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Date: 10/2/2023
SOUTH HADLEY — The Planning Board opened a public hearing during its Sept. 25 meeting to continue townwide discussions on its Housing Production Plan draft, and to seek public feedback on the draft.
The plan comes as South Hadley has a shortage of housing stock available and affordable to low- and moderate- income households. It has been a focus of town leaders to address this and create more affordable living in town.
The HPP provides analysis and discussion on South Hadley’s population, housing stock and housing affordability using current demographic market data. The existing conditions, as well as public comment from two community forums and a survey, have informed the community’s goals for housing and strategies that can be implemented to achieve these goals over time. Municipalities maintain HPPs to comply with a state law known as Chapter 40B and to address the goal of 10% deed-restricted affordable housing. The draft plan is an update to the 2016 HPP.
Director of Planning and Conservation Anne Capra opened the hearing by going through a presentation detailing the HPP and its goals for the town. She added the main function of the hearing was to hear from the public on the HPP.
Capra explained the HPP is a proactive strategy to plan and guide development of housing in the town and is regulated under Massachusetts General Law Chapter 40B. She explained the town aims to increase affordable housing stock to 10% through comprehensive assessment and strategic planning.
According to Capra, there is an Advisory Committee that has been receiving comments and surveys on the HPP, and will continue doing so through Oct. 28. The committee will meet a week after the deadline to go over feedback and work on coming up with what to incorporate in the final draft.
From there the draft would go to the Planning Board for their review and adoption. This process is expected to be done before the end of the year.
Capra explained in the HPP, the requirement under 40B is that there needs to be a comprehensive housing needs and demand assessment, constraints analysis and mitigation techniques, and also specific opportunities for new housing in the town.
“These can be broad goals for the type of development and needs to be met, and also to address numeric production targets so, as we said already, our goal is 10% affordable housing so we look at how much affordable housing we already have and how we get to that,” Capra explained.
Capra said the housing needs assessment is a great document that shows “fantastic” current demographic and economic market data.
“It really presents a very interesting picture of South Hadley. It has reshaped my understanding of the community, so I highly recommend that if you can’t read any other part of that plan, that is somewhere to read,” Capra said.
Hitting the 10% threshold of affordability would put South Hadley into a safe harbor with the state law. According to Capra, the town is just under 7,400 year-round housing units, and 424 of those are on the subsidized housing inventory, which count toward the 10% threshold the town is seeking.
“We need an additional 312 units to reach safe harbor, to reach that 10%, and so that breaks down into 63 units per year on average. So you can imagine, that’s a lot of housing and projects. We’re not even close to seeing anything like that,” Capra said.
The plan includes 18 strategies to help the town meet the goals mentioned and how they were decided on, according to Capra.
“We looked at all the data, the existing conditions about our community and our housing stock, and then we heard from the public and broke it all up and said what are some of what ways we can meet those goals,” Capra explained.
One of the strategies listed recommends the town dedicate funding to affordable housing development and maintenance of existing housing. Another suggests the town create more opportunities for the village center development through zoning.
Overall, many of the strategies aim to make South Hadley into a development destination for affordable housing due to its need.
When opened to public comments, residents expressed concerns regarding the representation of the board doing this work and some other parts of the current draft of the HPP.
Resident Martha Terry spoke first and raised concerns around the plan. Terry added she has been following this plan closely and has attended the community outreach sessions.
Terry first was curious how long the town would be in this safe harbor for if they met the requirements. Capra said there are two tiers — one or two years — of temporary safe harbor and it relates to how much and how quickly new housing is permitted.
Terry also said she has gotten the impression that South Hadley is feeling some sort of guilt for its lack of affordable housing and added housing has always been a “tight and expensive” issue for many.
“I feel that it’s really a ubiquitous issue. The pandemic has also exacerbated the housing crisis in many ways,” Terry said. “So anytime we use the word crisis in the plan, I almost hope that could be softened a little bit.”
She added she felt the plan seems to have ignored some public comments, and that it could be due to what the HPP Advisory Committee “wants or recommends.” She called some of the language in the plan “very technical” and said she felt some of it was written in a difficult way where the average person may have trouble understanding what it is saying.
“I also feel this might be because the Housing Production Committee is overrepresented with professionals, Planning Board members and architects, and there’s only one at-large person and that person is a professional architect. So that’s why maybe the plan is kind of esoteric,” Terry said.
Resident Linda Young shared a similar concern with the makeup of the advisory committee that includes members of town committees and boards making up nine of the 10 members.
“You only have one person resident at-large, but we have two people from the Planning Board and two people from the Housing Authority, so I’m questioning why didn’t you just have one person from each of those committees on this, so you could have more people involved in this committee,” Young asked. “Also Planning Board is going to be part of voting on the adoption. You already have two people from the Planning Board who have been involved with this draft proposal and final proposal [and] will be voting for the adoption. I think it’s a stacked group of people not representing enough people within our community.”
Resident Ann Stockton asked the board what would happen if the town is unable to reach the 10% requirement by state law. Planning Board Consultant June McCartin explained the main consequence is that any developer would be able to come into South Hadley and propose to do a mixed income development through a comprehensive permit.
“That development does not have to conform to local zoning laws or other land use regulations. So at any point, someone could be like, ‘I’m going to build a 300 unit thing near on this parcel I have,’ and in many ways there’s little oversight the town can conduct on that,” McCartin explained.
McCartin added it is not always conducted on that scale, but the point is local zoning laws and other land use regulations or even historic districts cannot be enforceable to the new unit in this scenario.
After a little more discussion clarifying questions from residents, the Planning Board voted to continue the hearing at 7 p.m. during its Oct. 23 meeting and is seeking more feedback from the public on the HPP. To review the Sept. 25 public hearing visit https://shctv15.com/video-archive/.
The plan and information on the planning process can be found at https://southhadley.org/1372/Housing-Production-Plan. Copies of the draft plan are available for review at Town Hall in the Planning and Conservation Department, the South Hadley Public Library, Gaylord Library and the South Hadley Senior Center.
Comments are due by Oct. 28. Comments may be submitted online via Google form, or by mail or in person to the Town of South Hadley Planning and Conservation Department, 116 Main St., South Hadley, MA 01075.