Housing Headlines

ARLINGTON --- The town's claim that it has satisfied the state's affordable housing requirement by having devoted over 1.5 percent of its land will be put to the test this fall with Oaktree Development's application to the town for a Ch. 40B permit so it can build 219 units on the 17-acre Mugar site in East Arlington. Towns can gain safe harbor from 40B applications if over 10 percent of its housing is affordable or if 1.5 percent of its land is used for affordable housing. Oaktree is disputing the town's estimate.

QUINCY --- First-time homebuyers who participated in a city-run loan program repaid thousands of dollars more when they sold their homes than what's described in the program's application form. The city reduced interest rates in some cases to 18 percent to avoid violating the state’s usury law, but the charges were still significantly higher than what the program application form says and, while not legal, much higher than other such area home-buying programs.

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.