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Date: 12/14/2022
AMHERST – Town Manager Paul Bockelman recently signed a purchase and sale agreement for the property at 457 Main St., which is the site of the former Amherst Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) post. The site was acquired for the purpose of constructing a shelter for people experiencing homelessness, providing supportive transitional housing to those in need and affordable housing for others in need, some of which will be geared toward veterans.
Assistant Town Manager David Ziomek said that the location is prime real estate in the context of the needs of a shelter.
“What attracted us to this Main Street site is how close it is to our downtown, that it has almost an acre of buildable flat land, it’s on the bus route, it’s close to services, and it affords us the opportunity to have our fire department, our police department and our CRESS responders to work closely in the future with the residents of this location as well as with the shelter provider. It met a lot of those criteria,” Ziomek said.
Ziomek clarified rumors of renovation, saying that the project will be a complete replacement of the building.
“Some of the early press indicated that the shelter would be in the old VFW building. That’s not actually accurate. We’re going to tear down the old VFW building and this would be a brand new building in its place. It’ll be a couple of years in the making.”
The shelter will be building on the work of Craig’s Doors, who have been assisting the town’s homeless for over a decade.
“Our current shelter provider in Amherst is Craig’s Doors. We’ve been working with them for I think 11 years. Through the years they’ve had to move from multiple places of worship. They’ve been very fortunate to be in the Baptist church, now they’re in the Lutheran church, and they’ve been in other locations. Our hope here is that we can build a new shelter with supportive permanent housing that this would afford them a secure place to work with our homeless population,” said Ziomek.
Ziomek said that although the management of the shelter is still to be decided, Craig’s Door has a good chance of receiving the space.
“[Craig’s Doors] has been a great partner to us for many years. This space that will be created here will likely be leased out to a provider, and [the identity of the provider] will be determined as we move through the project. We’ll likely put out an RFP for a building that would accommodate a shelter, and Craig’s Doors would likely be an organization that would respond to an RFP for providing services to those in need of homes in our community,” said Ziomek.
The town of Amherst will be assisting in financing the project, but will not be able to cover the whole tab, requiring outside support as well.
“The town will not be able to fund this entire project…This is many millions of dollars to get this project underway…Our town manager has set aside $1 million to jumpstart this project. $775,000 of that will be for the purchase and to secure the site and we hope to use some of the remaining money for some early design work and to get that process going. But this will clearly require local support, regional support and also state support…We’ll be reaching out to the development community, organizations like Valley CDC, Wayfinders, Home City Builders and similar organizations to see if they would partner with us on this project,” Ziomek said.
He said that the shelter will have multiple sections, each servicing a different group.
“The early vision here is for a first floor shelter that might be built in conjunction with some other flexible space on the first floor; in other words we may have spaces for service providers, we may have a day use space there for folks to drop in and get counselling. The building would be two and a half to three stories tall, so above that on the second and third floors would be permanent supportive housing units. Some of those units would be designated for veterans who are looking for housing and others would be set aside for folks who are currently homeless or moderate- to low-income folks who need permanent transitional housing,” Ziomek said.
The permanent supportive housing will be particularly impactful in Ziomek’s opinion.
“It will have a permanent supportive housing component to it and that is really critical because we know that housing for our most vulnerable residents of Hampshire County is something that’s in very short supply. The more units we can have in that category the better,” Ziomek said.
Ziomek praised the VFW for their support and vowed to continue collaborating with them in the future.
“We’re really grateful to the VFW post for their support. This VFW post means a lot to a lot of people in our community. We want to acknowledge that and honor those veterans that used the post through the years. We’ll continue to support the leadership of the post as that they transition from this site. We want to work with them and our Veteran’s Agent Steve Connor to continue to support those veterans who call Amherst home. We hope that this is kind of a new beginning for them as they decide where they will be meeting in the future.”