The town’s Municipal Affordable Housing Trust has received $140,000 to compensate for the loss of an affordable unit at Harvard Green on Lancaster County Road in a 2015 foreclosure auction. The condominium dropped off the state’s subsidized housing inventory, or SHI, after its owner defaulted on a second mortgage and the lender auctioned off the condo—over the objections of the state’s housing agency and the town. The trust will use the money to subsidize an affordable home elsewhere in town or on land that was historically part of Harvard but is now in Devens, MAHT Chair Arielle Jennings told the Press.
The payment concludes a legal action brought by the attorney general’s office on behalf of the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities—formerly the Department of Housing and Community Development—against Digital Credit Union and the condo’s defaulting mortgagor. This brings MAHT funds to $306,638, according to Finance Director Jared Mullane.
Under normal circumstances, affordable units built under the Local Initiative Program—as the Harvard Green condominiums were—are protected by deed riders that preserve the affordability of a unit when it changes hands and are recorded at the Registry of Deeds. But in this case, the additional mortgage apparently clouded the original affordability restriction and the foreclosure auction spun the condo into the open housing market. Now, the 32-unit Harvard Green development consists of seven, instead of eight, affordable homes.
According to the recently updated SHI, Harvard’s percentage of affordable homes sits at 4.9% against the state-mandated 10%, the threshold at which a town is allowed to refuse a project under the state’s affordable housing law, 40B. That’s down from the most recent past figures of between 5.2% and 5.8%.
Independent housing consultant and Harvard resident Bonnie Heudorfer told the Press she is pleased the trust is getting funds, but “a town never wants to see an affordable unit lost in this way.” In an email, she added: “That the attorney general went after the lender in this case should send a clear message to everyone involved (homeowners, municipalities, lenders, monitoring agents) that they need to pay attention to these restrictions.”
According to Heudorfer, the loss of this unit was not what caused Harvard’s subsidized housing inventory percentage to drop from 5.2% in 2020 to 4.9% in 2023—the unit has not yet been removed. It was the result of an increase in the number of year-round housing units as recorded by the 2020 census and the fact that a recently completed development on Ayer Road was inadvertently omitted in 2023. When all the affordable homes at the recently built Craftsman Village and Pine Hill Village developments are registered with the state’s housing agency, that will boost inventory.
A moving target
It is common, she said, for affordability percentages to decline after the inventory is updated with new census numbers, as the SHI was in May with 2020 census data. “Virtually every municipality saw a drop in their percentage because the denominator increased,” Heudorfer said. She noted that the town’s latest affordable housing proposal on Old Mill Road, now under review with the Zoning Board of Appeals, will also count toward the town’s 10% goal; of the 24 units, six will be affordable.
Monitoring stocks is complicated
Meanwhile, MAHT Chair Jennings said the trust wants to ensure that the town’s affordable units are monitored closely. She pointed to a goal in the town’s draft update to the 2017 Harvard Housing Production Plan to “Build town staffing capacity, including designated staffing to own affordable housing administration, to monitor, maintain, and pursue affordable housing.” Heudorfer, who is helping the trust update the production plan, added that doing so can be complicated. Several state and contract agencies—determined by the programs under which projects were built—track existing inventory through real estate transactions and the aging out of restrictions, while others manage the lotteries for new units. “Different projects may be governed by different rules; rental properties have their own set of issues,” she said. Heudorfer agreed with Jennings that assigning a staff person at Town Hall to keep track of the town’s affordable homes was a worthy goal.
Town Administrator Tim Bragan responded to a request for comment about the trust’s goal for Town Hall to more carefully monitor affordable inventory with a statement: “The town endeavors to assist MAHT in its mission and we in the Select Board office work closely with the state’s housing people whenever an affordable unit comes up for sale to make sure it stays on the affordable roster. Hopefully, the Governor’s housing initiative will assist in this area and help streamline the monitoring process.” According to an Oct. 10 article by Michael P. Norton of the State House News Service, the Healey administration is considering more than 20 policy changes to address a statewide shortage of homes for first-time buyers and for older and low-income people.
