Edgartown housing officials are putting their full support behind a controversial and expansive housing development after builders submitted a completely new and significantly reduced project because of pushback from the community.
A revised Katama Meadows plan — which was once expected to lay the groundwork for nearly 300 bedrooms, and has since been amended to about 52 planned single-family homes — was greeted with support from the members of the Edgartown affordable housing committee in a meeting on Tuesday.
In an unprecedented move, part of the new plans call for donating 14 8,000-square-foot lots to the town, where planners will look to create affordable housing; the other 12 privately developed lots will be geared toward home ownership for middle-income families.
“If our proposal is approved, 26 hard-working Island families would have a home that they wouldn’t otherwise,” Robert Moriarty, the lawyer presiding over the project, told the Edgartown affordable housing committee on Tuesday before presenting the draft proposal.
While the latest official plan has yet to be submitted to the Martha’s Vineyard Commission, the committee agreed to write a letter in support of the project.
The building development — which spans across about 25 of the 54 acres of privately owned land on Meeting House Way — has been under the critical eye of town officials and the Martha’s Vineyard Commission since the original proposal was submitted in 2019. It was subsequently voted down by the commission, the case went to superior court, and the entire project has been turned on its head over the past six years.
But Moriarty said he and his clients have completely altered it to be a better fit into the housing landscape of the Island.
“My clients heard you,” he said. “They heard you loud and clear.”
Moriarty said they’ll be switching the low-income housing units originally planned to lots for single-family homes that will be available for relatively affordable prices; they are directed at the middle-income earners on the Island who make too much to qualify for subsidized housing, and too little to afford soaring real estate prices.
The original proposal was for a 286-unit development with high density and some affordable housing units, and both the town of Edgartown and the Martha’s Vineyard Commission felt the detriments outweighed the benefits. But after input from municipal and planning groups, this new plan is completely altered.
“We want to get it right,” executive director of the commission Adam Turner said in the meeting on Tuesday. “I’m glad to see that the town and affordable housing committee have stepped up and said, ‘This is what we want.’”
While housing for low-income earners has been touted as being of high importance by state and local reports, those who are often left out of affordable housing initiatives are middle-class families and individuals. And since the affordable housing committees only have oversight on projects that are for those earning 180 percent of area median income (AMI) or under, their opportunities for seeing projects that address that group are only found in the private developments that come across their desk. Katama Meadows is now one of them.
Instead of a multi-unit complex with a variety of housing developments, the plan now includes 26 affordable lots at 8,000 square feet each — 12 to be sold to locals who qualify after a vetting process by a delegated board, and 14 lots to be donated to the town of Edgartown for future housing projects.
Katama Meadows will also be 50 percent open space — with more than 25 acres kept as conservation land, mainly for a rare moth whose habitat is in the forest area.
The 12 lots — formerly the duplex lots in the original proposal — will be for 250 percent of AMI and year-round occupancy, restricted in perpetuity, and will go on the market for $295,000 each. There’s a four-bedroom maximum, and no accessory dwelling units allowed. But at that price, the land is far more affordable than some other real estate offerings on the Island.
The other 26 lots will be market-rate, making the project a 1:1 affordable and AMI-restricted to market-rate ratio, which housing committee members appreciate as being higher than the usual distribution. Local experts have estimated that about 10 to 25 percent of units are usually delegated as affordable and AMI-restricted, with 75 to 90 percent market-rate. Katama Meadows would balance the scales, and potentially raise the bar for future projects.
And as for the lots donated for affordable housing to Edgartown: “What you do with the 14 lots is up to you,” Moriarty said to the town officials on Tuesday.
The 14 lots will likely be deed-restricted and targeted to those between 60 and 180 percent of AMI. Edgartown planning board member Julia Livingston — who wanted the units to be available to lower-income earners — and affordable housing committee member Melissa Vincent — who said discussions were ongoing but ultimately aligned with the request — had a back-and-forth over the issue at Tuesday’s meeting.
The parcel was set to be available to applicants between 80 and 180 percent of AMI, but Livingston requested that range be reconsidered due to town goals outlined in recent Housing Production Plan meetings.
“Can’t we just have this be a little more flexible,” Livingston asked the board after requesting to lower the income bracket. “I thought we were trying to get a balance between the missing middle and the low-income people.”
“But what we asked for is to house the missing middle,” Vincent responded. But she agreed after discussion that lowering the bracket would be helpful to the town and locals who qualified for affordable housing in the future.
“I like this; I think it’s a big improvement,” Livingston said regarding the many adjustments to the plan. In previous meetings, Livingston had been critical of the plan and its parameters, but voiced her support after seeing the new proposal.
Moriarty highlighted the wastewater capacity to the board on Tuesday, and said their board of health approval for more than 25,000 gallons for the area would likely still hold in this new iteration after the plan was changed. And since this new proposal is less densely populated than the multi-unit building before, many of the nitrogen and wastewater restrictions will be loosened.
The proposal comes over a year after a development — on Jernagen Pond Road in Edgartown — that targeted Islanders in a similar income bracket was built and has had successful results so far. That project was praised for assisting municipal employees, nurses, teachers, and young local families who fell into the income category for what housing experts call the “missing middle.”
The affordable housing committee expressed their excitement over the changes to the Katama Meadows plan, the conservation land, and mainly the lots being donated.
“Thank you for listening to us, thank you for hearing about … the people who are living here and working here, and allowing for there to possibly be an opportunity for them,” Vincent said. “We are in support of the way this is moving forward.”