly 22 hours of legal services for the 91B process.
Regional Housing Services Director Liz Rust said an Old Marlboro Road effort known as the Assabet River Homes at the Bluff cost $130,000 in legal fees. The 91B arrangement has fewer groups involved, but Rust said legal costs are still a factor.
Still, Johnson said, “It’s worth the investment.”
The path forward
Bergman said MassDOT wants Acton to offload 91B by the end of January. Officials will discuss this at a meeting of housing groups next week.
“If all the heads are shaking up and down,” Bergman told The Bridge, and if an environmental review checks out, the housing trust could buy the land with a $500,000 allocation from the American Rescue Plan Act and $100,000 from its own coffers.
Officials haven’t decided just how “affordable” new units might be. One option would reserve units for buyers making less than 120% of the area median income. Another would set the cap at 100%.
As a regional median, calculations include communities with much cheaper housing than Acton. Many market-rate homes here are selling well above the AMI.
Former League of Women Voters Housing Issues Chair Dorrie Kehoe urged town officials in 2021 to consider affordable housing at several publicly owned parcels, including 91B.
Nearly five years later, she’s moved to Vermont and said things had “sort of come to a little bit of a halt” when she last checked in.
“I’d be really very, very happy to see more progress,” she said.
‘A slushy bucket’
Four new units would be only an incremental change amid a larger housing crunch. The housing trust is eyeing additional projects, even if the big-ticket items might take a few years.
Members are celebrating after the town Community Preservation Committee recommended awarding $785,000 in Community Preservation Act money to replenish the trust’s funds.
CPC hesitated to delegate decision-making authority over individual housing projects, and Chair Eve Isenberg described the trust account as “kind of a slushy bucket” during recent deliberations.
The panel ultimately conceded, and Johnson said housing proponents “were all doing high-fives around that.”
As for the winding road on 91B, Johnson said, “We’d always like to see a more efficient process, but this is the messy process of affordable housing in Massachusetts.”
