To The Editor:
Scott Van Voorhis owes an apology to affordable housing advocates, developers and attorneys everywhere after his incendiary commentary piece, “Affordability Issues,” published in the April 2, 2012 issue of Banker & Tradesman.
Far from being a “boondoogle” or a “train wreck,” as he tries to categorize two worthy affordable housing projects recently completed in Worcester at abandoned former commercial buildings, the projects he writes about provided much-needed affordable rental units for inner-city residents usually left behind in the difficult and, yes, expensive business of housing creation.
Creating affordable housing units, as anyone who has worked on such projects can attest, is a time-consuming, frustrating, complex and expensive undertaking due to the myriad of regulatory and financing hurdles that must be overcome. Rather than belittling the success of the former Hadley-Burwick Furniture Store and Hammond Organ Reed Factory projects, we should be celebrating them and the residents for whom those projects provided 91 units of desperately needed housing.
Mr. Van Voorhis seems to view these projects through the lens of just one set of facts – the cost per unit – but conveniently leaves out the many compelling facts and statistics about the neighborhood and residents these projects benefit.
The May Street housing project was developed by a neighborhood non-profit group (the Worcester Common Ground CDC) that renovated a long-vacant and blighted historic building – the Hammond Organ Reed Factory – and provided 46 affordable rental units. The Hammond Organ Factory complex was built in approximately 1868 and contained 60,000 square feet of floor space. During its heyday in the early 20th century, it employed more than 200 people and was the largest organ reed factory in the world. Suffering the same fate as many Worcester factories and the products they manufactured, declining demand for organs eventually caused the factory to close, and the building housed a furniture company, then a storage facility, before being abandoned in 2001.
The building was purchased in 2006 by Worcester Common Ground (a CDC whose mission is to revitalize decaying inner-city neighborhoods). Their $16 million renovation project – which provided 46 affordable apartments and a large community room – was completed on-time and on-budget in 2008, with financing obtained from a plethora of private and public sources, including historic preservation credits, low income housing tax credits, and conventional financing.
The revitalization of this historic building earned the project the Massachusetts Historic Commission’s annual Preservation Award for Adaptive Reuse, Rehabilitation and Restoration in 2010. According to Worcester Common Ground, the economic profile of the typical family that now calls this apartment building home reveals a median annual household income of less than $15,000, in a neighborhood where there is an owner occupancy rate of only 10 percent!
I wonder if the residents of these units would agree with Mr. Van Voorhis’s assessment that the public investment in this development, and others like it, provided an “abysmal payback?”
While all of us who lend our time and expertise to developing affordable housing wish creation of housing units was the end of the story, it is not, as Mr. Van Voorhis unintentionally reveals. There are obviously many more hurdles and obstacles to overcome to stabilize inner-city neighborhoods like those in Worcester, and prevent new housing developments from being surrounded by abandoned properties and empty storefronts.
But these hurdles and obstacles are not justification for abandoning attempts to provide residents of those communities with safe and affordable housing, like the units at the Hadley-Burwick and Hammond Organ buildings.
Fortunately, affordable housing advocates and developers, and their attorneys, are made of tough and determined skin, and will continue to work towards the goal of housing creation despite the roadblocks and detours that lie ahead.
Laurence D. Shind, Esq.
Attorney, Kertzman & Weil LLP
Wellesley
