Pittsfield Affordable Housing Trust Looks to Resources
PITTSFIELD, Mass. — Established last year with an initial $500,000, the Affordable Housing Trust soon expects to see additional resources to aid its mission.
"There are a few pieces that are coming into play," Director of Community Development June Dodds said to the panel on Wednesday.
Pittsfield received a technical assistance grant for three years through MassHousing's Neighborhood Hub program for the effort and will kick off a public input process next month. The trust is seeking $150,000 in Community Preservation Act funds this year with an aim to determine priority housing needs by July and award project funding in the fiscal year 2024.
Trust members have agreed that the panel must leverage funds to address the city's housing crisis. In its five months of work, the panel has consulted multiple Berkshire County housing entities to pave a path forward.
"I'm thinking of trying to marshal all of our resources together to make affordable housing happening without us extending ourselves and risking our principal, so to speak, our corpus of our funds, on any project," Michael McCarthy said.
Teton Management owner George Whaling detailed his experience with housing development and the challenges of inflationary supply chain costs.
"I think the whole concept of affordable housing has changed immensely over the last 20 years, 25 years," he said. "It's absolutely incredibly difficult to, first of all, buy an asset at a price point that makes sense and then to renovate that particular asset, again at a price that makes sense."
With inflation playing into the equation, Whaling said developers will get a bad rap because they have to charge between $1,500 to $2,500 a month to make a reasonable return and pay debt service.
The company owns Allendale Pines, which added 10 new homes in the last couple of years and has received permitting to expand the park into AP South and a new AP North with over 20 new homes.
While the existing trailer park's lot rent is around $330 per month, Whaling explained that AP North will need to be at a substantially higher price point just to cover costs.
"We just coincidentally received some of those numbers and the construction numbers are just off the hook. I'm not sure where we're going to go with that," he said.
"I'm not trying to cast and negative shadow on this but I think it does speak to what all developers are going through. It's just the cost of construction and the cost of excavation and putting in roads and water, sewer, fire hydrants, connecting to the public utilities. It's just exorbitant."
The flip side, he said, is if a mobile home community can be bought for $20,000 a lot or less, improvements could be made to the common areas and homes could be put on lots to then be sold.
Whaling reported that the 10 new homes were well received and supported by the Mobile Home Rent Control Board. They were priced at $120,000 to $145,000.
"The demand was just remarkable to me," he said, saying he would love to do more of it but the development costs are not making economic sense.
Matthew Lauro has seen that with recent developments, the cost per unit is $20,000 to $30,000 more in Berkshire County than in other larger metro areas.
"That's absolutely the case. From our perspective, that's happening with excavation in any management of the land or utilities below anything ground down," Whaling said, adding that in the apartment business, the cost to develop units is consistent with Boston but rents are nearly half.
Whaling believes in the mobile home business and is trying to retire the term "trailer," instead calling the structures attainable housing or mobile homes.
He wondered if the trust could lean on or seek government subsidies to help develop "ground down" aspects of a mobile home park for affordable housing efforts.
Dodds said it is something that would have to be explored based on the funding source and what is considered affordable.
The mixture of renting lot space and owning the home also comes into play.
"It's a conundrum, right? It certainly meets some of the criteria for affordable housing, but then there are these other things that make it a challenge for traditional mechanisms to come into play," she said.
"But it's certainly something we could explore, even just making it more attractive in some way."
Tags: affordable housing,
