At its June 18 meeting, the Planning Board unanimously voted to reject a citizen petition that would require proposed senior housing on the Hildreth property to include affordable units. The petition, championed by Paul Green of Old Littleton Road, will be voted on at the next town meeting.
This will not be the petition’s first town meeting; the Planning Board first rejected the proposal to require 25 percent of Housing@Hildreth units to be affordable in February. At the Annual Town Meeting in May, voters sent the petition back to the Planning Board, encouraging Green to work with the board to find a solution they could agree on.
Green and the Planning Board have been unable to agree on the issue due to different basic priorities for the Hildreth development. Green believes that the town has a “moral responsibility to provide better housing diversity,” he said, and that the Hildreth project should help Harvard reach its affordable housing goal. According to Planning Board member Fran Nickerson, the goals of the project are to provide housing into which current Harvard seniors can downsize and to help pay for proposed expansion at Hildreth House, the town’s senior center. The Planning Board has repeatedly voted against Green’s proposal on the grounds that including affordable units will likely drive up the cost of the market-rate units and endanger the overall financial viability of the plan.
Green disagrees, and he produced a set of numbers based on official estimates from the Housing@Hildreth Committee outlining a scenario in which the units could be included with minimal impact to the project’s finances. However, Green’s plan required the commitment of Community Preservation funds to subsidize the affordable units, and, according to Planning Board member Rich Maiore, “There are about a hundred projects competing for that pot of money.”
Planning Board members said they would not support the plan until Green produces a source of additional funds to subsidize the affordable units. Green stated his intention to do just that, in addition to presenting his plan to the citizens at the next town meeting.
