It’s never a good time to throw millions of taxpayer dollars down the rat hole, but especially not now as state and city governments scramble to keep teachers in the classroom and police officers on the street.

But that is exactly what is happening in Worcester, the Bay State’s perennial second city, where a slew of “affordable” housing projects are coming on line at the staggering cost of several hundred thousand dollars per unit.

It’s a boondoggle, a train wreck or however else you want to phrase it – and it’s being financed in part through millions in various federal and state subsidies, including tax credits aimed at preserving historic buildings.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s a worthy cause. But good intentions aside, there is no excuse for throwing precious public dollars away.

“Why should the federal and state government be spending money like this?” asked Worcester Auditor James DelSignore of the sky-high cost of building affordable apartments in the city. “It is ridiculous.”

Footing the Bill

Taxpayers have footed the bill for more than $21 million in low-income housing tax credits across 10 different projects in Worcester over the past few years, aimed at working-poor renters who can afford only a few hundred dollars in rent each month.

State government has chipped in as well, shelling out another $5.2 million in historic tax credits on a pair of projects that featured rehabs of older buildings, including a 1920s-era furniture factory.

Given the brutal realities of our state’s high-priced housing market, it’s the kind of housing we need more of, not less. But the payback for all this public investment has been nothing short of abysmal, with just 240 units to show for it.

The most notorious example is the Hadley, a 45 unit affordable housing project carved out of the old Hadley-Burwick building on Main Street.

That project cost $543,000 per unit to build. The median price of a single-family home in Worcester last year was $155,000, according to information obtained from The Warren Group, publisher of Banker & Tradesman.

And before declaring bankruptcy, the developer sucked in $12.5 million in low income federal tax credits and another $3 million in state historic preservation tax credits.

Touted as a lynchpin in Worcester’s $1 billion downtown redevelopment when it was unveiled in 2006, today the Hadley is surrounded by empty storefronts, with a parking lot where promised condos and other new development was supposed to go.

It’s such a disaster, in fact, that one city councilor recently seriously suggested the city would have been better off bulldozing the building and replacing it with a McDonald’s.

Inefficient Spending 

Other Worcester housing developments have featured the same toxic combination of high costs and high public subsidies.

While it’s hard to beat the Hadley’s half-a-million-dollar-per-apartment price tag, the cost to build a half dozen other new subsidized housing projects in Worcester range from $299,000 to well over $400,000 per unit.

A local nonprofit converted a May Street factory into 46 units of low income rental housing, scooping up $2.9 million in federal tax credits and nearly another $2 million in state historic preservation tax credits.

Here again, the costs were staggering, weighing in at a $414,000 per unit.

These are the kinds of costs typically associated with building large suburban homes or even downtown luxury condos, not subsidized apartments.

And we are just talking about tax credits here. All these projects received millions more in low-cost financing from city and state agencies.

It’s hard to argue against building affordable housing – after all we live in a state that consistently ranks near the top nationally in terms of home prices. Moreover, in a state that is as rich in history as Massachusetts, preserving historic buildings will always be a concern.

But what about a little common sense when it comes to deciding where – and how – to invest our increasingly scarce public dollars?

Just think about the $542,000 per unit blown on Worcester’s Hadley project.

There are surely more efficient housing developers, both public and private, who could have built ten apartments somewhere else for the cost of one at the Hadley.

Do the math. Instead of 45 units in a struggling project that has just added to downtown Worcester’s problems, we could have had 450 low-cost apartments on a new site somewhere else.

Now what sounds like a better use of taxpayer dollars?