Drawing Board Full For Housing In Lunenburg | Sewer helped opened the floodgates for development
For years, as housing prices in the Boston area and along I-495 rose, developers found Central Massachusetts cities and towns more and more attractive as sites for houses and condos.
One of the latest spots hit by a barrage of development proposals is Lunenburg.
While today’s housing market conditions mean those plans are inching along, if all the proposals now on the table were to move forward, the town of under 10,000 could see as many as 900 new units go up.
The town is now considering proposals for a development with 135 single-family homes and a 120-condominium project proposed under the state’s Chapter 40B law. Another 40B condo project, this one with 146 units, was rejected last year, but the developer is appealing the decision.
Homes For Less
At first glance, Lunenburg is not an obvious place to put a lot of new homes. None of the big highways coveted by commuters run through town.
But the developer of the proposed single-family home project, Kevin O’Brien of Andover-based O’Brien Homes Inc., said he sees a good market for the houses he wants to build, which he said will be priced starting around the $300,000 mark.
“I think it’s a nice little town,” he said. “I think less expensive houses can be built out there.”
Some local development officials say their town has become much more attractive for developers since it began running modern sewer lines in 2000.
“Sewer is the throttle of growth in my opinion,” said Donald Bowen, chairman of the town’s zoning board of appeals. “In other words, when you get sewer you open up the possibility of growth.”
Bowen said another reason Lunenburg may appeal to some developers is its low percentage of affordable housing. The state allows developers to erect 40B developments, which are denser and less regulated than regular projects, in communities where less than 10 percent of the housing stock is affordable, unless they’re making significant progress toward the 10 percent mark. Currently, the Department of Housing and Community Development counts just 1.9 percent of Lunenburg’s 3,605 homes as affordable.
In what some describe as an effort to combat the influx of 40B projects, the town became one of the first communities to enact the state’s Chapter 40R law after it was passed in 2005. The law allows for the construction of “smart growth” projects with affordable units and compensates the host communities for their impact on local services.
Bowen said Lunenburg’s proposed 40R development, which would put 204 apartments at the site of the Tri-Town Drive-In theater, would include enough affordable units to count as progress toward the 10 percent goal, and that would let officials turn away the 40B proposals for a little while. But Tri-Town Landing hasn’t moved forward yet, and while it sits on the back burner, Bowen said his board has to consider any new 40B proposals that are proposed in the meantime.
Wait and See
For all the projects that have been proposed, though, it remains to be seen what will end up getting built.
“During the times of non-building, people do their planning and present a lot of paperwork,” said Planning Director Marion M. Benson, “And we have a lot of paperwork in front of us, but we don’t have any shovels.”
O’Brien said that it’s unclear when the housing market will recover enough to make projects like his workable.
“Mostly everybody, me included, will probably wait until the market changes a little bit,” he said.
Benson said the Tri-Town project may be the only one that is likely to move forward any time soon.
Bill Caselden, principal of Great Bridges, the developer on the Tri-Town project, said he’s waiting on a final piece of financing from MassHousing before starting the first 66-unit phase of the project, hopefully before the winter. After that, he said, additional phases will depend on the state of the financial markets. “Things are pretty tenuous out there,” he said.
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