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Provincetown Housing Authority

    CERTIFIED

    Eastham Takes on the Housing Management Problem

    Seven units owned by the affordable housing trust will be managed by town staff

    By

    EASTHAM — Last July, the Eastham Affordable Housing Trust’s housing management contract with the nonprofit Community Development Partnership (CDP) expired, and the trust didn’t renew it. Instead, it decided to have town staff manage its seven properties alongside the six town-owned units that Eastham already managed.

    4 Stellwagen Way is one of the properties owned by the Eastham Affordable Housing Trust and managed by the town of Eastham. (Photo by Olivia Oldham)

    Jay Coburn, CEO of the CDP, and Jacqui Beebe, Eastham’s town administrator, had different assessments of the wisdom of that change.

    “Property management in general is a problem,” Coburn said. “If you mess it up, you risk losing the tax credit, and that’s a disaster.”

    Town staff “were concerned there wasn’t a lot of capital improvement being done,” Beebe said. The properties required more maintenance than they were receiving, she added.

    The CDP had been managing the trust’s properties since 2013. The decision not to renew the contract came after the town hired a housing coordinator, Rachel Butler, in December 2021. She was qualified to perform the same management functions that the CDP had been contracted for.

    Management of affordable and income-restricted units has spurred debate on the Outer Cape before.

    The question of who was responsible for checking on Wellfleet’s income-restricted accessory dwelling units flummoxed town staff last year when a year-round tenant was evicted by new owners who listed the main house as a short-term rental and took the ADU for themselves.

    Wellfleet’s income-restricted ADUs had been monitored by the CDP until another contract changed; afterwards, Wellfleet’s assistant town administrator and building commissioner each said the other was in charge.

    In Provincetown, the management contract for the 26 market-rate rentals at the Harbor Hill complex will soon be put out to bid again — but not before a separate request for proposals is issued to see if any property management companies want to buy the complex outright.

    “We spend a lot of time talking about building affordable housing, but we don’t pay a lot of attention to the management of it,” said Kristin Hatch, executive director of the Provincetown Housing Authority. As towns create more housing, they must assess the benefits of management by nonprofits, private companies, or in-house staff, she said.

    ‘The Queen of Management’

    Eastham’s changeover is resource-efficient and will improve the quality of the housing, according to Beebe and Eastham Affordable Housing Trust chair Carolyn McPherson.

    But a CDP director said it could create more work than the town can handle.

    “I generally encourage towns to not own and manage their own properties,” said Paul Ruchinskas, treasurer of CDP’s board and former affordable housing specialist at the Cape Cod Commission. “Typically, towns don’t have the capacity to do it.”

    Finding property managers who can do income certification is particularly difficult, Ruchinskas said.

    It’s “the toughest skill set to find,” and if there is turnover in the role, finding a replacement “will be one of the hardest challenges for the town over the long haul,” he said.

    Before coming to Eastham, Butler was a property manager for 12 years at Community Housing Resource, an affordable housing developer based in Provincetown.

    She was “the queen of management,” said Hatch — a “known commodity” and an asset to the region’s housing efforts.

    In Eastham, Butler is currently in charge of relatively few units — six owned by the town, including two that were bought in 2022, and seven owned by the trust.

    “She managed many more units than that for Community Housing Resource,” Hatch said.

    Hatch is the sole property manager for the Provincetown Housing Authority (alongside a maintenance technician and an administrative assistant), which has 46 units; she also administers 26 state vouchers.

    Ruchinskas acknowledged that the small number of units will make it easier for Butler to manage the properties. “The fact that it’s all located in Eastham just makes it a heck of a lot easier to deal with,” he said.

    Out to Bid

    Ruchinskas also said that for towns to maintain or improve their housing they must go through a procurement process outlined by Massachusetts’s Chapter 30B, which states that all town contracts must be offered for bidding by different vendors to guarantee fairness.

    That process is “cumbersome,” said Coburn, and CDP already has two maintenance technicians on staff.

    Larger improvement projects will be subject to 30B, Beebe agreed — though she said that would still be the case if a nonprofit were managing the units.

    Any town-owned property is subject to 30B, Beebe said, since “it is still a public asset.”

    Eastham also has facilities and maintenance workers in its DPW. They can supply day-to-day services, from fixing broken amenities to “something very simple, like plunging a toilet,” Butler said, and the town doesn’t have to bid out such urgent repairs.

    In years to come, the larger housing projects at the T-Time, Town Center Plaza, and Council on Aging parcels will likely be managed by their developers, McPherson said.

    Beyond those projects, Eastham has also endorsed a “scattered site” approach to affordable housing, seizing the opportunity to purchase individual units when they become available, Beebe said.

    The scattered site approach was challenging for CDP’s technicians, who “spend 40 percent of their time driving,” according to Coburn.

    Projects like the Village at Nauset Green, a 65-unit complex managed by the multi-state developer Pennrose, are easier to manage because the units are close together and nearly identical, Coburn said.

    News Editor Paul Benson contributed reporting.

    CIVICS

    Cold Hands, Warm Hearts at Town Meeting

    Provincetown voters gets things done with unusual speed and harmony

    By

    PtwnTM
    On Monday, Sept. 21, 265 Provincetown voters gathered on a chilly late afternoon for a Covid-safe, socially distanced outdoor annual town meeting. (Photo Paul Benson)

    PROVINCETOWN — The long-delayed annual town meeting moved at a brisk pace on Monday, Sept. 21, with the chilly weather perhaps encouraging voters gathered in the parking lot at St. Peter the Apostle Church to reach a consensus.

    The meeting was completed in just under two hours — an achievement for any Cape town, and especially one as prone to contentious debate as Provincetown, where meetings have commonly stretched to two and even three consecutive evenings. The meeting was also remarkable for the level of agreement, with no more than a scattering of “no” votes for any of the articles.

    Article 8, concerning the Gosnold Street dune project, was approved with little discussion, and Article 9, a series of Community Preservation Act grants, including a land acquisition for senior housing at Maushope, was approved quickly as well. The grant of $425,000 will allow the Provincetown Housing Authority to expand its affordable senior housing efforts, according to PHA Director Kristin Hatch, who is seeking to add 10 to 15 units of supportive senior housing on the site.

    Article 11, a $595,000 bond payment for the debt used to acquire Harbor Hill, provoked the longest discussion, beginning with presentations from Nathan Butera of the Year-Round Market-Rate Rental Housing Trust and select board member Louise Venden. Butera’s report included information on the current tenancy of the project — 50 people, including eight children, with the 28th and final unit scheduled to be occupied on Oct. 1 — and on the trust’s efforts to pursue a broad range of financing, ownership, and management arrangements.

    The project is currently in the third year of a three-year management contract with the Community Development Partnership in Eastham. A capital needs assessment identified $800,000 worth of maintenance that ought to be done in the next five years, and the trust is studying whether outside capital can be involved in the project.

    Eight people rose to speak on Article 11, raising questions about the cost structure, and arguing for and against town involvement in middle-class housing.

    A tenant in the building, Jaime de Sousa, was last to speak. “As a resident of Harbor Hill, I encourage folks to support this article and also future articles that have to do with affordable and market-rate housing,” he said. “Studies have shown that as housing availability declines, my entire age bracket is projected to decline. To secure the longevity of Provincetown as we know it, it’s important to have housing for all.”

    A series of church bells rang out in heavy tones while de Sousa spoke. The somber tones seemed to have a settling effect — the vote was called immediately after, and the article passed with fewer than 10 votes against it.

    Article 13 appropriated $12,600 to hire an indigenous peoples consultant, who will help develop at least one public art project and study other forms of representation. Article 14 banned plastic water bottles under one gallon, and Article 15 set the town’s zero-emissions goal into town bylaws. Fewer than 10 people voted against Article 14, and no one voted against 13 or 15.

    Another interesting development at this town meeting was the debut of a group called Four Hundred Plus. On at least three articles, speakers began their public statements with “I stand in solidarity with Four Hundred Plus, an intersectional and intergenerational, queer and allied collective of seasonal, transient, and permanent residents.” Carolyn Clough advocated for Harbor Hill with this identifier, and other speakers rose for the indigenous memorial project and for the zero-emissions bylaw.

    “We started meeting in June, and we’re meeting every Tuesday night at the Provincetown Brewing Co.,” Clough told the Independent. “We’re a collective that’s sick of racism, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia. Instead of celebrating the Pilgrims taking this land, we want to see a new era. We did the Black Lives Matter chalking all over town on Labor Day, and we met on the Sunday before town meeting to go over the articles and see where we wanted to speak.”

    Organized public comments may not be entirely new for Provincetown, but they’re not typical. Town meetings are always a disparate collection of subjects, initiatives, and budgetary housekeeping — and for one to be this short and generally sweet was quite the September surprise.

    TOWN MEETING PREVIEW

    Warrant Articles on Housing and Flood Prevention Face Voters

    Funds for Harbor Hill and Ryder Street dune to be considered

    By

    PROVINCETOWN — Like much of the summer season this year, town meeting in Provincetown is going to arrive later, leaner, and al fresco. Originally scheduled for early April, at the height of the pandemic, it was moved to Monday, Sept. 21, at 5 p.m. and outdoors, to the St. Peter the Apostle Catholic Church parking lot at 11 Prince St. The warrant has been trimmed and adjusted to not be overlong. Even so, voters will be asked to consider some noteworthy articles.

    This map shows parking, check-in, and gathering locations for Monday’s annual town meeting.

    Harbor Hill

    If past is prologue, then the longest discussion will likely be about Article 11, which allocates $595,000 from the general fund for a year’s worth of bond payments for the Harbor Hill market-rate rental housing project.

    In advance of the originally scheduled April town meeting, then-Town Manager Robin Craver argued that the general fund, and not short-term rental tax or marijuana tax receipts, was the right source of money for the bond payments.

    “When people talk about the debt service like it’s a subsidy or an addition, they’re counting it twice,” said Craver. The $10.7 million that the town voted in 2017 was a debt authorization, not an expenditure of cash, said Craver. “That $595,000 is your mortgage payment. It’s not like you’re throwing $595,000 to the wind. You’re investing in a property, and at any point you’ll be able to sell it.”

    There are 28 apartments at Harbor Hill; 25 are currently rented. The Year-Round Market Rate Rental Housing Trust hired two outside experts this year, one to do a capital needs assessment on the buildings, and one to do a financial viability analysis on the project overall.

    The capital needs assessment identified $1.7 million worth of work that is needed over the next 20 years, about 50 percent of it in the next five years, according to the report. The financial viability analysis is just getting underway. It is supposed to assess management costs, maintenance costs, and the potential for other sources of public or private money.

    “We have a broader set of housing needs than just Harbor Hill,” said select board member Louise Venden. “We need to not just think that as long as we can fund Harbor Hill, everything will be OK. If you look at the range of people whose housing needs are not being met — we need to be more careful about how we spend the town’s money.”

    Ryder Street Dune

    Article 8 is a step toward the construction of a man-made dune designed to stop seawater from flooding the center of town via Gosnold Street. In January 2018, a nor’easter pushed a swell of seawater into Provincetown Harbor that, at high tide, flowed over the beach and into downtown. Numerous homes and businesses suffered damage, especially along Bradford Street near town hall.

    The Ryder Street beach without a barrier dune in October 2019. (Photo Paul Benson)

    Conservation Agent Tim Famulare expects the Ryder Street dune project to be mostly funded by state and federal grant money, but that process, while cheaper, can be extremely complex.

    Article 8 authorizes the town to acquire access rights across the beach-facing end of several properties, because the town’s permanent right to access and maintain the dune is a prerequisite for the grants. The article directs the select board to negotiate for the access privileges (or easements) with the landowners and to take them by eminent domain if necessary.

    If eminent domain were used, an assessor or a court would decide the fair compensation to be paid to the land owners. The flood-protection value of the dune could be balanced against any harm to the land owners’ other interests, however. The assessor was still developing formal cost estimates at press time, but they should be available later this week, said Famulare.

    Senior Housing at Maushope

    Buried within Article 9 is funding to acquire land for supportive senior housing. The Provincetown Housing Authority (PHA) runs the Maushope building off Harry Kemp Way, which includes 24 state-subsidized apartments for seniors and people with disabilities. Article 9 includes a grant of $425,000 from community preservation funds for an adjacent parcel of land, where the PHA hopes to build 10 to 15 new units.

    “Supportive housing means there’s laundry services, cleaning services — maybe there’s a common kitchen and somebody comes and cooks dinner,” said Kristin Hatch, director of the PHA. “It’s people who aren’t so sick they need a nursing home, maybe aren’t rich enough for assisted living. It’s been shown there’s better health outcomes when there are more people around, checking in.

    “We see the need here for affordable housing for seniors,” continued Hatch. “We’re a small, state-chartered agency, but there’s a lot of state-level expertise we can draw on to put this project together and find the funding streams.” Affordable housing typically involves combining state and federal grant money, tax credits, financing, and rental revenue streams, which collectively cover the cost of the project. Getting the right parcel at the right price is the first hurdle.

    “It’s all theoretical until you actually have the land to develop,” said Hatch.

    Indigenous Monuments Expert

    Plans for a memorial to the Wampanoag people bogged down in 2019, and select board member Lise King advocated for the town to contract with a specialist in indigenous representation and public art. Article 13 allocates $12,600 for that purpose. The specialist would evaluate possible locations, artists, and budgets, and report back with at least one public art proposal for the town to consider.

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