Housing Headlines

The Boston Globe's Evan Horowitz jumps into the numbers on homeownership and finds that the lack of starter homes is due to a significant drop in people who have owned their homes for five to nine years. Horowitz found that from 2005 to 2016, people who had lived in their homes five to nine years had dropped by nearly a third while there was a 22 percent increase among those who had stayed in the same place 10 to 19 years.

CHELSEA --- Having already worked together to bring mixed-income housing to a formerly rundown industrial area known as the Box District, Traggorth Companies and The Neighborhood Developers are at it again, proposing to turn a long-vacant property on Broadway near the Revere line into 42 mixed-income apartments.

ORLEANS --- Selectmen have voted to fund an initial assessment of the Cape Cod Five Cents Savings Bank operations center to see if the property is suitable to be redeveloped into affordable housing. The move comes as the bank prepares to centralize its operations in Hyannis. The bank is expected to move its personnel to Hyannis in 2019.

WORCESTER --- A group behind the effort to get Worcester to vote on whether to adopt the Community Preservation Act has decided not to gather the more than 5,000 signatures necessary to get the measure on the ballot this year. In a written statement, Yes For A Better Worcester criticized an earlier vote by the city council not to put CPA on the ballot, thus triggering the short-lived effort to get the measure on the ballot via citizen's petition. The group said it would restart its effort next year.

LEE --- Plans for one of the town's old paper mills continue to take shape as developer Jeff Cohen revealed at a recent planning board meeting revised plans for a $60 million redevelopment of the Eagle Mill into a mixed-use development with 52 affordable apartments, 28 market-rate apartments and a hotel. In the 1880s, the town had 25 paper mills but the number had shrunk to four when the Eagle Mill closed in 2008. Today, there is only one paper-based company operating in Lee.

WEYMOUTH --- A developer within the South Weymouth Naval Air Station redevelopment has pledged to restore damage wetlands after it was found that some 1,400 squre feet of wetlands were filled in behind Dorset Park, a cluster of 26 single-family homes within the Union Point development.