DEERFIELD — For three students at The Conway School of Landscape Design, their studies have taken them across town lines to tackle housing in Deerfield.
Graduate students Celine Voyard, Annika Lachner and James Riley are working with town employees and a group of residents, including a few who serve on the Planning Board and Ad Hoc Senior Housing Committee, to identify potential paths for growing housing in Deerfield. In April, after three months of collaboration, the students will provide the town with recommendations, including zoning tweaks to ease housing development like adjusting the minimum lot size and frontage requirements for single-family homes and duplexes to make them equal as well as allowing duplexes in all residential districts, according to a description of the project sent to Planning and Economic Development Coordinator Alexandria Galloway.
When crafting the recommendations, the students also will take into account the town’s ecology and diversity of its land, such as pockets of fertile farmland residents may want to see protected. According to Lachner, the final analysis will include maps of existing conditions and maps of the effects of any zoning changes.
“There has been some projects, but I think this kind of conversation hasn’t really continued for a while, so we’re helping start it,” Voyard explained. “We may provide some sort of recommendations towards the end, but it’s up to the town of Deerfield to continue that effort.”
Throughout the process, residents’ voices will help guide the study. On Feb. 9, the three students hosted two community forums at the former Congregational Church, with the first at 2 p.m. drawing about 20 residents.
“We’re really trying to, even from just modeling possibilities, [do] it in a way that doesn’t fly in the face of what residents are saying about Deerfield,” Lachner said.
“This conversation is really important,” Galloway prefaced to the four attendees at the second evening forum.
She told attendees that the conversation surrounding increasing housing in Deerfield started about a year ago and became louder during recent discussions regarding accessory dwelling units, or ADUs. When the Conway School approached her about the study, “this conversation really bubbled to the top,” Galloway said.
Before the “ink dries” on the students’ work, the town planner told attendees, “Why don’t we see if there are creative ways we can talk about housing as a community?”
During the hour-long community forum, attendees shared aspects of town they love and played a game called, “Guess that density!” In the housing-themed game, the audience called out their guesses for the densities of areas outside Deerfield in Marblehead and Boston’s Concord Square along with streets in town with a range of densities, from Elm Street which holds 36 units per acre to Crestview Road’s density of 1 unit per acre, according to the students’ calculations.
Attendees also ranked the types of housing units they would like to see more of in Deerfield and listed their top three housing concerns. Residents discussed issues like limited land available for housing development and lack of access to public sewers and water supply in certain areas of town. For preferred new housing, attendees leaned towards increasing all housing types along Routes 5 and 10 and constructing more duplexes and triplexes in town. According to Riley, during the earlier forum, residents raised limited subsidized housing and lack of affordable senior housing as issues and called for senior housing that is centrally located and strengthening the septic system infrastructure.
The team of three students plans to host at least one more community forum likely in early March to hear residents’ insider perspectives and the solutions they would like to see for boosting housing in town.
“We’re doing it for them, they’re the ones who live here. We are trying to ultimately make the town better for the people who live here,” Lachner said. “It’s really important to us to be centering that and centering the actual experiences of the people who are going to have to live with the decisions or the recommendations that we make.”
“Deerfield is a small town, so any change makes a huge impact, so we really want to be intentional,” Voyard echoed.