Push-back to affordable housing plan

The traditional wood clapboards, wrap-around front porches and narrow, peaked roofs in the proposed Palmer Pointe affordable-housing project in Barrington haven’t eased neighborhood concerns about the development.
Like the 47-unit Sweetbriar subdivision completed three year ago, Palmer Point has stoked fears of urbanization and more traffic in one of the state’s premier bedroom communities.
A petition opposing the project was signed by 517 residents and circulated along with a letter titled “NIMBY,” referencing the often disdainful acronym Not In My Backyard attached to such efforts, outlining local fears about the development.
“There is a prospect, for all abutting landowners on both sides of the [proposed site], of waking up one morning knowing that within the mere distance of town-imposed setbacks they now have 195 new neighbors, with cars,” the letter, signed by the Community Opposed to Development 02806, warned in one of 12 bullet points.
Attempts to build affordable housing in wealthy suburbs bring controversy and court legal fights across the state and country, but in Rhode Island, no community has resisted the concept quite like Barrington.
When Sweetbrier was proposed, opponents appealed the project to the state Supreme Court.
Last year, as residents braced for developers to unveil their Palmer Pointe plan, town officials discussed organizing an East Bay revolt against the state’s affordable-housing law.
Like Sweetbrier, Palmer Pointe is possible because of the 2004 Low and Moderate Income Housing Act, which gives deed-restricted, government-subsidized, affordable developments a way around local zoning restrictions.
The law targets communities where less than 10 percent of all homes qualify as affordable and Barrington’s 2.5 percent affordability puts it firmly in that category.
Town planners looking to raise that number identified the 9-acre Sowams Road site of Palmer Pointe, now home to a plant nursery owned by Joseph and Maria Silveira, as an appropriate place to build.
But even though the affordable-housing law gives Palmer Pointe a permitting advantage over other proposals for apartments in the suburbs, the project’s developers are trying to design the complex in way that will make the community embrace population density. Pleased with the outcome of Sweetbrier, the East Bay Community Development Corp. has teamed up with the architects at Providence-based Union Studio again for Palmer Pointe.
“It is an attempt to take multifamily and render it to a scale sympathetic to single-family residents and make a sense of community with more common space,” said Union Studio architect Donald Powers.
If approved as planned, Palmer Pointe would include 48 apartments of different sizes arranged within 14 “town houses” designed to look like a larger number of smaller, unattached single-family houses. (The project would also include two detached single-family houses built on the site of existing homes that would be torn down.)
The layout, with the buildings sited around a loop road off Sowams, while similar to Sweetbrier, includes a conscious effort to further break up the structures and avoid a row-house look.
“It has more and varied common space instead of one central common,” Powers said. “The unit styles are less uniform, more rambling and smaller scale. In a nutshell, it is similar to the little parts of traditional architecture without playing tricky, architecture games.”
Of the 48 apartments, there will be 12 one-bedrooms, 23 two-bedrooms and 13 three-bedrooms.
Following federal affordability guidelines, the apartments will be open to families making 60 percent of the area median income, which is $31,800 for an individual and $45,360 for a family of four.
Rents are $778 per month for one-bedrooms, $881 per month for two-bedrooms and $922 for three-bedrooms.
On opposition to the project, Powers said he expects it might be even more vigorous than Sweetbrier.
“You can’t blame people who are scared because over the last 50 years development hasn’t been done right and has only hurt people’s quality of life,” Powers said. “I am more frustrated that the people who support affordable housing have not been more vocal. Barrington is not unique. It is on the far side of the [anti-development] spectrum, but it is difficult for any town.” William LeMoult, a Hampden Street resident and member of the Community Opposed to Development 02806, declined to discuss the project over the phone, referring to the group’s published materials on the matter.
Among the group’s strongest objections are additional traffic, the strain on town services, the potential bankruptcy of East Bay Community Development, a surplus of available houses on the market and taxpayer subsidies.
Frank Spinella, a development consultant working for East Bay Community Development, said he expects to seek a similar package of financial supports, as he did for Sweetbriar.
Those include approximately $12 million in affordable-housing tax credits and an agreement with the town to pay 8 percent of the gross income from the development instead of property taxes.
Construction of the project is estimated to cost $14 million and East Bay Community Development has an agreement to buy the land from the Silveiras, but the terms have not been disclosed.
“Residents who have lived next to an open field or farm prefer no change and I understand that,” Spinella said of the opposition.
Spinella said he hopes to submit the application for a comprehensive affordable-housing permit this month for a first appearance before the Barrington Planning Board in April. If all goes well, the project could start construction in the summer of 2014 and be occupied by 2015.
In 2005, a proposal called Osprey Landing would have put nine conventional single-family houses on 25,000-square-foot lots on the same piece of Silveira property, but was rejected by the Barrington Planning Board because the shape of the lots and roadway didn’t meet design guidelines.
Asked whether it was an aversion to affordable housing or just more construction that draws opposition in Barrington, Town Planner Philip Hervey said it is “density” that is unpopular. •

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