Meeting transcript
PZC Public Info Meeting for Affordable Housing Plan
May 14, 2022 · Watch on YouTube · All meetings
And I hope that doesn't happen.
Thanks, Eric. And I see Joanne is joining us too. So we got a little bit of finance committee showing up. That's great. Good morning. Sorry. I put in the wrong code.
Yeah. We heard we heard you a little garbled, Joanne. How are you hearing us? Can you see the screen?
I'm not going to be on camera yet this morning, but thank you for the invitation. I put in the wrong code originally, but I'm glad I'm in now.
Okay, yep. Well, I am not going to delay any more because it's a beautiful Saturday morning out there. So Eric, can you allow me to share my screen and I'll try and get the presentation up here? Okay, so hopefully you can all see the presentation at this point. And it's a small group, so I guess given that, I'm gonna try to take questions as we go. And if there was a larger group, I'd have waited till we're at the end, but I'm gonna go ahead and start. And good morning for those of you who don't know me. I'm Jed Larson and I'm the chairman of the Andover Planning And Zoning Commission. I want to thank you for attending this morning, giving up a beautiful Saturday morning here at Andover in an effort to learn about the plan and your interest in creating affordable housing in Andover. I was hoping Bill Warner would be here. I want to thank him for his help in developing the plan, know, and he's been working with the town of Andover for many years. He was a town planner a while back and a land use consultant for several of the projects that we've done. So the commission felt we were fortunate with his background of Andover to have us helping him out. And I know Joanne, you and Diane will thank Bill as well. I did show him the presentation ahead of time and his only comment was, wow, that's a lot of slides. So I did eliminate a bunch of them in an effort. I see Jim's notice when it went out talked about a brief presentation and so I wanted to do my best to keep it there.
So I eliminated several of the slides and I worked to make the presentation as brief as I can but I have a fair amount of information and so at that point I'll get started. And what we're going to discuss today is we're going to start out with the affordable housing, Diane. What is it? Who needs it? And what are the Connecticut state statutes that apply? Then we'll talk about the situation in Andover, population trends, that was a little concerning to me, the current housing stock. Is there a need in Andover? In which it Andover's affordable housing goal be? We have several recommendations coming from the Andover affordable housing plan. And lastly, I'm interested in what you folks think. Please mute yourself when you're not talking to keep the background noise down. Presentation was created over the last six months and is a snapshot in time.
A lot has changed in the last six months with inflation, higher interest rates, and higher housing prices as well. The result of these factors is that the need for affordable housing continues to grow and become an even more important issue for our town. Over the past six months, my feelings on affordable housing have evolved from not thinking we needed one, to thinking this plan for affordable housing would be good for Andover, to thinking that if we fail to act on this, we do so at our own peril. I hope I can convince you of that as well. Share your thoughts with others and maybe we'll get a little more interest in this as we go along. We'll start out with Diane's question when she was tuning in here, what is affordable housing? And by the Connecticut state definition, affordable housing is housing that is affordable to individuals and families making 80% or less than the area median income. It also goes on to say that a family at that income level cannot spend more than 30% of their total income on housing, whether that's rent or mortgage taxes and insurance. Andover's median family income is about $105,000 And so what that means to us is that if you take 80% of that 105,000, that's about 80,000. And then if you take 30,000 or 30% of that to be spent on housing, it comes down to about $2,000 a month.
If you make less than that 80,000, obviously you've got less to spend on housing. Affordable housing can be rental units or private ownership, and it can be condos, apartments or single family homes. Jed, real quick, the slides are not advancing.
Can you hit the from current slide slideshow and then advance through so we can see visually?
Okay, yep. Thanks for helping me out on that. And let me There we go. Well, so
I guess you'll have to you'll have to see the little bit of stuff off on the left hand side, then maybe this will work and get you where we are there. But anyhow, that's the Jed,
if you just hit the little button up on that says from current slide, that should start the slideshow and then you should be able to go.
Well, let's try it here. When I do that, I lose my, well, we'll see if it goes here. The last thing I wanted to say about the affordable housing for the state definition is an affordable housing unit must be de restricted for forty years so that the value of the house can go up no more than the consumer price index. That's certainly anybody who's out there building a single family home is not going to put a deed restriction on it. That's always been one of the keys to growing your own wealth, if you will, is the ability to have that money in your house. And so that's really going to apply to developments. And then if we have an accessory dwelling unit, the deed restrictions will lay for ten years, so that's a little bit better. Did the slideshow advance to the next picture? It did not. Okay, so I'm gonna go back and we're gonna try it.
I'll just do it this way. Now you got a picture of some housing.
Yes, and if you wanted, because I have the presentation, I could probably launch the presentation and you could speak and I could just advance the slides if you want to try that. I prefer to do this. I've been working on the presentation
since I sent it to you and I think that would probably confuse me a little more than that. Anyhow, here are some pictures of privately developed affordable housing. And in our plan, we're talking about quality housing that we should be proud to have in our community. The housing may be a little smaller, the lots a little closer together, but we're talking about very nice housing and what many people would desire today. As we went through this, it occurred to me that maybe the American dream with respect to housing is changing just a little bit. You know, when the baby boomers like me were entering the housing market, we all thought we wanted, at least a lot of us thought we wanted big houses on big lots to raise a family. This might not be true today. Economic, social, and environmental issues point towards a desire for smaller houses on smaller lives with less maintenance. Hopefully we advance to a picture of what we're not talking about. In the majority of affordable housing is concentrated in the cities.
Here are some pictures of public housing which exists to serve those in the very low income brackets. These are heavily subsidized and such subsidies are not targeted to rural areas because of a lack of need and lack of infrastructure to support such population, including public sewers, water, and transportation. So back in 1989, Connecticut recognized that the state was having an affordable housing problem and adopted Connecticut General Statute eight-thirty gs, which required each town to have 10% of its housing deemed affordable per the state definition. Andover is not the only town that struggled to meet that 10% wicket in Connecticut. And in fact, most of the smaller towns are in the same boat that Andover has been in with much smaller number of affordable homes than which are acquired. So Andover is subject to the provisions of eight thirty gs because we're required to have the 10% of our housing units affordable and we're not. And what eight thirty gs specifies is that developers, when they come in and build the development, at least 30% of those units will be designated as affordable. That is affordable to the people making less than 80% of the median income and only spending 30% of their income on housing. And in fact, 15% of those that are designated as affordable will be affordable to families making 60% of the median income. In the significance of eight-thirty gs is it allows developers to disregard zoning rules while also shifting the burden of proof
to the town to justify a denial. So while our zoning regs require about an acre and a half of land in 200 foot of frontage and all these things to make developments. Somebody coming in to develop under eight thirty gs can disregard all those requirements and build whatever kind of housing development they want, as long as it passes the public health code. So it becomes very difficult for a town to deny an application which does not meet current zoning standards but does meet the minimum standards found in the act which says public health code has to buy into it. So essentially in order to deny an application the town is required to find documented and proven public health or safety concerns. The problem is that no matter how easy it is to gain approval for an affordable housing development, the developer isn't going to develop the property unless he can make a profit in doing so. So little progress was made in getting the towns to create affordable housing. And in 2017, the Connecticut General Statute eight-30J was adopted. And this says that at least once every five years, each municipality shall prepare or amend and adopt an affordable housing plan for the municipality. Such plan shall specify how the municipality intends to increase the number of affordable housing developments in the municipality. It doesn't say what needs to be in the plan, doesn't say what's required or who adopts it, and no public hearing is required. So at this point, the Planning and Zoning Commission has drafted up this plan based on any feedback we get today.
We might tweak on it a little bit but this is our plan. Last year Connecticut recognized it as an unfunded mandate to create the plan and use federal money to create a grant program which he took advantage of. We hired Bill Warner and he created the plan with us. And these plans are due to the state by the 06/01/2022, which is coming up soon.
Excuse me, Chad. Yep. Are we able to ask the questions as we go along? Yep, go ahead. Okay, just a quick question on a couple of the slides back. Have we identified, I mean, overall already I'm very interested and I think it's, you know, with the times we're in in the country and everything we see in town and the state will be a good idea for Andover. But have we identified plots of land
or does that come later in your presentation? I don't want to jump my questions. Nope, that does come a little bit later. We'll talk about a couple of places that
Down drafted a an incentive housing plan in '17 and it's got a couple of examples we'll talk about. Okay, I don't want to jump in. I just don't want to skip the chance to ask Okay, my
no, very good, thank you. But anyhow, and I don't know how closely you know all of you have followed all the news on planning and zoning stuff from the state capital, but last year Public Act 20 one-twenty nine was adopted in the legislature was going to take all this action to force the towns to create affordable housing. There was a lot of pushback from the towns and there's a bunch of stuff in that act that the Planning and Zoning Commission is going to be dealing with, but there were two items that really pertained to affordable housing that I wanted to talk about today. The first was the accessory dwelling units, and these are you know the little extra apartments if you will that can be internal to the house, external to the house. Know when we first put the accessory dwelling unit regulation into our zoning regs, I remember the discussion at the time was this was for our aging parents or a caregiver or something like that. And since then, it's come to show that the accessory dwelling units can be a good source of affordable housing, especially for the young folks just starting out. And you know I have a son that lived in essentially an accessory dwelling unit down in Groton next to Electric Boat where he's working
and he got his start. And I go back to you know the TV show Happy Days, which I watched and Fonzie lived in, you know, the accessory dwelling unit there. So anyhow, accessory dwelling units can be a good thing for the town, but the state mandated that each town shall designate locations and zoning districts within the municipality in which accessory apartments are allowed, provided, and this is the important part, provided at least one accessory apartment shall be allowed as of right on each lot that contains a single family dwelling. So there's some words in the public act that allow us to opt out for the accessory dwelling units, and while I think there's a lot of good stuff in there that we may want to take a look at, I don't think the town of Andover wants to have people building accessory dwelling units on the very small lots on Andover Lake because of the detriment that could cause the lake. So anyhow, we'll take a look there. We've also got to figure out how do we go about making it attractive for people who are building an accessory dwelling unit to want to have a ten year deed restriction on that. You know, if you have your parents living in the house with you, ten years might not be all that excessive and that big a deal, but you know to have a deed restrict for ten years, we've got to provide incentive for the people that want to sign that. I don't know exactly how to do that but we'll figure it out. The other thing that was in the public act was that it allowed manufactured
mobile homes that exceed 22 feet in their narrowest dimension in towns. Know, mobile homes have long been viewed as affordable housing distracting from the character that the towns are trying to maintain. And so Andover, like most small towns, currently prohibits mobile homes and mobile home parks, and we'll need to change that to be consistent with the Connecticut statute. Okay, so now we're going to look at Andover a little more specifically. And this slide talks about the median household income by age of householder. And as we started down this path, I was concerned about the seniors. I know we have a lot of seniors in town living on a fixed income. And as you can see, for the people 65 years and over, the average income is down to around 73,000 per year, which is below the, you know, the 80% of the town median, which comes into about 81. The other thing that was interesting on this slide is we must not have very many, if any households with people 25
years of age in there because there's no data there at all. And you can see for overall Pollen County, know, the average, the median income there was like $26,000 So that's pretty small, but certainly if we wanted to attract younger folks to start out in Andover, they're gonna need some help too. The state used median incomes in terms of family size. And I struggled to understand this at first because I was concerned about seniors living on fixed incomes and how did we take care of them and I think the lower senior incomes are reflected in the lower incomes for the smaller family sizes of one or two people. Anyway, are the numbers that state uses in considering our eligibility for affordable housing. Now let's look at Andover's housing stock and I've got a bunch of statistics here and it probably gets blurred a little bit on what I'm trying to say but bear with me here.
You know, we've got thirteen fifty seven housing units in Andover. 92%, which is higher than the surrounding area's average, are single family homes. And of those single family homes, 62% are three or more bedroom homes, which is our families are continuing to get smaller, maybe those aren't what people are looking for today. 82% of our single family homes are owner occupied. And again, that's a much higher number than the state average. So we've only got 12% of those homes as rental units. And at the time the survey was taken, know, there were 7% or 87 units vacant. So anyhow, to have 10% of our housing affordable, we would require about 132 housing units, which 10% of that top number thirteen fifty seven. We currently have 51 and this is a deficit of about 81 affordable homes. Now let's look at the rental market in Andover. For rental, the state programs use the fair market rent for the region is determined by HUD. And so in this little chart here in the center, can see the different fair market rents by unit bedroom ranging from $670 a month for an efficiency up to about $1,500
a month for a four bedroom house. Down below are the actual rents reported in Andover and you can see we've got 114 units of $500 to $1,000 essentially, and that's the majority of our rental. Dollars 32 are in the $1,000 to $1,500 per month range and 10 are in excess of $1,500 a month. So you look at the rent costs and you say gee whiz, Andover's a great place to live. As we saw from the last slide, you know, problem is there are a few rental options available to people in Andover and they're primarily older homes with more maintenance. Next, I wanted to look at the home ownership. And this slide takes two examples, a family of two and a family of four with the income that the state defined as being 80% of the median for that family size. We're gonna take 30% of it to come up with an actual housing payment of 20,000 per year for a family of 2 or 24,000 for a family of four, which comes down to a monthly payment of about $1,600 a month for a family of two and 2,000 for a family of four. Next we looked at what kind of house can you get for that kind of money and we looked at $250,000 $300,000 and $350,000 And if you take the principal interest, what the taxes would be, add on the insurance, that gives you a total payment for a $250,000 house of about $15.80 dollars per month, which we see that's what a family of two can afford. So that shows that a family of two can go in and get a $250,000
house. That family of four can afford the $300,000 house and family of four didn't make it quite up to the $350,000 So this gets into what we call naturally occurring affordable units in Andover. As I mentioned before, to me, when I moved here, I thought Andover seemed to be a very affordable place to live. None of these homes have the forty year deed restrictions placed so they don't count towards affordable housing, but you can see you know we've got the last four years worth of numbers here. Total sales, how many of those sales were under $250,000 How many were under $300,000 and that includes those that were under $250,000 And so it shows the percentage of those that are under $300,000 or affordable to a family of four ranging from 78% in 2018 to 57% in 2021. These homes are also older than average and while making them more affordable to buy, more costly to maintain, and less desirable than a newer home. You can also see the trend is toward fewer homes selling for the affordable prices given the recent rapid increase in selling prices. So that's where we are on our housing stock. This is a slide that really got my attention and should be to all of us living in Andover. It shows Andover's population going down. And I thought this might be reflective of the statewide trend of population so I dug a little deeper into that and found that while the population in Connecticut increased slightly from 2019 to 2020
by about 1%, the population in Andover decreased by 87 people or 2.7%. I went back and looked at the last plan of conservation and development and that plan did not anticipate the decline in population. It showed it leveling off but it did not recognize that it would decline. That document came out in 2015. You look at the numbers of the data that went into that, you know, from 2012 to 2014, it shows it kind of leveling off there and then we're starting to decline again. The Connecticut Data Center projects population to continue to decline further to only 2,864 people in 2030 and 2,550 in 2040. Now we all think Andover is a great place to live, so why is this happening? Should we be concerned and what can we do to change it if we think it's a problem? I go back to the recent long term plan that the town of Andover issued in 2019 which recognized the need and importance for creating affordable housing. It said Andover will have to work hard to attract millennials, especially homebuyers, to overcome a bias toward more urban amenities. It also went on to state that Andover has 93% single family housing. This will need to change to attract younger demographic. This is coupled with the fact that Andover has very little affordable housing. So anyhow, we've recognized it as a problem like the state recognized it starting back in, you know,
the late 1990s. But I think it's something that should be a concern to all of us. Next slide shows the median age in Andover and it happens to be much older than the county and the state in general. This slide also got my attention. We have recognized that Andover has an aging population and again I attributed this to our country's population aging in general with the baby boomer population reaching our senior years. But Andover is aging faster than average. Do we have the housing to support them as they age and desire smaller houses on smaller lots that are easier to maintain? Again from the long term plan the town issued in 2019,
Andover's population is aging and without a concerted effort to attract millennial homebuyers this trend will accelerate. And this is where my opinion on affordable housing shifted from something that was nice to do to something that we had to tackle for the future well-being of our town. This slide shows the number of building permits issued per year from about nineteen ninety to twenty seventeen. We can see the building permits issued peaked in 1996 at about 36 permits that year. Know, things were good, people were building lots of houses, people were buying, moving to Andover, and that sort of thing. For the last ten to twelve years we have been seeing three to five building permits per year. So the speculative market in housing hasn't existed since the housing bubble burst back actually before 2010, probably 02/2008. With that, it's going to be difficult for Andover to reach the 10% goal. In the 90s, we were building 20 to 30 units of housing a year, but from 2009 on, it's been less than 10 and essentially three to five in the last several years. We need 81 additional affordable units to meet our state mandate of 10% affordable. If we were to do this,
and if a developer had to make 30% of a development affordable, that means we'd be building two seventy two new units in Andover, 191 at the market rate and 81 affordable. And that's probably not going to happen anytime soon. So Andover will always be subject to that eight-thirty gs requirement. In a lot of towns, there's a very significant gap between the price that the affordable houses sell at and the price that are going at the market rate. That allows those towns to make up for what they're losing on the affordable housing by the prices they're charging on the market rate units. That's not happening here in Andover. In a lot of the small towns, the gap is much narrower. We see if we want affordable housing to mix in well with the town, it's going to look very similar to the market based sales. So this isn't going to solve our problem for us anytime soon. We've also got the lack of public sewer which makes density very challenging here in Andover. So while we're always going to be subject to the eight-thirty gs regulations, the likelihood of a developer doing an eight thirty gs application in Andover is very small. Next, I wanted to look at who should the affordable housing plan target. And we've talked now about young folks wanting to keep them in town. And this graph of age distribution shows that we've got about four forty three people in the 10 19 year old age bracket.
Now those folks aren't going go out and buy homes today, but by the time we get around to actually having some affordable housing, they may be in the marketplace and we'd be interested in keeping those people here in town. The other group that we talked about were the seniors and we see a big bracket from 50 to 69 years of age. We got two little spikes there that show us we've got almost 1,200 empty nesters potentially looking to downsize and stay in town. And if we don't have options for them to stay in town, that means that they're probably going to go someplace else. So with that, how many units are potentially needed? And somewhere off all the state data, see that 18% of the households in Andover spend between 3050% of their income on housing. On top of that, there's 4% of the households that spend more than half of their income on housing. So for this plan, you know, we took a look at the low end of what is needed, it would be the 4% that spend more than half. And if we went to the upper limit, it would be all the people that spend above 30% of their income on housing. And the same statistics said that the hourly wage needed to afford a two bedroom apartment
is $23.65 down below if we looked at the know the ten to nineteen year old age grouping there were four forty three residents. If we took care of the 4% that are paying more than half that would be 18 residents. If we took a look at the 18% that are between 30 50 that comes up to 80. Similarly with the fifty to sixty nine year olds, know we show that again 4% it comes out to about four fifty households when you take a look at there's about 2.6 people per household. And again on the low end that would be about 18 households, the upper end 81 households. So that gives us a bracket of potential need anywhere from between thirty six and one hundred and sixty one units. The need for affordable housing should not be viewed as something we need to do to meet the state requirement, but as we show here, something we want to tackle to get the young people to want to live here, raise a family here, retire here, and stay here. We really need to have more than our deficit of 81 units that's suggested. So next we'll take a look at the affordable housing units that currently exist. And again, we're supposed to have 10%, which is 133 units basically. In 2015, it shows that we had 24 government assisted units and 31 units that were financed with the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority or US Department of Agriculture federally subsidized loans for a total of 51 units. That comes out to an affordable rate of 4.18%
as opposed to the 10% required. In 2020, we see that the numbers actually went down a little bit and I have not been able to get the light bulb on in my brain successfully on why the government assisted numbers went from 24 to 18. I know there's still 24 units sitting over there on Riverside Drive. Talked to Eric, he tried to help explain that to me a little bit, but it just doesn't make sense that we should have lost credit for six of our affordable housing units there. But anyhow, you know, we did. I don't know if we can get it back,
but anyhow, that has resulted in our drop in affordable housing numbers down to the total of 51 that we have today for 3.85%. So we need 81 additional units to reach the 10%. That brings us to what should we have as a goal in Andover for affordable housing? And our plan came up with we should try to create five to 15 affordable housing units in the next ten years and it should be targeted to Andover seniors interested in downsizing. In Andover's ten to nineteen year old age cohort, which I guess now is generation Z, the generation, the millennial generations, a little bit older than that now. And this sounds like a fairly modest goal in terms of what we need, but could be a very challenging goal to meet in terms of what we have seen for building activity over the past several years. This is where we get into talking about where is the property in Andover that we might be able to develop. And Andover put out an incentive housing zone study in 2017 and essentially came up with three possible sites that we could use. The first is the Phelps property over on Schottie Mill Road and it's about 9.4 acres that we could develop. The next property listed was Rosewood Acres on Lindholt's Corner which is about 16.4 acres. And lastly is the town of Andover property behind the town hall
which is about 70 acres. And I wanted to take a little closer look at the town of Andover property as I consider this a very promising option that because Andover already owns the property, we could make a deal with the developer to get the developer interested in building housing back there. The incentive housing zone created two development scenarios which are displayed in the following figures. And this shows you know several, this shows 10 of those multi unit housing complexes that we saw in the picture right up front. 42 units in 10 buildings with a mixture of one and two bedroom units and I thought that was a very attractive option back there. The other scenario that we looked through was your 24 single family lots of two bedroom homes. And I think this would be a great move forward to the development of the town center concept that our plan of conservation development addresses, especially now that our new senior community center is approaching reality. This would be a great help to those in town who might benefit from increased affordable housing. So where do we go from here?
First, let's look at the organization awareness of the plan. Know, and the first goal was to present the plan. I was hoping that we get a few more takers, but with the weather being so nice out there today, I know that's a tough sell to come listen to a presentation on affordable housing. But hopefully, you people that did attend can help the town out, spreading the word that, this is something we really need to do. And I'm hoping that I get the opportunity to present the plan in additional venues going forward. It's important to recognize that the plan is not free, Doesn't cost very much, but as you can see from the third bullet down there, it's gonna talk about a permanent staff member being assigned to the committee. So we would have to pay for that. Any of the affordable housing that we developed in this plan would add to the grant list, and so it would be a plus for the town budget that way, but it would certainly cost us a little bit to get started. Now, a couple of the things that we did not consider in our plan
that other towns have considered, and they're actually putting in the budget the town purchasing property to make it available to developers so that they can go out and build affordable housing. I didn't think that with as hard as we worked to get through a budget to pass, that would be something that we wanted to address right now, so it's not in the plan. Other towns are also going out and buying housing that they are renting to people to create affordable housing there. With similar thing, I didn't think that was something that we would be looking at getting into our plan right now. However, if the town all of a sudden said, yep, those are great ideas, we should do them, be happy to add those into the plan. Next is create an affordable housing committee. Plans are often shelved because there's no champion. It is recommended that an affordable housing committee be established with the goal of keeping this plan in the forefront. And we're hoping that the Board of Selectmen would be willing to establish that committee. And ideally, a permanent paid town staff member with true interest in this subject could be assigned to staff to the affordable housing committee to help them out. Next, look at what we would like the affordable housing committee to do. And the committee and the staff could use social media, print media, and presentations to highlight the need and identify and work with residents in need of affordable housing or interested
in renovations to agent plays to create affordable accessory units. Perhaps one of the biggest issues to buying a house is lack of knowledge of existing programs. The committee and staff would work with REALTORS to promote the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority and U. S. Department Of Agriculture mortgage and down payment assistance programs. Homes bought with these programs count as state defined affordable housing. The general statutes municipal powers allow the creation of a housing trust fund. All towns in Connecticut are in a unique position they have found money in the form of COVID relief funds. And I recognize that most of the money is going towards building the new senior community center and I completely agree with this. It's recommended that a housing trust fund be established with an initial deposit from the COVID relief funds if there's any remaining and subsequent deposits could come from the annual budget if we chose to fund that in there or end of the year transfers of surplus funds. We should be applying for small cities community development block grants, funding for money to fund the housing trust fund for housing rehabilitation and modification for low and moderate income owners and tenants.
In considering Andover's age demographics, helping seniors comfortably age in place will be a huge issue to avoid social isolation. A safe and affordable home is critical, but also to assist seniors with aging in place it's critical that the town continues to provide support programs to maintain a good quality of life. These include the senior centers programming for all types of seniors, meals on wheels, dial a ride, visiting nurse program, and handyman services for small jobs within their homes. To help further affordable housing, we should consider tax abatement programs as allowed under the general Connecticut statutes.
Next, we should be looking at modifying the existing housing stock. A recent AARP survey found eighty percent of seniors would like to remain in their homes and age in place. Consider direct grants from the housing trust fund and the small cities eligible grants to encourage low to moderate income qualified seniors to modify their homes to allow aging in place. This might be single floor living, bathroom modifications, ramps, and or to create affordable accessory units for extra income from a relative or a caregiver. And the housing trust fund that could be paid back for many loans that we give out when the house is eventually sold by the people getting the loans. We could create a program which creates affordable accessory dwelling units by creating a direct grant housing trust fund in small cities, community development grant, block grant eligible or tax abatements. To ease the process, we could have available maximum rental rates and model ten year deed restriction acceptable to the State Department of Housing to qualify as affordable units and help with our annual reporting process. We should look at expanding the senior housing over on Riverside Drive. There are currently 24 units at Riverside Drive Senior Housing. There is currently a waiting list
and like other senior housing, it may be a couple years before a unit will become available. It is anticipated that the lack of senior housing units will only get worse over time. And this is exactly at the time when more and more seniors are realizing they need more affordable housing and do not want to leave their hometowns. The town should work with management at Riverside Drive Senior Housing to evaluate the feasibility of expansion. There are state and federal funds to assist with such expansions. And lastly, should make sure that seniors in need are aware of the statute on temporary health care structures. And what this allows is, you know, essentially a small mobile home to be brought on the property for the duration of the need that a caregiver might live in if the property owner chose to go that way. And there are a couple of things for the Planning and Zoning Commission to do. First, we should adopt the affordable housing plan as an addendum to our current plan of conservation and development,
and we'll be doing that soon because we owe this plan to the state by June 1. We'll recommend to the Board of Selectmen that we opt out of the requirements of Public Act 2,129 for accessory dwelling units. This is recommended because complying could be detrimental to Andover Lake. After opting out, we can amend the regulations to comply with those things we like in the act in the Andover Rural Design Zone. Most significantly, as of rate units up to a thousand square feet and remove the special permit requirements for detached units. Right now somebody has to come in and get a special permit with a public hearing to put up unit on their house, which most people would put in the upstairs of a barn or a garage or something like that. We think that might be one of the things we can do that would entice people to sign up for that ten year deed restriction to make that count as affordable housing.
We can amend the Andover Rural Design District to allow as of right two to four unit structures on larger lots. And in this we would include design guidelines to protect the rural character of our town and the single residential family character. This will increase the supply and diversity of housing stock with smaller, more affordable housing units and they all add to our grant list. And we'll need to eliminate the mobile homes and mobile home parks meeting the definition of the state statute from our prohibited use section. And lastly, we should amend section 4.14, planned residential development for older persons to eliminate the need for special permits and add a density bonus in exchange for affordable units. We need to do everything we can to help make developers want to come in and develop the town here. We can amend the Andover mixed use floating zone to incorporate an optional affordable component in exchange for higher density
in a more straightforward, less risky approval process. We should adopt the incentive housing zone, perhaps increasing the density in recognition that the State Department of Health septic capacity has recently increased from 5,000 gallons per day to 7,500 gallons per day for the septic system, making it easier to put more dense housing in. And we should proactively rezone the three incentive housing zones discussed in the affordable housing plan using an overlay zone technique which preserves the existing zoning but would allow the incentive housing zone development as of right if a developer were to come in and try to do that. After rezoning the property, the Planning and Zoning Commission with the affordable housing committee can advocate that the town seriously consider opening discussions with for profit and not for profit developers who might be interested in development of a neighborhood on the town property adjacent to the Town Hall Fire Station, including senior and affordable units. So in conclusion, affordable housing is a good thing and a necessary thing for our down future. There is a growing need for affordable housing in the Andover. There's a lot of grant money available right now to support affordable housing efforts.
There are steps Andover can take to encourage affordable housing development. And affordable housing development is already well underway in many other towns. You know, was a article in the paper I think a week ago talked about Glastonbury building 1,000 apartments on the corner of Route 83 And 94 there. So I know we need some champions to lead the effort. I know you're out there. And at this point, all those champions may not hear today, but I'm interested in hearing what you think. So Diane or Joanne, what do you think?
I'll go first. I'm very impressed Jed, can you guys hear me okay? This computer sometimes has issues. Nope, hear you fine. Okay, yeah, I'm very impressed. As someone that has a hobby of real estate and things of this nature, I was very, you know, Engrossed in learning, you know, expanding my knowledge base about a lot of issues that you brought up. You know, maybe when it first started coming up in the board of selectman meetings, I was like, you know, I don't know if that's a topic we need to really, you know, dive into. Although I knew, you know, you and Eric were supporting it and bringing it forward month after month. But with recent events with inflation and all the documentation you gave us here today with the trends with just the housing prices and also with the age and the population, you know, going down. Very scary with everything the town is trying to do right now and then seeing those trends. So that really opened my eyes. So I say why not Andover for those identifiable pieces of property that you see having those nice units that other towns have, you know, I more so go for those standalone, maybe two bedroom places, you know, I really do worry about our seniors and everything that they need. They kind of are the backbone of the community and they support everything else in town. So why not, you know, with the new
senior slash community center being built, why not look at that property back there to have some affordable, nice units which would be close to things that they need? Yeah, I'm really in favor. I don't want to keep going on and on, but I want to volunteer my time with anything that I can do. Mean, it's just a natural interest for me anyways. And it was very, very eye opening that we've only had like three to five. We built our house in 2005. So I've been here seventeen years through all the ups and downs, raised my kids here. And yeah, so seeing that there's only three to five, I think I jotted down on average new permits because of lack of available
land plots, I'm sure. I think this is a great need in our town to sustain things. And just one more thing, and then I'll shut up. It's it's interesting to find out Andover's affordability and, like, when I talk about the global piece of it, my own son who was raised in Andover recently got married at the age of 29, is in the housing market in the Boston area. So you can only imagine what a starter home cost there. So, But thank you for all this work and information. It's very, very educational.
Well, you, Joanne. And I would ask one favor in return is maybe you can share some of that with the other people on the finance committee. And I'd love the opportunity to come and present this at a finance commission meeting at some point. I didn't want to bother the finance committee because I knew you all were in the throes of the budget cycle and were really busy with that. But I felt badly that I wasn't able to get this through the finance committee in an effort to build the case for the, you know, that town planner economic development coordinator, which I think could really help out a lot. And there is a lot going on in the planning zoning commission that I could use a little help with. The other comment I would make is I was concerned, you know, when I saw the presentation on the new senior community center, would that preclude our ability to get a driveway back into a little development there? And I talked to Ed on the committee there and he was saying that, nope, they had that, they were aware of the desire at some point to have affordable housing or housing back there. And they made sure that the plan for the senior center is consistent with still developing that land back there behind it. So to have seniors living right in the vicinity of town hall and the senior center being able to volunteer in the school, I thought that would be just
a wonderful thing. But thank you for your comments. Diane, how about you?
Okay. I agree with a lot of what Joanne said. This was very enlightening. You've answered Mostly all my questions, including the last one you just addressed was the senior center interfering with access to that back 70 acres at the town hall. I was disappointed more people did not log on to this presentation. Like I say, it was very enlightening. I'm glad to see that it will be on YouTube and hopefully people can view it there. One of my questions was, how likely is it this is probably an Eric question I don't know. How likely is it that we would ever get source here in Andover, I know they're right over there in Coventry, they're over there in Bolton. Hebron has them. Columbia and Andover got these two big lakes that are you know within a quarter mile of each other. And it just seems that somebody would be thinking about getting sewers in this area. Anybody have any idea how likely that might be? Do you want to take a crack at that?
Sure. So the first thing is that the town is very unlikely to do it until such point as we're forced to do it And we would be forced to do it if there were significant contamination problems with wells in the Lake District. You know, that seems to be what trips other municipalities into being forced to do it by the DEP. The DEEP has kind of started fighting expansion of sewers in this, not promoting it. In fact, Coventry has been trying for multiple years to tie in and connect more of Coventry to the sewer system. Actually, I do it and EEP has multiple times rejected their, you know, application, even though the sewer system they're going into has the capacity to accept it. So the kind of landscape for approval for that has changed. But it is possible that at some point in the future, the town will be forced to do it in the Lake District. We looked at that, you know, briefly about ten, eleven years ago of what the cost basis was and eleven years ago, the cost basis to Andover would be somewhere around a minimum of $8,000,000 to provide sewers just to the Lake District. So, would think your cost basis today would be at least one and a half times that.
So, it would be a very expensive proposition for the town. The other thing is that if we ever did do it, we would work very hard to see whether we could get enough excess capacity to be able to provide sewers in at least a portion of the route order. So we could increase the commercial potential for that area, which is exactly what Bolton did when they were forced to put in sewers on Lower Bolton Lake. I am really hoping, you know, we don't have to do that because, you know, that means we have a sewer authority and it adds an awful lot of regulatory burden to the town. So the town is not looking for that opportunity is what I would say. You know,
does that answer your question? Yes, it does. Thank you very much. The other thing is I did not look favorably upon the idea of eliminating mobile homes and mobile home parks from Andover. I don't think that is something that Andover residents would be supportive of. I know of several mobile home parks that are very nice there's one right appearance stores Jensen's mobile home park which is been there for a long time and not bad, but those are few and far between most of them become just an eyesore and not not attractive not well maintained blah blah blah and I'm not, I don't think that Andover would be looking to have mobile home parks in Andover. Also, I did like the fact that you're looking so closely at supporting the seniors. Again, that's really a group I think that we really want to keep in town. They don't provide a big tax burden to Andover. We don't have children in school. So, you know, the school expense and that, again, we have to have the seniors but we also have to have the young people you know there's a whole mix. And I think that you guys are looking at that and I was surprised about the population decline in Andover. That's always not good news. But interesting. And a lot of interesting data that you gave. And I appreciate all the hard work that went into
putting this presentation together and disappointed again that more people didn't chime in. So that's basically what I have to say. Basically, thank you very much for all your hard work. This was much appreciated. Thank you.
Well, in a favor, if I could ask of you, Diane, is maybe you spread the word and maybe this would be a presentation for a senior luncheon. Oh, you might have to condense it a whole lot. Well,
I know. Yeah, that was tough. My exuberance kept expanding and I thought I had it down to about half an hour and I see it squeaked out a little longer than that today. So we'll try but I'll see what I could do there.
But anyhow, thank you. I think you'll find that seniors have the same attention span as a child you know so. Yep, I understand. Bear. Yeah, you've been there you know that it has to be very, very sharp very crisp but don't don't bug them with too many details that they don't need to know. They only want to know what affects me. So, yeah.
Thanks Diane. Leanne, did you have anything for us this morning.
Hi, no, I wasn't able to tune in until about ten minutes ago. So I'm hoping that this will be posted on YouTube in the near future, It will.
Thanks Leanne. Joanne, I see, you have your hand up there?
Yeah, I just found that little tool today. I like that. Just following up again, great points by Diane. I'm happy to take the lead as you asked with spreading the word with the finance department. I think it kind of goes full circle with everything that's going on in town right now with trying to do a little bit more nice looking building along the Route 6 Corridor that we could bring some tax base to town and bringing affordable housing for mainly lower income, maybe young people that want to get into town and seniors alike. I mean, definitely seniors that are homeowners now because they'll probably sell their homes to the seniors. Seniors may sell their homes to younger people coming in. It could be a hand in hand works together.
Quick question that I somehow missed the ten year deed stipulation. Can you just tell me that in a nutshell? What that
was? Okay, so there's two deed restrictions. One is on a regular home, if it's to be deemed affordable, it would have a forty year deed restriction. And the ten year deed restriction is for if you went out in your yard and built an accessory apartment or an accessory dwelling unit, you would only need a ten year deed restriction on that to have that count is affordable. And what that means is that the price increase in the accessory dwelling unit or the home would be limited to the consumer price index for the forty years or ten years, whichever was applicable to that situation. Shadhill.
That does. That's what I thought it was. I just wanted to make sure that I understood it. I could see a lot of ways around this. This is really exciting. It's I mean, I think it's much needed right now. The time is now with everything going on. So thank you again.
I see one other person here that it looks like three bull. I don't know who that is. But if you got any questions or comments for us, now is good. Okay. Jay, Eric Garnison. Eric
or Jim, you guys got any comments on what we went through?
I just want to inject a couple things. One, an answer to Diane's question. The town is not looking at allowing mobile homes in town because we want to. We're looking to do it because the state tells us we have to. So our regulations prohibit it,
but the state law doesn't allow us to have regulations to prohibit it. Would that be a correct statement, Jed?
Absolutely. And we can put, you know, while we can't prohibit it, we can do our best to make sure that these prefabricated modular homes almost, if you will, you know, are attractive and blend in well with the character of the neighborhoods that they might be in. But it's not something that we're going after because we want to, the states told us, and they did not give us the option to opt out of that particular piece of legislation.
Right. And I have a couple other things that I just wanted to say real quick. The first is, as you're discussing this with people, I would talk about this as both affordable housing and workforce housing. And the reason is, if you look at the employees in the town of Andover, with the exception of myself and the public works foreman, every single town employee falls under the affordable housing statute. So, you know, I think we want to make it clear that what a lot of these towns are doing is doing this and saying, the people who work here in this town need to be able to live in this town. I think that's an important point to hammer home. The second thing, when you guys are looking at crafting regulations that will allow in the manufactured in the modular homes, There's the the cutout says basically you have to allow them if they're over 22 feet wide. I would eliminate that restriction for modular homes, but not manufactured homes. And the difference is a manufactured home has to meet a lower HUD building standard than a modular home. A modular home has to meet all the current building codes, whereas a mobile or manufactured home does not. So if it were me, would consider structuring that so the 22 foot wide minimum applied only to mobile homes, but that's my own personal take on it. You know, think everything we can do to increase the number of accessory dwelling units in town is a good thing. You know, in the concept of allowing people tax breaks if they agree to deed restrict their houses to be affordable housing is an interesting concept. There is a fair amount of housing in town that probably this could be done with
simply because a lot of the stuff on, say, Pine Ridge Drive, those houses tend to be well under the cost of what the affordable housing threshold is. The house I live in, you know, could easily, you know, be deed restricted to that. So I think that's a possibility, but you'd have to work really carefully with the Board of Finance to understand the tax implications if we were going to do that. And that's all I got. Jed, I think that was a great presentation.
Thanks, Eric. And I did have a couple of slides on that workforce housing issue, and they got cut in an effort to get it down. Maybe I'll put those back in because there's an awful lot of good people that we would love having, you know, our firemen, for instance, you know, they could benefit from affordable housing and it's a good thing. So I'll look at putting those back in. I'll see if there's something else. If there's something that I talked about that you think shouldn't be in there, I'm interested in hearing that from you as well. Jim, do you have anything for us before we wrap it up?
Nope, it did occur to me that I should have put on the agenda the action on the plan given the time frame, the agenda for Monday's PGC meeting. You've
got words in there that I think will suit us just fine. Okay. So I'm there. Again, I thank everybody who did tune in today for being here. I hope that we can figure out how to get this information out to more folks because I think more folks need it. But I won't take up any more of your time this morning. I appreciate your attention, your participation and support, and go out and enjoy the rest of this very beautiful Andover day.
Thanks very much, Jed. Thank you. Have a great weekend. Yeah, so long everybody. Alright, peace. Bye.