PROVINCETOWN — The select board took two votes on July 24 that put the town on course to create up to 100 new apartments at two locations — one on Shank Painter Road and the other on Nelson Avenue.
The first vote was to award Christine Barker and M. Tatiana Eck and their respective companies a contract to redevelop the former police station site at 26 Shank Painter Road into 40 market-rate apartments.
The town asked for proposals for market-rate apartments at that site in April, and Barker and Eck, working with architect Jeffry Burchard, filed the only response. Their proposal includes the transfer of 26 Shank Painter and the adjacent parking lot at 15 Browne Street to them for $500, a potential $4-million contribution from the town, and the development of 40 apartments that would be restricted to market-rate year-round rental occupancy only.
“The town would convey the property with a deed restriction that all units must remain as year-round rentals,” Town Manager Alex Morse wrote in a memo to the select board recommending the contract.
The contract does not itself convey the property or spend any money. “The conveyance of the property does not occur until a project is permitted, financed, and ready to break ground,” Morse wrote in the memo.
The vote to purchase three adjacent parcels on Nelson Avenue — numbers 22, 22R, and 24 with a total area of .91 acres — came at the end of the meeting, after a brief interval in executive session. The first two parcels will cost $1,270,000, while the third one will be $765,000, for a combined total of $2,035,000.
Developer Tom Tannariello had spent 13 months securing permits to build 10 market-rate condos and two affordable-ownership condos at 22 and 22R Nelson. He was awarded his final permits in January but put the properties on the market in April.
Combined, the three parcels have an allowed density of 18 units, Morse wrote to the select board. But once the town’s sewer system has expanded to serve Nelson Avenue, sometime between 2027 and 2030, the parcel could support from 48 to 60 units, he wrote.
“While the town does not have immediate plans for redevelopment of these parcels, securing this land is in the town’s best interests,” Morse wrote.
“The vast majority of units in any privately-owned plan would be market-rate condos,” Morse wrote, “many of which would be eligible to be short-term rented.” By purchasing the Nelson Avenue property, the town is “positioning itself to have the assets needed to provide affordable, community, and workforce housing in the long term,” Morse wrote.
The select board’s vote to endorse the purchase and sale agreement was unanimous. The purchase would have to be approved by voters at a fall town meeting, which is tentatively scheduled for Monday, Oct. 23.
Market-Rate Apartments
The 40 apartments that Barker and Eck propose to build would be the first deed-restricted market-rate rentals the town has commissioned without state or federal support.
Similar construction projects, such as the apartments at Province Landing at 90 Shank Painter Road, have all been deed-restricted for people making less than 80 percent of the county’s median income in order to capture federal and state funding for affordable housing.
The Harbor Hill timeshare complex on Bradford Street Extension was purchased with town funds and rehabilitated into 28 market-rate apartments, but building market-rate apartments from scratch has not been attempted on the Outer Cape in many years.
The town had issued a request for proposals that specifically sought developers who would not use state and federal funding in order to ensure that the units could be inhabited by people who earn 80 percent of area median income or more.
Barker and Eck asked for a 10-year abatement of local property taxes alongside the $4-million town contribution. In his memo to the select board, Morse wrote, “While the discussion regarding the town’s financial contribution can be decided at a future time, the review committee feels the initial request does not seem unreasonable given the lack of financial subsidies” from other layers of government.
Barker and Eck’s apartment building would include 32 units with no income restrictions on the occupants and 8 units with an income restriction from 80 percent to 150 percent of area median income. In dollar terms, that would be $67,700 to $126,975 per year for a single person, or $77,400 to $145,125 for a couple.
They propose to rent 18 studio apartments at $1,675 to $2,000 per month, 18 one-bedroom apartments at $2,500 to $2,750 a month, and four two-bedroom apartments for $3,000 a month.
Their partners on the proposal include Burchard, the architect from Machado Silvetti who designed the Provincetown Art Association and Museum’s building at 460 Commercial, and John Ciluzzi, owner of Premier Commercial Real Estate, which will manage the apartments.
The building uses a new zoning bylaw, passed at town meeting in 2022, that allows four-story residential buildings in the town’s General Commercial zone, which runs along Shank Painter Road and the northern end of Conwell Street. Burchard’s design steps back the fourth story by wrapping it with balconies and steps back part of the first story that faces Commercial Street as well.
The parcels on which it would sit amount to only 0.4 acres and wrap around an existing three-story building at 30 Shank Painter Road that comprises eight residential condominium units. There would be no onsite parking at the property, although there are 27 town-owned paid parking spaces across the street at the fire station.
The entire project is projected to cost $13.3 million, or $333,000 per apartment.
Select board members praised the presentation and then voted for it unanimously.
“I was on the RFP review committee,” said select board member Erik Borg, “and my major takeaways were that it’s a creative and well-designed solution on a strange plot of land, and it serves a demographic in town where we have a gap.”
“When the town issued this RFP, we weren’t sure what we were going to get back,” said select board member Austin Miller. “I think what we see here in terms of unit count, design, and thoughtfulness of the proposal is really solid work.”
