Please Support Local Advertisers
IPSWICH — It’s so close, you can almost touch it. Just not yet.
The thing you want to touch is 10%. That’s the percentage of a community’s housing stock that should be affordable to protect the town from “unfriendly” 40Bs.
Those projects let developers bypass most local zoning if less than 10% of a community’s housing is on the Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Liveable Communities’ (EOHLC) subsidized housing inventory (SHI).
“We were at 9.1%, floating around,” planning director Alan Manoian told the planning board last week.
Shortfall
According to the EOHLC website, the 10% is calculated using the total number of housing units measured on the U.S. Decennial Census, which last occurred in 2020.
Those “2020 units” amounted to 6,215 in Ipswich. Ten percent of that is 621.5, or 622 after rounding.
According to the EOHLC, Ipswich has 570 units on the SHI, leaving a shortfall of 52, which is exactly the number of apartments approved for the Harborlight Homes development at 2 Washington Street.
However, those have not been added to the SHI yet, Manoian said. Even when they are, there are conditions.
“If a building permit is not issued within a year, those units get knocked off your list,” he explained.
“They put them back on after the building permit is issued,” planning board Jennifer Crawford said. “So we get at least one year of relief.”
The complex was approved earlier this year, but Harborlight said it did not expect to get funding until 2027.
In the meantime, assistant town planner Brianna Kelly said she is still waiting for Harborlight to get back with information that would let her complete the SHI application to the state.
The end result is that no Harborlight units are on the SHI yet, and the town’s percentage is unchanged at 9.17%, according to the EOHLC’s calculation.
Bruni Project
Although the Essex Road 40B was approved last September, it cannot be added to the SHI because of a legal appeal, Manaoian said.
“The state told us, ‘No, you cannot count those until that appeal is resolved’,” he informed planners.
The backers of that project, which is now known as Avalon Ipswich, want to put 214 rental units on the land around the Bruni Marketplace on Essex Road.
If those 214 units were added to the town’s SHI list, it would bring the SHI total to 836 units (570 + 52 + 214). As a share of the Census count (6,215 units), that would put Ipswich’s percentage of affordable housing at 13.45%.
New proposal
In the meantime, a new 40B proposal is under discussion at Colonial Drive on Topsfield Road. At the zoning board of appeals’ (ZBA’s) last meeting, members were unsure if the town had reached 10% — and safe harbor.
The property owners have not filed an application yet, but they told the ZBA they would like to build 40 apartments. Under state law, ZBAs act as the single permitting authority for 40B applications.
However, they still have to work with the state to get a “letter of eligibility” before they return to the town with an application.
