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Date: 1/18/2022
SOUTH HADLEY – The South Hadley Planning Board recently voted to update the town’s Housing Production Plan. These plans are tools for planning and developing affordable housing in order to meet the state’s Chapter 40B statute.
Chapter 40B is a Massachusetts General Law that dictates affordable housing in the state. It says that each town should aim for allocating a minimum of 10 percent of certified housing stock as affordable.
“South Hadley, as far as I know, has never been at 10 percent,” said Town Administrator Lisa Wong.
According to Wong, the Housing Production Plan helps the community create a strategy to meet affordable housing needs consistent with this 40B statute and regulations.
The plan gives data such as numbers of affordable housing units within the community and where exactly they are located. Each plan is valid for five years. South Hadley’s current plan was developed in 2016 in conjunction with the Pioneer Valley Planning Commission.
Wong said that South Hadley has a Housing Production Plan in order to help qualify for a status called Safe Harbor. Safe Harbor is a temporary reprieve from the 40B statute.
“If you’re under 10 percent, there are certain things that developers can do in a community that can go around local zoning rules and they can build something, for example, that’s bigger, with more density, potentially some design changes, some potential impacts on a community that normally, through the zoning process, we can control and regulate,” she said.
With Safe Harbor, towns can still use local zoning rules to dictate affordable housing development. The plan outlines the amount of housing stock that needs to be increased every year in order to achieve Safe Harbor.
Wong said that the next step will be to find funding for the plan.
“I am going to recommend to the Selectboard to approve money from the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) funds. So I’ll bring that before the board sooner than later, probably in early February,” she said.
The town will then hire someone to get the plan done prior to the expiration date of the current one. Wong said that the new plan will follow the exact format of the 2016 plan, but will just update numbers.
“The plan will actually give you the updated numbers that you can use to then appeal to stay in Safe Harbor, but they won’t be able to use the numbers from 2016 after this plan expires,” she said.
According to Wong, in the last plan South Hadley had 5.58 percent of housing stock as affordable. She said that bringing more affordable housing to South Hadley would include a lot of neighborhood involvement and conversations.
With Safe Harbor, the town is able to tackle these projects on a smaller, local scale.
“Because we don’t necessarily have a huge inventory of buildings for big housing projects, it’s probably going to be more incremental with more sporadic opportunities to do bigger developments,” said Wong. “Sometimes there’s pushback, but that’s where there’s community conversations to say ‘Well, do we want a medium sized project?’ and kind of work our way there or, if we don’t move forward with these projects, then we’re going to be out of Safe Harbor and we’re going to get, maybe, a megadevelopment that we don’t want to see.”
She said that having and updating the plan gives the town a clear path forward.
“It gives us a much more clear path. Without it, we don’t know where we stand and what we need to do every year to actually understand how to maintain local control over projects,” said Wong.
The new plan is anticipated to be finalized in the spring before the current plan’s expiration, according to Wong.
“Obviously we want to get it done and approved before then because we don’t really want to have a gap. I will say that a lot has changed since 2016 and it would be very interesting for us to learn as a community how, for example, COVID-19 has impacted our town. So, I think that updating this is going to give us a lot of information that is useful as we think about how to provide services to our residents in general,” she said.
Those interested in learning more about the Housing Production Plan or viewing the 2016 version are encouraged to visit the South Hadley town website at https://southhadley.org.