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Realizing a New Vision for Housing through Progress at Gile hill by rigel cable

ecently, Money magazine awarded Hanover, New Hampshire, second place on its 2007 Best Places to Live list. They aren’t the only ones who have been drawn to the quaint, yet worldly atmosphere of this rural New England college town. With Dartmouth College right in the center of things, the internationally-recognized Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in neighboring Lebanon, and an ever-broadening base of jobs clustered around the two towns, it is easy to see why the population in this area continues to grow at a tremendous rate.

Despite this recent period of great population growth, new housing construction within the core towns of the area has not kept pace. According to a recent study by the Upper Valley Housing Coalition, between 1990 and 2000, a gap of 3,000 units arose between the supply of and the demand for housing in the region. During this time, the median income for Upper Valley residents increased by less than half the rate of the median housing cost. Therefore, many people are not only having trouble finding places to live, but they also are not making enough money to pay for what is available.

These two interconnected problems, insufficient supply of housing units and the steep cost of housing in the Hanover and Lebanon area, leave many people with no choice but to commute longer distances to their workplaces. Len Cadwallader, Executive Director of Vital Communities, asserts that many of the people who work in the core areas of the Upper Valley are living farther and farther away, dealing every day with commutes of an hour or more. Currently, much of the workforce in Hanover and Lebanon live in towns and cities 30 miles or more away from their jobs. This has a broad impact on the overall quality of life in the area, with various implications from traffic and environmental degradation, to sprawl and the socio-economic stratification of communities.

This is why Twin Pines Housing Trust, a private, not-for-profit corporation, and their for-profit partner, The Hartland Group Developers and Consultants, are spearheading a broad effort to build housing that is not only affordable for a wide range of families, but is also located only minutes from the major regional employers. With construction managers Trumbull-Nelson, these organizations are creating a very different kind of housing development on a portion of the former “Gile Tract” in Hanover, next to Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center. They hope this new project will be the first of many initiatives that aim to address the housing crisis in the Upper Valley.

“Right now, more and more workers can no longer participate in the towns they live in or work in because of long commutes,” says Bruce Pacht, executive director of Twin Pines. To find solutions, Pacht suggests, we need to rethink the rules and regulations we’ve put in place to preserve our image of the New England village that lives in our memories. “Our nostalgic vision of a village is a place where everyone lives, where the banker’s kids walked to school with the blacksmith’s kids and you knew the boys cutting across your yard to get to school on time,” comments Pacht. Instead, he continues, we’ve dispersed houses around the countryside, turned our backs on the natural features we claim to love, and forced the cost of land and housing beyond the means of households earning the area’s median wage. According to Pacht and Cadwallader, it will take reflection, creativity, and cooperation to reinstate the underlying core values that make this part of New England a special place to live.

That’s the vision that led Hanover resident Bob Strauss to begin what was to become his brainchild. Starting in 1999, Strauss began his mission to create affordable housing for working families in the Hanover area.
“On Christmas Eve, 1999, my church, St. Thomas, in conjunction with Our Savior Lutheran Church, in Hanover, worked to support an immigrant family from Afghanistan,” Strauss recounts. “In the first year, we moved the family three or four times—there just wasn’t an affordable place for them to live. Eventually, Lebanon took on the burden of finding a place for the family to live in Romano Circle in West Lebanon, with special education, including English as a Second Language, for the three daughters. We were very grateful to Lebanon for taking this on, but it made me realize how badly Hanover needed available affordable housing.”

From then on, Strauss worked with a core group of Hanover residents to create the Hanover Affordable Housing Commission. The group was officially recognized in 2002, and about a year later, the Town of Hanover voted to donate up to half of the Gile Tract for affordable housing. The name comes from the land on which the housing will be located. In the early 1950s, Dr. John Fowler Gile of Hanover gave a 50-acre plot of land to the town, now divided both to preserve open space and to provide housing. Bringing the vision of affordable housing to life required close cooperation between of the Town of Hanover, Dartmouth College, Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center, and the City of Lebanon, because the entrance to Gile Hill (as the housing development is to be known) crosses land that is owned by, or is under the regulatory supervision of, one or more of these entities.

Since Twin Pines Housing Trust and The Hartland Group formed their development partnership, a great deal of time and energy has been devoted to financing the undertaking. “Closing the financing required cooperation among several diverse funding sources, from private capital to loans,” Pacht explains.

After nearly five years, Gile Hill has progressed into what Dick Jennings, Vice President of Mascoma Savings Bank, considers pioneering territory. With multiple state and federal fund sources, Gile is truly a remarkable achievement. “Gile is a cornerstone project for affordable housing. It’s the first time affordable housing has been done in this way to this scale, putting it on the charts nationally,” he explains.

an artist’s rendering of gile hill

Strauss agrees with Jennings that the project is important for three main reasons. First, it will provide mixed-income housing, not just housing for households with lower incomes. Second, at 120 units it is fairly large in scale, and will be built to “green” building standards. Third, it will be built in close proximity to one of the region’s most affluent communities (Hanover), with great access to jobs.

For these reasons, Gile Hill could become a project of national importance, and is, “Definitely the most important affordable housing project in New England,” according to Greg Kennedy, Senior Vice President of Mascoma Savings Bank.

Pacht, Strauss, and others hope that this will be the first of many affordable housing initiatives to come to fruition in the Upper Valley. “First, though,” says Strauss, “we need to see how this project works out.” Financing for the project recently was concluded, and the single-floor condominiums and apartments will soon be up for sale and available for rent. Sixty percent of the apartments and one fourth of the condominiums will be offered at affordable rates to qualifying households. The rest of the housing will be priced at lower market rates.

“Gile Hill will be a diverse community located within walking distance to the hospital and to shopping, with easy public access to Hanover,” asserts Pacht. With Trumbull-Nelson well underway on site with construction, families should be living at Gile within the next year.

“It’s going to be monumental. It will show that it is possible to create a community with high-quality housing in a healthy environment that’s affordable for families in different income categories,” explains Jennings. Kennedy agrees with him that Gile Hill will be a “wonderful example for New England.”