Housing Headlines

BOSTON --- The city of Boston is reporting good progress in its effort to end chronic homelessness by quickly matching people with housing and support services. But some barriers in the system remain. Since July 2014, Boston has found permanent housing — with services tied to it — for 717 veterans who were homeless. In January of this year, the city had 612 chronically homeless people in its emergency shelters. In the last eight months, it's housed 172 of them.

BEVERLY --- A public meeting was held in late September so that Sarah Barnat of Boston-based Barnat Development could show preliminary plans regarding its efforts to turn an MBTA lot on Rantoul St. into a $21 million, 67-unit mixed-income apartment building.

BOSTON --- Anh Nguyen is accustomed to working in communities where disinvestment is common. She once worked in San Francisco’s Tenderloin section, a neighborhood hard-hit by unemployment, drug trade and prostitution. Now, the 38-year-old Vietnamese-American woman who was raised in Central Massachusetts, is bringing those hard-learned lessons to the Hub as the new director of the Bowdoin-Geneva Main Street organization, a business district comprised of bodegas, barber shops and other stores run by entrepreneurs with roots in the Dominican Republic and Cape Verde. “We have to grow our shopping base here,” said Nguyen. “We have this wonderful Spanish and Caribbean experience in Bowdoin-Geneva. And we have a talented board with business owners, property owners and residents. It’s a good mix of institutional knowledge.”

TAUNTON --- Courtney Morris and her two children will no longer be homeless as they have moved from a shelter into Carpenter's Glen, an East Taunton affordable housing development that was just rehabilitated by the nonprofit Housing Solutions of Southerastern Mass. and financing from the Baker Administration's Department of Housing and Community Development.

AMHERST --- The Select Board has agreed to send a letter to the state in support of Beacon Communities' intention of applying to the town for a Ch. 40B comprehensive permit that would pave the way for it to develop a mixed-use development with 130 apartments in North Amherst's so-called mill district on Cowles Road.

NEEDHAM ---- Needham and Newton have taken a joint approach to reinventing a typical suburban office park along Rt. 128 but Banker & Tradesman Scott Van Voorhis opines that while Needham has succeed in zoning for housing and business, Newton has struggled so far.