Spring has arrived on Outer Cape Cod, and along with the robins and pollen, another seasonal visitor is making the rounds: electioneering letters.
Town meetings in Wellfleet and Eastham are fast approaching, and Truro has two to contend with: its regular spring town meeting and a delayed special town meeting from last fall. Inboxes in Truro are filling with emails and newsletters exhorting people to vote one way or another, and unsigned letters have begun to appear as well, including one that foretells doom if the town approves too much affordable housing.
There are also elections for select board in all four towns, and every candidate running has told the Independent that housing is a priority. Follow-up questions often reveal that their beliefs vary widely, however — from “build more, faster” to “affordable housing isn’t really affordable.”
To help readers sort through the deluge of election rhetoric, the Independent contacted one of Cape Cod’s most highly regarded housing experts, Laura Shufelt of the Mass. Housing Partnership. Among her many roles is helping craft formal bid requests for affordable housing projects so that towns can secure millions in state funding to build housing here, said Jay Coburn, CEO of the Community Development Partnership.
The rules governing state and federal housing money are enormously complex, Shufelt said — but she outlined some key differences between fact and fiction.
How Much Does It Cost?
In most affordable housing developments on Cape Cod — including Sally’s Way in Truro, the Province Landing apartments in Provincetown, and the Village at Nauset Green in Eastham — the majority of units have a set rent that changes only incrementally from year to year, Shufelt said. The formula is complex, but it is based on a longstanding federal affordability standard that no more than 30 percent of a household’s income should go to housing.
“The federal standard is that 30 percent of a renter’s income should go to housing and utilities, which leaves the other 70 percent for food, insurance, taxes, your vehicle, and the rest of life’s expenses,” Shufelt said. “For homeowners, that 30 percent doesn’t include utilities but does include mortgage principal, interest, property taxes, and insurance.
“The crisis in our state is that a lot of people are paying more than 30 percent — in fact, there are people spending more than 50 percent of their income on housing, meaning they’re extremely cost-burdened,” Shufelt said. Census data show that almost 40 percent of Provincetown’s resident homeowners and 60 percent of its renters are housing cost-burdened, for example.
In affordable housing projects, however, the 30-percent-of-income rule still controls how the rent for each unit is set.
Who Can Live There?
“Local preference” rules that reserve units for people who are already connected to a town are a hot-button topic, Shufelt said. The federal government prefers to fund projects without local preference, but they are allowed when a community can show its need for housing is acute.
“When you prove there’s an overwhelming need for housing, like in Cape Cod towns, you can set aside up to 70 percent of units as local preference,” Shufelt said. “That includes people who live in the town, people who work for the town, people who work for a business based in the town, and people with a child that goes to school in the town.”
Nearly all recent projects on Cape Cod have had 70 percent of their units set aside as “local preference,” Shufelt said. Most of the units that are open to people across the state also wind up going to Cape Cod residents, she added.
“One of our recent projects in Hyannis had 43 market-rate units and 10 that were affordable,” Shufelt said. “There were 80 applicants for those 10 units, and all but three were from Cape Cod.”
Fifteen years ago, the state reserved 12 percent of units in affordable housing projects for racial minorities, but that system has changed, Shufelt said. Now, if the applicant pool for the local-preference units is not very racially diverse, then applicants from outside the town are added until the local pool has the same level of diversity as the county, which on Cape Cod is 15 percent, she said.
“Then the lottery takes place for the local units,” Shufelt said, “and then everyone in the local pool is added back into the open pool, so they also have a shot at the other 30 percent of units.
“The people who get these affordable units, whether it’s the local preference units or the other 30 percent, are overwhelmingly people from Cape Cod,” she said.
Why Does It Take So Long?
The Independent asked Coburn to explain the housing development process on Cape Cod — and in particular why some projects take so much longer than others.
“If everything goes right, you can get a project done in five years,” said Coburn. “That’s if the zoning board of appeals acts quickly, no one takes your permits to court, and you have a strong town staff that can vet your project and support it with infrastructure.”
The “pre-development phase,” which takes place after a town buys land but before it issues its formal request for proposals from affordable housing developers, can take more years, however.
“An extensive community engagement process can take a lot of time, and it doesn’t always include input from people who understand financing and costs of development,” Coburn said. “You can wind up with a unicorn plan that is beautiful but not economically viable unless the town wants to pay for all of it.”
Because the timeline is so long, Coburn said, towns need a “pipeline” of housing projects at different stages of development.
“You do not want to do what Truro did, which is take 10 years to build 16 units at Sally’s Way, finish in 2013, and then be starting from scratch on the next project,” he said. “Now it’s 11 years later, and Truro hasn’t opened the door on a single new rental unit” that is affordable for lower-income people.
