Affordable Housing Trust buys one parcel, rejects another
Harvard’s Municipal Affordable Housing Trust has purchased—for about $1.1 million—a 28-acre property at 166 Littleton Road, with plans to create affordable housing there under provisions of the state’s comprehensive permit law, 40B. In the coming months, the trust will solicit bids from private developers based on its guidelines for the layout, appearance, and number of units to be built. By the time the project is complete, trustees say, the private developer will own the land and the trust will have recouped much of its investment. Three existing building lots on the parcel, with frontage on Pinnacle Road, are likely to be sold to defray costs for the affordable units, trustees said at their meeting on Monday.
Guidelines developed last spring call for a total of 15 to 17 ownership units, with five to seven condominiums to be created in the existing circa 1878 farmhouse, and up to five buildings to be constructed elsewhere on the site. The farmhouse served as the town’s so-called Poor Farm in the 19th century.
Twenty-five percent of the project will be sold at state-sanctioned affordable rates, the remainder at market price. Engineering studies for the site are currently scheduled to begin on Sept. 20.
Also this week, trust chairman Bruce Nickerson confirmed that the trust has decided against buying a 15-acre property abutting Doe Orchards, near the Ayer town line. “We have concluded that the property on Ayer Road would not support the kind of development that we had initially envisioned,” he said in an email to the Press. Up to 50 rental apartments had been considered for the site. A treasurer’s report at the trust’s Monday meeting showed that a deposit on the parcel was refunded to the trust.
The Harvard Municipal Affordable Trust is a quasi-governmental body that was created by Town Meeting under the provisions of the Community Preservation Act. It is funded largely through a surcharge on the real estate tax levy and is allowed to buy, sell, and manage real estate on behalf of the town, but is not subject to open bidding and certain other public interest laws that govern municipalities in real estate and development projects.
