EASTHAM — It has been five years since the town bought the 11-acre T-Time property for housing and commercial development. During that time, a nine-person committee spent four years gathering community input and developing recommendations for the site with help from outside consultants. But it may be another decade before any of those plans are realized.

Meanwhile, the town’s affordable housing inventory has been shrinking. According to recent data from the state Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities, 3.7 percent of the housing units in Eastham are affordable, far short of the state’s goal of 10 percent. That number is down from the 4.5 percent reported in 2020.

It’s the question of wastewater that’s slowing progress on the housing front, according to Town Manager Jacqui Beebe.

In a presentation to the select board on July 22, Beebe described the need to get the town’s wastewater management plans underway for the entire North Eastham Village Center Master Plan — a project that would turn a chunk of North Eastham into a walkable village center — before developers can propose appropriate housing at the T-Time site.

The timeline Beebe presented at the meeting foresees the completion of a municipal sewer by 2029 and includes plans for three sets of apartments to be completed between 2032 and 2035.

“I know there is a desire to see the housing part move along faster, but we can’t do that until we get wastewater going,” Beebe told the Independent.

The North Eastham Master Plan encompasses several large infrastructure projects that include redeveloping three sites for housing, creating a commercial and community town center, and building a centralized wastewater treatment system for all of it plus a new “Main Street” roadway from Brackett Road to the T-Time property — a project being developed by Environmental Partners Group.

The plan’s beginnings came when the town purchased the former T-Time driving range for $1.6 million in 2019. Two years later, the town purchased the 3.5-acre Town Center Plaza and soon after that began evaluating the former Council on Aging property at 1405 Nauset Road for additional housing.

Housing is part of the vision at each location, with 40 units suggested for T-Time, 30 units at the Town Center Plaza, and 12 at the former COA. A 25,000-square-foot community center as well as retail space, community gardens, bike and pedestrian trails, a playground, and — if survey dreams are included, possibly even a municipal swimming pool — are on the list for the T-Time site.

Eastham’s 2021 housing production plan identified an affordable housing shortage of 575 units, including 380 ownership units and 195 rental units — a total that’s seven times the number the North Eastham Master Plan would provide.

“These are units that were needed a year or two ago when the housing production plan was done,” said Jay Coburn, CEO of the Community Development Partnership. “What is the town’s plan for providing the housing that is needed now? Will there be anybody left living year-round in Eastham or on the Outer Cape by 2035?”

There’s a long way to go on the wastewater plan. The town voted in 2023 to allocate $6 million for design and engineering to bring sewerage along the Route 6 corridor in North Eastham as well as to Salt Pond to the south. A joint plan with Orleans for centralized treatment for properties in South Eastham is also underway.

Design and engineering have been progressing for a year, Beebe said, and funding for wastewater treatment construction will likely come before voters next spring. But Beebe would not name a price for that work, citing the wide range of costs the project could incur. According to the executive summary of the Targeted Watershed Management Plan, estimates of the cost of the system’s construction, including a contingency, range from $107 million to $132 million.

Beebe noted that there are many external funding sources for municipal wastewater treatment projects, including zero-percent-interest loans from the state’s revolving fund as well as a 25-percent subsidy from the Cape Cod and Islands Water Protection Fund. Still, she said, an estimated 50 percent of the funding could come from the tax levy.

Construction on wastewater would then begin in 2026 and go through 2029, the timeline showed.

Once funding for wastewater is secured, “only then could we even think about releasing a housing RFP,” Beebe told the board. Beebe cited Wellfleet’s affordable housing project at 95 Lawrence Road, which won state funding only after it secured funding for a wastewater treatment facility there.

The Lawrence Road project is being overseen by the Community Development Partnership and Cambridge-based Preservation of Affordable Housing. The CDP’s Coburn agreed that housing hinges on wastewater. “In order to build housing at the scale we need it and in a manner that is financially sustainable, there has got to be density,” he said. “Density requires there to be wastewater treatment.”

But, he added, “You kind of need to walk and chew gum at the same time.”

According to Beebe’s master plan timeline, a request for proposals at T-Time and Town Center Plaza will be issued in 2026.

The town could build housing at T-Time without investing in wastewater management, Beebe said, but that would drastically reduce the number of units that could be built.

Another reason why Beebe has spread out the timeline of the project is to spread out the funding requests to be brought before voters each year. The town is still paying off the debt from installing its municipal water system, a 10-year project that asked for a total of $130 million from voters in 2014 and 2015.

“We are still paying for water, so we have to pace the beginning of our funding plans with the reduction of our water debt,” Beebe said.

The town is also contracting help from Brovitz Community Planning and Dodson & Flinker Landscape Architecture & Planning for a zoning overhaul that would allow for higher density housing and commercial property in the new village center. Zoning amendments could come before voters in the spring.

Depending on the votes on wastewater and zoning, a lot is subject to change, Beebe said. So, although the T-Time Development Committee worked for four years to put together the draft plan it presented in March 2023, which included housing type and density, none of that is set in stone.

Instead, a decade after the T-Time purchase, that committee’s effort would be revisited: “Once we have our ducks in a row in terms of wastewater,” Beebe said, “then we can go back and look. How many units do we want? What kinds of units do we want? Do want them to be workforce? Do we want them to be affordable?”