Wow.
I had started a column philosophizing about affordable housing and the relationship to conservation land when this abstract consideration got blown out of the water by the fast-moving happenings between Rolling Ridge and Hobart Lane.
There are about 17 acres of open sloping ground between those two roads, covered now with woods and old fields, that are part of an old subdivision that wasn't finished. 13.5 of those acres were purchased in 1991 by Hope Church. Their effort to build has been held up by legal battles, so they have decided to sell their land to JPI, a developer of housing for students. JPI proposes to develop about 250 units, most of it for students and some of it for low-income families. JPI is also offering to give the town conservation land at the intersection of Meadow Street and Route 116.
The neighbors are upset. They are taking a petition article to Town Meeting on June 15th, asking the town to purchase the land for $1 million for "recreation, conservation, low and moderate income housing, education, or other purposes ^Å"
It feels like an emergency. Don't just stand there, do something! At Select Board meetings, the talk is of rescinding the money for the athletic fields on Potwine Lane, buying this other land instead, and building three athletic fields there, along with "some" affordable units and small bits of "conservation land."
I think we should be more deliberative.
First of all, the chance of JPI building their proposal is close to zero. They would have to get a Comprehensive Permit from the Town. Amherst has met the goal of 10% "affordable housing" according to state definitions, so the Permit cannot be forced through. Can you picture Amherst's Zoning Board voting for a 250-unit apartment development next to an existing neighborhood of single-family homes? I can't.
Second, where would we get the money? If the town borrows $1 million, planning to pay it off in 20 years, it will cost us about $90,000 a year. We already have a budget about which the chair of the Select Board said recently "I'm starting to panic." The advocates for this purchase say that if we rescind the money for constructing the athletic fields at Potwine Lane that would free some money annually (about $40,000), but they don't even have a guess how much it would cost to build athletic fields on this North Amherst parcel, so that's not helpful. Some talk about selling part of the land to a developer to build "affordable housing," but that too is speculative.
Third, purchasing this land for conservation and recreation is not on the long-range plans developed by either the Conservation Commission or the Leisure Services Commission. The town cannot afford to rush in and buy every open field that has neighbors who love it when development threatens. We have many long-range plans that have been developed carefully with citizen committees and expert staff input, that need the money this warrant article would spend.
We can't afford to spend $1 million for this land, and we don't need to do it. The most likely outcome, if Town Meeting does not jump in like Tarzan, will be that JPI will not get a comprehensive permit, and the land will be sold to a developer who will build the usual houses on the approximately fifteen lots that are available there. Given the costs of land and the value of real estate in Amherst, they will be expensive by most of our standards.
Which leads me back to where I was starting, a couple of weeks ago: affordable housing. One of the factors that makes housing for families so expensive in this town is competition from groups of students who rent houses together. If there aren't more apartments, more houses will be rented.
This parcel is about a mile from the UMass campus; if students were living there, they could walk to campus. The University is planning to increase its number of students significantly. Whether you or I likes that idea is irrelevant; there is nothing that we, as local residents, or Town Meeting as our representatives, can do about it. What we do have to do is deal with the consequences. If the apartments get built in far north Amherst, or in Sunderland, more people will drive into Amherst and need parking. Remember, PVTA buses are suffering from budget cuts, and the buses on that route are already full during prime traveling times.
I am not supporting the JPI proposal. It's too big, and the prices sound unrealistic. But I'd like to see apartments for students near the campus. We need more compact, attractive, and inexpensive housing near the University. Just saying "no" isn't going to maintain our quality of life here; we need serious planning and implementation of the plans.