City leaders in Springfield, officials from Springfield College and a group of nonprofit agencies are trying to redevelop the Old Hill neighborhood, which is located west of the college campus.
[Editor’s Note: Smart-growth development has been a top priority of Gov. Mitt Romney’s administration. The communities and organizations featured in this series were recently awarded grants from the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association’s Smart Growth Demonstration Initiative for their efforts to implement smart-growth and affordable-housing development strategies.]
A Springfield neighborhood that has suffered from decades of neglect is the target of a revitalization effort that could create as many as 100 homes for first-time buyers.
City leaders, officials from Springfield College and a group of nonprofit agencies are trying to redevelop the Old Hill neighborhood, which is located west of the college campus. The neighborhood is marked by abandoned and boarded-up buildings, neglected housing and vacant parcels that have become dumping sites and eyesores.
“We’ve identified over 130 vacant parcels or boarded buildings,” said Peter Gagliardi, executive director of HAP Inc., a regional housing partnership for Hampden and Hampshire counties. “This is a neighborhood of 4,700 people, so that’s a huge percentage of what was once a residential neighborhood.”
HAP Inc. was one of seven organizations and communities that recently received technical assistance grants from the Citizens’ Housing and Planning Association, or CHAPA, to implement smart-growth and affordable-housing development strategies. MassHousing, a quasi-public state agency, provided funding for the CHAPA initiative.
CHAPA selected seven projects across Massachusetts to serve as models for creating development that incorporates affordable housing while maximizing open space and preserving environmental resources, increasing access to public transit and utilizing existing infrastructure. Experts consider such projects to be prime examples of so-called smart growth.
The Romney administration has been a key supporter of smart-growth development, arguing that housing created near transportation and locations that already have infrastructure, along with the redevelopment of underutilized structures and sites, discourages sprawl and represents a more responsible form of development.
Architecturally Sensitive
In Springfield, HAP received $27,000 to help with the creation or rehabilitation of 100 housing units for first-time homeowners over five years and to incorporate environmentally friendly “green building” methods in the development that takes place.
Springfield College and the city have completed master planning for the Old Hill neighborhood with a goal to revive both its residential and commercial components, explained Gagliardi.
In collaboration with Springfield Neighborhood Housing Services and the Greater Springfield Habitat for Humanity, HAP will work on the residential development.
The $27,000 grant that HAP received will be used to hire a third-party consultant who will be able to do some additional planning and analyze the sites that need to be developed, as well as provide support for green building.
Gagliardi anticipates most of the residential development to center around single-family housing, but he also said that existing two-family homes that can be renovated will be preserved.
“This neighborhood really needs single-family homes,” said Gagliardi.
Bus routes run through the neighborhood and residents can easily hop on a bus at State Street, a major thoroughfare, to reach the city’s downtown section. The neighborhood itself is located within walking distance to some major employers including Springfield College and Springfield Technical Community College, and is in close proximity to Mass Mutual Life Insurance Co., the only Fortune 500 company with headquarters in the city.
Making this core urban neighborhood more desirable, will encourage residents to move in and perhaps keep them from relocating to faraway destinations, thereby decreasing commute times and preserving farmland and open space that has been gobbled up in recent years by new housing construction, explained Gagliardi.
“Our goal is to begin working on this soon,” he said. “We have some proposals pending for some of the first houses. We hope they will be under construction in the fall.”
According to Gagliardi, some of the housing will include green-construction principles, and new homes will be constructed so they are architecturally sensitive to the residences built 80 to 100 years ago that were originally part of the neighborhood.
Scope and Scale
In another part of western Massachusetts, the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission received a $20,000 grant to look at developing a framework for a regional, sub-regional or community housing trust or expanding the scope of an existing organization to function as a community housing trust. By doing so, the commission hopes to establish a regional approach to affordable-housing development and open-space preservation.
Of the 32 cities and towns in the Berkshires, only North Adams has met the state goal of having 10 percent of its housing stock affordable, according to the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission. In addition, there are 18 communities in the region that do not have a single housing unit that can be counted toward its affordable housing inventory.
Most of the communities in the Berkshires are small rural towns that are struggling with development pressures and officials feel like they are unable to manage growth to address their housing needs while maintaining community character, according to the regional planning commission.
“We have affordable housing issues just like the rest of the state. Sometimes they take different forms, but we have them,” said Nathaniel Karns, the commission’s executive director.
Karns said a regional land trust called the Berkshire Natural Resources Council has been established and many communities have formed local land trusts, but their focus has been primarily to preserve land.
The efforts of such land trusts are “creating some scarcities of land and driving up the cost of housing because of it,” explained Bryan Boeskin, a senior planner for the commission.
In some cases, however, the community land and housing trust concept has been successfully used in the Berkshires to create affordable housing while employing sustainable development principals, according to the grant application that the Berkshire Regional Planning Commission submitted to CHAPA.
The commission plans to use the grant to research and analyze successful housing trusts and work with communities to determine which models are most applicable in the region. Once those models have been identified, the commission wants to get input and support from the communities
“One of the key issues that would be determined through this initial planning process is the scope and purview of the trust: whether it should be regional, sub-regional or community-based,” according to the application.
Boeskin said that the commission has tried to bring together the land trusts and different nonprofit groups to work on both land preservation and affordable-housing goals.
One of the first steps that the commission has taken is assembling a steering committee, which includes representatives from various housing advocacy groups, community development agencies and land trusts, to guide and direct the commission’s work in developing and implementing the organizational template for the housing trust.
“In this housing area that we’re looking at, there need to be some economies of scale and you can’t achieve that unless you have a bigger geographical area or service area,” Boeskin said.
Aglaia Pikounis may be reached at apikounis@thewarrengroup.com.
