|
Realizing a New Vision for
Housing through Progress at Gile hill by Rigel Cable
Recently, 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.”
|
