A former nursing home in Northampton, Massachusetts, has been an eyesore for locals since it closed over a decade ago. It’ll soon to be home to up to 60 families with construction getting under way.
For the past few years, the Northampton Rehabilitation and Nursing Center has sat vacant. The large campus off Bridge Road dates to 1967 and was once permitted to offer 160 beds, according to Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra.
The facility fell into foreclosure in 2012 and was dormant before plans to convert the structure materialized about three years ago.
Fast forward to Wednesday, when Sciarra and other officials gathered to mark construction by Valley Community Development Corporation beginning.
“We desperately need all kinds of housing … in Northampton, across the Commonwealth, across the country, but I feel like family housing is really crucial,” she told WAMC Wednesday. “We know how hard it is for people to be able to purchase homes in Northampton, to be able to afford rental homes in Northampton and we, like other communities across the Commonwealth, are struggling with bringing families into our community and having them be able to afford it, and we know how important that is for a vitality of any city, right? You need to always be bringing in new families.”
The Prospect Place project aims to convert the facility into 60 affordable family housing units, according to the CDC.
The property was purchased from a mortgage holder around 2021, with its site plan being approved a year later and asbestos abatement work starting soon after that.
Valley CDC Executive Director Alexis Breiteneicher tells WAMC the project's almost $30 million price tag makes use of at least 19 funding sources.
That includes nearly a million dollars from the city via Community Preservation Act Funds and $2.5 million in grants from the Department of Energy Resources’s Moderate & Low Income Decarbonization Program as well as the MassHousing Climate Ready Homes Program.
“We're under construction right now, and construction should last somewhere between 12 and 16 months,” Breiteneicher said. “And, then once construction is nearing the end, is when we'll open the lottery, so folks can apply to become tenants here, and we hope to have folks start moving in sometime in the late fall,, early winter of 2025.”
She says considering how long it takes for projects to move forward when it comes to affordable housing projects, things have been going "lightning quick" for the planned rental units.
“We're super excited to have multiple tiers of affordability within this building, so folks from 30 percent of the area median income, all the way up to 100 percent of the area median income,” the executive director told WAMC. “We have housing subsidies tied in with the number of those units, trying to make it affordable. The other thing that's been happening in a lot of communities, particularly in Western Mass, is a decline in population, so younger families cannot afford to live here. So, that's part of the reason why we felt like building affordable family housing was just so critical.”
Powering heating systems in the winter and air conditioning in the summer will be both a solar array on the roof as well as a geothermal system.
Rebecca Tepper, Secretary of the state's Executive Office of Energy & Environmental Affairs, says retrofitting older structures and housing like Prospect Place is a major component of the state's plans to reach net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 — hence the millions in support via the state's decarbonization program.
"One of our biggest emitters of greenhouse gas emissions is our building sector,” Tepper told reporters at the groundbreaking. “So, in order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we have to address not only new housing, but also existing housing, and that's why it's so important to do big retrofits … because most of the buildings that are existing today will be here in 2050.”
Officials got a look of the long corridors and spots where individual units will go up on tours afterward.
Having visited a year prior, Housing Secretary Ed Augustus told reporters getting family-specific housing done in Massachusetts is not an easy task.
He praised the developer and Northampton for taking the family unit route when other types tend to pose less of a challenge.
“Sometimes seniors are less challenging - to do a senior development - because they're often not seen as causing costs to schools or other resources,” he explained. “Families - not every community is as welcoming as Northampton is, and a lot of credit to them, that they recognize that that's an important part of the housing ecosystem, [to] have affordable places for families here.”
Earlier in the ceremony, he noted that the massive, $5 billion housing bond bill signed by Governor Maura Healey had items directly supporting community development corporations like Valley CDC.
That included making permanent the Community Investment Tax Credit – a tax credit program CDCs make extensive use of – while expanding the cap from $12 million to $15 million.
