During a town meeting next month, Hanover voters will decide whether or not to donate a large tract of land near Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center to Vital Communities, a local affordable-housing advocacy group. Vital Communities has plans to built nearly 60 units of workforce housing on the land.
Vital Communities claims that these 60 units of housing will help ease the acute workforce housing crunch in the Upper Valley, a problem many say is caused by large expansions in the past decade by local employers, most notably Dartmouth College and DHMC.
Vital Communities' plans for the Gile Tract include 24 one- and two-bedroom apartments, 16 single-family "cottages" for low-to-moderate income range families and 16 single-family units priced around $200,000 for moderate-income families.
"We're interested in building a strong neighborhood, by which I mean a mixed-income neighborhood, that provides housing for parts of the economic spectrum that have not been served well in the last 20 years," said Len Cadwallader, Coordinator of Vital Communities.
The Vermont Association of Planning and Development Agencies defines affordable workforce housing to be housing which costs no more than 30 percent of income. Included in this definition of housing are rent and utilities for rental housing and mortgage, taxes and property insurance for owned housing.
Currently, according to Applied Economic Research, Inc., households earning the median income in the Upper Valley can afford a $125,000 home. The median home cost in the Hanover-Lebanon area, however, is $170,000 while the average is $203,000.
According to Cadwallader, this would mean that the target income group for the Gile Tract housing would be working families earning 80-120 percent of the median income for Grafton County, encompassing individuals earning from about $40,000 to $60,000.
Cadwallader said that the project had met with generally positive reception from the citizens of Hanover.
"So far people have been very receptive to this. It has been something that has been an identified and perceived need for a long, long time, but the price of land has prevented it from happening before," said Cadawallader.
According to statistics provided by AER throughout the 1990s 6,129 new jobs were created in the in the Hartford-Lebanon Market Area, but only 2,774 new units of housing were added during that same period.
Much of the housing crunch in the Upper Valley has been attributed to the presence of DHMC and the College. While Dartmouth and DHMC are according to AER "predominately recession-proof" -- as was evident during the low levels of unemployment during the 1989-1992 national economic downturn -- and provide a high level of employment stability and foster low unemployment in the Hanover-Lebanon area, they also create a market where the cost of living is unusually high when compared to the surrounding area.
Dartmouth students moving off-campus also contribute to the problem of workforce housing. Because students are an ever-shifting population and tend to be less picky about the upkeep of their rentals as long as they are close to campus, they tend to be more desirable tenants than permanent residents. To this end, the College has made a commitment to keep more students living on campus, but due to budget cuts construction of new dormitories has yet to begin.
"Some of the apartments available aren't necessarily affordable either. Just having Dartmouth students move back onto campus is not going to take care of this," Cadwallader said.
A town meeting on April 28 will be held in 105 Dartmouth Hall to discuss the Gile Tract decision. Professors and various community members will be giving brief presentations.
