GREENFIELD — After building a picnic table outside the construction site of a two-bedroom affordable home at 5 Birch St., Pioneer Valley Habitat for Humanity members joined city officials last week to discuss housing needs in Greenfield and Franklin County.
According to Habitat for Humanity, approximately one in every six households spends more than half of their income on housing. The data also states that while the median renter income in Massachusetts is $52,600 per year, a household needs approximately $160,151 per year to purchase a median-priced home.
“What’s been happening here in the region, the overwhelming trend, is that we just don’t have enough housing and we have not been creating enough housing, really since the 2000s,” Franklin Regional Council of Governments’ Housing and Livability Program Manager Megan Rhodes said. “Because of that, we have the lowest vacancy rate in the state, at around 0%, some say around 1.3%, and that’s generously high, but a lot of our towns are around 0% to 0.1%, which means there’s really no room for people — if you want to change your situation if your family’s gotten larger or smaller, or your income has changed. There’s nothing for you to move into to change that situation.”
One of the local challenges to building housing in Greenfield, Mayor Ginny Desorgher said, is some residents’ opposition to development. She said when developers try to build housing in the city — market rate or affordable — it’s often met with pushback.
“We made some significant changes to the zoning that made it more amenable to housing developments, and yet there is some resistance to it amongst some individuals,” Desorgher said. Referencing her time serving on the Planning Board, she added, “many times you go to Planning Board meetings and you would meet resistance with any developments that were coming through.
“I live on Silver Crest Lane,” the mayor continued, “and I heard when that development was coming in, people were resistant to that. Life as we knew it was going to end when that development went in; it was going to be the end of Western civilization, with all the traffic that was going to go on to Silver Street. That did not happen.”
Greenfield’s Community and Economic Development Director Amy Cahillane explained that the city is hoping to partner with organizations such as Greenfield Community College and other nearby colleges, as well as Baystate Franklin Medical Center, to advocate for housing development in the city. She explained that students and young medical professionals have a vested interest in this issue, as they move to the region for work or school and struggle to find a place to live.
Cahillane also said the state funding for housing projects in Franklin County is slim compared to the levels of funding that Boston and surrounding cities receive.
“The challenges that we see in trying to make Boston-based housing grant funding work for housing is very similar in the economic development space, but they don’t understand what a business looks like out here,” Cahillane said. “It’s 100% scale — scale in terms of what works for funding, scale in terms of what makes an impact out here. A housing development that would be a game-changer for Greenfield wouldn’t even make a place like Brookline blink.”
Rhodes added that the lack of public sewer infrastructure and the prevalence of septic tanks also proves challenging for rural development, and Pioneer Valley Habitat for Humanity Executive Director Megan McDonough explained that in general, there’s limited developable land in rural communities.
McDonough noted that more pro-housing zoning changes in rural areas are helping the county overcome its development limitations.
“We’re lucky to live in a community that has supportive businesses and banks that want to see a lot of this happening. There’s limited resources all around. There’s only so far each [project] can go,” McDonough said. “Finding land has actually become harder and harder. We’re looking at more building lots that have difficult stormwater or wetlands issues to overcome, or just complicated legal histories.”
The Birch Street lot that Pioneer Valley Habitat for Humanity is working on, though, has proved to be “kind of our ideal,” McDonough said.
“It’s a small infill lot,” she said. “I’d love to find more lots like this. I don’t know how to, but I’d also love it if there were people who had big lots. Zoning has changed over the years and now their side yard is big enough to be a building lot.”