How do you explain a landmark affordable housing initiative in only about 1,000 words?

How do you make a largely affluent, Ivy League community understand what it is like to spend up to half your monthly income—or more—trying desperately to keep a roof over your kids’ heads with virtually no hope of ever having a place you can call your own?

How do you get this community to appreciate that a clustered, affordable-home community for people of mixed incomes will benefit not just those who live in it, but also the economic, environmental, and social well being of the entire Upper Valley region?

Spreading that gospel is one of the roles of Len Cadwallader, executive director of Vital Communities, a regional nonprofit organization that advocates for the development of affordable housing in the Upper Valley. Listen as he explains how the Gile Community Housing Project, which is developing a neighborhood of 120 much-needed housing “units” in Hanover for people in a wide range of economic situations, is a win-win proposition.

Many people are forced to commute 30, 40, & 50 miles to work in the Upper Valley.

“Why does it matter?” Cadwallader asks rhetorically. “It matters on a lot of levels. It makes economic sense to get people living closer to where the jobs are. If the lowest-income-earning people have the longest commutes, it’s an indirect and unfair tax burden on them to expect them to pay for all that commuting. Every single business owner knows in his or her gut that this is an issue that needs to be addressed because if we don’t address the housing crunch we’ve lost the game for a healthy economy in this area. Businesses that can’t find workers will move elsewhere.”

And yet it’s more than that, according to Cadwallader.

“You want good, compassionate people taking care of you at the hospital, or at the reference desk at the library, or coaching your kids in Little League and basketball. Not all of them are doctors or lawyers who can afford to live here,” Cadwallader says. “The bottom line is, you want good people who aren’t earning a lot of money able to live close to where the jobs are, and the jobs are in Lebanon and Hanover.”

He’s right. The jobs are there. And affordable housing, to an alarming extent, isn’t.

$500,000
is the median price of
a house in Hanover.

According to Anne Duncan Cooley, executive director of the Upper Valley Housing Coalition, affordable housing means paying 30 percent or less of your income on housing. That means a family making less than $70,000 a year shouldn’t spend more than $170,000 on a home. With the median price for a house in Hanover around $500,000 and the median condominium around $300,000, many people are forced to commute 30, 40, and 50 miles to work at Dartmouth College, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, and other employers in the immediate area.

“We did a study in 2001 that said we are 3,000 (housing) units short,” says Duncan Cooley. “I don’t know if that has gone up, but I can pretty confidently say there’s a significant gap between the need and what’s been built since then.”

Three housing development projects in three different communities are at different stages of addressing that need. The Grange project in Woodstock, the “Agway” initiative in Norwich, and Gile in Hanover are all meant to allow more people who work in the heart of the Upper Valley to live there.

The Gile Community may well be the first to break ground, as early as late this winter or next spring. It will consist of a cluster of about 15 one, two- and three-bedroom apartments, townhouses, and condominiums (most will be two-bedroom) situated on a 22-acre parcel of land off the north access road to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center on the Hanover–Lebanon line. Half of the units will be rental; half will be for sale. Some will be sold at “market rate,” allowing others to be priced according to income level. The hope is to have some of the units available by the spring of 2008.

According to Bruce Pacht, executive director of the Twin Pines Housing Trust, the nonprofit organization that is co-developing Gile and that will manage it, the project not only addresses a need, but does so in an environmentally and socially responsible manner. The other co-developer is the Burlington based Hartland Group.

“Our idea is to create a community,” Pacht says. “A community of people with mixed incomes living in different situations. Single families. People with children. People without children.

“It’s near shopping and everything else and is on a public bus line. This is the way communities, I think, are going to need to be built in the future. There isn’t enough land for everybody to own a big house on 10 acres. We are going to have to learn to live a little closer together and figure out how to do that in an appropriate and dignified way that respects the environment. We think (the Gile Community) will do that.”

Affordable housing means spending 30% or less on housing

Duncan Cooley is excited by what a visit to the site, preliminary drawings, and a little imagination tell her about what Gile will look like when the two-and-a-half-year building schedule is completed.

“There are a lot of big rocks and trees on the property,” she says. “What they have tried hard to do is to keep that nice environment and site the houses around it. So it’s not going to be a development where every tree gets cut down and everything is leveled out. It won’t be cookie cutter, but will be tailored to the site. When you walk around it you’ll notice that.
“You don’t have to do a lot of landscaping because the landscaping is already there,” she continued. “It’s going to seem like a neighborhood that has been there for a while.”

A mixed income neighborhood that defeats all the stereotypes of “affordable housing,” Gile will be the first of its kind not only in the Upper Valley, but in the entire region.

“You don’t have to stand by the side of I-91 to realize that there’s an awful lot of people commuting into this job core,” says Cadwallader. “That’s a market force that needs a place to live.

“By taking the pieces of public land or land that has been overlooked by the private market and thinking about how they can be utilized to the benefit of the entire community, we can protect that and build affordable housing. The Gile Community is a perfect example.”