The state has dramatically updated the number of affordable housing units credited to Plymouth, bringing the town closer to a long-elusive benchmark that would allow it to reject some residential development proposals.
The revised figure comes after local officials discovered that Plymouth had not been given credit for 588 units of existing affordable housing.
While the new number boost efforts to gain more control over residential growth in Plymouth, officials are still trying to sort out why the state’s count has been too low for years – and why it took Kristen Ford, a new employee, to figure out something was amiss. Ford works as part-time coordinator for the Community Preservation Committee.
The state Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities said Tuesday that Plymouth currently has a total of 1,578 affordable housing units, or about 6.1 percent of its total inventory. To be able to turn down so-called 40b projects – which can circumvent many zoning rules – a municipality must reach the 10 percent threshold.
Lee Hartmann, Plymouth’s director of planning and development, told the Select Board Tuesday that the town is on a path to achieve the 10 percent level in coming years. But for that to happen, a slew of building plans must come to fruition. Changes in the real estate market, such as a recession or rising construction costs, could affect that scenario.
Hartmann said local officials are waiting for another 277 existing affordable units to be added to the stock count, which would bring the total to 1,855, or 7.2 percent.
Three hundred additional units would be credited if Claremont Companies builds apartments as planned at Colony Place and another 38 if Pulte Homes goes ahead with construction of additional affordable units on Hedges Road.
That would bring Plymouth’s affordable housing count to 2,180, increasing the percentage to 7.8 percent, Town Manager Derek Brindisi told the Select Board on March 4.
Beyond that, 144 affordable housing units are planned for the Redbrook development in South Plymouth, Brindisi said, which would bring the figure to 8.3 percent.
And with the addition of approximately 375 affordable housing units envisioned for a third phase of the Harborwalk apartments at Cordage Park, the 10 percent mark would be within reach.
There is “no guarantee all that gets built,” Hartmann cautioned, but if does, the town would be just 191 units short of reaching 10 percent.
He said the number of entities involved in funding and building affordable housing makes tabulating them tricky.
“It’s a little bit of a challenge when these numbers come in,” Hartmann said.
But Select Board member John Mahoney seemed to view it as a good news/bad news scenario. At Tuesday’s meeting, he called discovery of the previously unreported 588 units “embarrassing and euphoric all at the same time.”
“It’s good that all of a sudden we’ve leapt from being in the four percent range into the seven, eight, potentially almost nine-and—half percent range,” he told Hartmann, “but how we got here, to me, is unacceptable.”
Hartmann said two mistakes were made: Affordable units were undercounted while the total number of homes in Plymouth was inflated.
In an email to Town Manager Derek Brindisi Tuesday, Hartmann explained that the town included seasonal housing units as part of the overall housing stock total, when it should only have been counting units that are lived in year-round.
Plymouth has approximately 25,000 year-round units and another 3,000 seasonal units. Including seasonal units in the denominator yielded a lower percentage of units that were affordable. Precisely why it took so long to uncover such a mistake is unclear.
Mahoney, who serves as the Select Board’s representative on the Community Preservation Committee – which recommends spending for some affordable housing – said part of the reason for the undercount was that the committee resisted accepting staff help until last year.
“But the other half of this is [in] your purview,” Mahoney told Brindisi.
Brindisi said the error was detected after Ford and Finance Director Lynne Barrett decided to conduct an audit of the town’s affordable housing inventory. The town’s Office of Community Development Tuesday – for the first time – posted a complete inventory of Plymouth’s affordable housing units.
“There were two massive breakdowns here,” Mahoney told the Independent. For one, he said, “you had a committee that was in desperate need of administrative support,” referring to the Community Preservation Committee.
The hiring of an administrative support person was a longstanding point of contention between Brindisi and the Select Board on one side and Bill Keohan, former chair of the Community Preservation Committee, on the other. Keohan wanted to be part of the interviewing and hiring process. Brindisi and the board wanted to make the hiring decision.
Ultimately, Keohan acceded, but the rift persisted and the Select Board replaced him with former fire chief Edward Bradley.
Keohan, who is running for a seat on the Select Board in the May town election, declined to comment Thursday.
While the Community Preservation Committee makes funding recommendations for affordable housing, money also comes from other sources.
“The other failure [in the undercount] resides in the Planning Department,” Mahoney said. “The Planning Department is under the purview of Mr. Brindisi. That is his responsibility to analyze and figure out what happened. Fix it if possible.”
Reiterating what he said during Tuesday’s meeting, Mahoney told the Independent that the mistake stemmed from “a completely unacceptable set of circumstances.”
Brindisi, however, said Hartmann is best equipped to address how the 588 units went unreported.
Hartmann told the Independent that there were several reasons for the gap.
First, Ford detected discrepancies between the number of affordable units funded after recommendations by the Community Preservation Committee and the figure reflected on the state’s list. Hartmann said his department knew of some of those discrepancies and had been working with the state to correct them but had not been aware of all of them.
Among the unreported Community Preservation Committee-funded projects Ford found was Cherry Hill II, a Plymouth Area Housing Authority building with 35 apartments categorized as affordable.
In addition, the town was not given credit for Hanover Colony Place, a 320-unit apartment complex, Hartmann explained. By law, if at least 25 percent of a project’s units are deemed affordable, all the units can be included in the count. It was a major discrepancy that has been rectified, he said.
The town has still not been given enough credits for the Harborwalk apartments, Hartmann said. The Cordage Park complex was built in two phases, and a third is in the planning stage. In the first phase, fewer than 25 percent of the units were affordable, so the town could only claim credit for the 31 affordable units. But more than 25 percent of the apartments in the second phase qualified as affordable, bringing the cumulative percentage for both phases up to 25 percent. That meant all 302 apartments should have been counted as affordable. They were not and the mistake went undetected.
Hartmann said the town is still working with the state to sort out the mix-up.
He also blamed the state for being slow in recording the addition of new affordable units.
“We have been working for months to have the state update Plymouth’s numbers,” Hartmann said. “The state updates its numbers twice a year. There is a lag time.”
Fred Thys can be reached at fred@plymouthindependent.org.