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A consummate leader and friend of those in need, Bruce Pacht and the Twin Pines Housing Trust are now tackling the issue of affordable housing in the Upper Valley. By Bruce Wood

ruce Pacht can do a little rough carpentry, but he isn’t a carpenter. Call him a builder who doesn’t build with his hands. Over the course of 31 years, Pacht built United Developmental Services (UDS) from a small agency that helped 17 people with developmental disabilities live productive and meaningful lives into an organization that helped more than 250 disabled individuals and their families each year. Under his guidance, UDS went from nine part-time employees and a $120,000 budget to more than 100 full- and part-time employees and a $7 million budget.

According to Bruce pacht, the goal of tpht is “perpetually affordable housing in the upper valley.”

These days Pacht, 61, is the executive director of Twin Pines Housing Trust (TPHT), the private, not-for-profit, community-based organization whose goal is to help provide and maintain “perpetually affordable housing in the Upper Valley region of Vermont and New Hampshire.” The Gile Community Housing Project, which will bring a neighborhood of around 120 much-needed units of affordable housing to Hanover, is a TPHT project that will be constructed by Trumbull-Nelson.

Pacht has brought with him to TPHT the same principles and unwavering sense of commitment that he brought to UDS.

A 1967 graduate of Dartmouth College, Pacht was born in Newport, Rhode Island, where his father was finishing up a stint in the navy. He was raised in Great Neck, New York, just outside of Queens, and got his first glimpse of the Upper Valley in 1963. “I wanted to be away at a small school and not in a city,” he said. “It was an eight-hour drive up here until the interstates were finished my senior year. Or you had to fly, so it was pretty exotic. I wasn’t a hiker or into the outdoors. I came to get away from what I had known.”

A French major, Pacht was in graduate school at Stanford on a four-year fellowship with the goal of becoming a French professor before the Vietnam War rocked his world. “The war swept us all in a different direction,” he said in his paneled TPHT office in a renovated warehouse in downtown White River Junction. “I’d always been fighting against it, but I got serious when I was in California and met some other people with strong beliefs. I was in serious opposition to the war and then dropped out of school the night that Richard Nixon was inaugurated. That was probably the biggest turning point of my life. If I had stayed there my life would have been completely different.”

Pacht eventually migrated back to Dartmouth where he joined a war protest at the Parkhurst Hall administration building in May 1969, got arrested and spent 26 days in the old Rockingham County jail. Later that spring, he helped develop a commune in nearby Hartland. “It started with six of us putting in money for rent and ended up with as many as 15 of us sharing the house,” he said. “We called ourselves the Wooden Shoe Labor Force. We shoveled snow off roofs. We did gardening. We did itinerant painting. We got the contract to run the Canaan town dump.”

After the Wooden Shoe relocated to Canaan, Pacht was elected to the town planning board and his wife at the time, Carol, was elected to the state legislature.

Pacht left the Wooden Shoe after almost six years and joined UDS, where he applied for a job helping kids with disabilities do things like rough carpentry and ended up as the organization’s executive director. “I’d never been the executive director of anything,” he admitted with a laugh. “And I didn’t know anything about mental retardation. I knew a little about rough carpentry so I thought I could fake my way through that.”

Pacht discovered that he had a talent for managing and building organizations, and that the time was ripe for UDS, which grew rapidly. “It wasn’t my entrepreneurial gift or anything that made it happen,” he says (though many would surely disagree). “During this period of time from 1976 to 2006 there was a revolution in the way we thought about people with mental retardation. It was really a civil rights movement. During the 1980s the New Hampshire legislature appropriated a huge amount of money in response to being sued. The law of the land was behind us, and it was fun to be on that wave.”

The winner of the 2006 Co-op Food Stores Allen and Nan King Award for Community Service, Pacht believes he is at the forefront of another wave in the push for affordable housing. The more he learns about the subject, the more convinced he is about the importance of what he is doing.

“[Affordable housing] is an important issue for people who earn less than the area median income, which is roughly $63,000 for a family of four in Grafton (County),” he said. “So often the way it is now, you either find a fixer-upper in Canaan, or even farther away like Northern Vermont. Now your car breaks down and you’ve got just one car in the family. You live a life that is constantly draining.”

Affordable housing, he stresses, benefits not just the people living in it, but others in the surrounding community as well.

“We love the clean industries and yet the engineers can’t afford to find a house here. Even at $60,000 or $70,000 a year, if the wife is at home with two kids the family won’t be able to afford what they need. Or what if you have a cop who is earning $50,000 and a wife who is earning $25,000 as an administrative assistant? Where are these people going to live? And how are they going to be part of the community? If you are traveling 40 miles you can’t coach the team because you are still at work when they are playing. And you can’t serve on the planning board in the town where you work because you don’t live there. We are losing that sense of community.”
Pacht believes Trumbull-Nelson, like others involved in the planning and building of the Gile project, is committed to building community.

“Because they are part of the community, they want to make it work,” he said. “We have the same attitude from the architects who understand the imperatives of the budget. If something has got to go to make it affordable, it’s got to go.

“Our funding from the federal and state sources means we can’t build something that goes below a certain level of quality and we wouldn’t want to. You can build a house for very little money but it might not last or be anything anybody wants to live in. So we have to figure out how to build quality in and yet keep the price of it where we can afford it. I’m still enough of an optimist to believe that if we all work together we can make it happen.”