Brookline’s Community Preservation Act Committee has over $9 million of funding at its disposal and is working through how to spend it, with applicants requesting more than $14 million for affordable housing, preservation and open space projects.
“It’s going to be tough decisions,” said committee chair Nancy Heller. “There’s no question about it, because there’s a lot of worthy applications here.”
At its Feb. 15 meeting, the committee reviewed the first batch of proposals from organizations in the community aimed at boosting affordable housing, one of the Community Preservation Plan’s three central priorities and a key facet of Brookline’s overall policy goals.
The Community Preservation Act allows communities across the Commonwealth to add a surtax on local property, which is then matched by some state funding. Brookline voters opted in to the new tax in May 2021.
The resulting money must be used on three focus areas: open space and recreation, historic preservation and community housing. The committee will ultimately make funding recommendations to Town Meeting, where elected Town Meeting members will vote on whether to approve the funding in May.
While some Community Preservation Act communities have written specific guidelines about how to divvy up the funds across the three categories, Brookline’s plan leaves the distribution largely up to the committee’s discretion. The law only requires that at least 10% of the funding is devoted to each category.
The committee already reviewed its six open space and recreation proposals and its three historical preservation proposals at a Jan. 22 meeting.
Here are the affordable housing projects up for possible funding:
Brookline Housing Authority
The most expensive item proposed would help redevelop an existing federally funded housing property at the intersection of Walnut Street and High Street.
The Brookline Housing Authority (BHA) is asking for $3.75 million for phase 1 of its redevelopment plan, which would cost an estimated $75 million in total. The first phase would demolish three BHA apartment buildings on Walnut Street and build approximately 100 units in their place.
The redevelopment plan is tied to Town Meeting’s November vote to change many of Brookline’s zoning laws in response to the MBTA Communities Act. The “consensus” plan which was approved contained a section accommodating this particular project.
The CPA funding is critical for the project’s overall funding potential, said Michael Alperin, executive director of the housing authority.
Why? The town’s Housing Advisory Board has agreed to match the $3.75 million of potential Community Preservation funds with money from the Affordable Housing Trust. The action would bring the project’s initial funding to 10% of its estimated total cost just from local contributions, which Alperin said would open the doors to key state and federal funding options.
“We view that site as our next big project, and really important,” Alperin said.
The Housing Authority’s second proposal seeks to fix several roofs on an existing state-funded housing development for low-income families on Egmont Street. The six roofs need to be replaced at an estimated $500,000 cost per roof, but the housing authority is leaving the number of roof replacements up to the committee’s discretion.
The Egmont Street project is one example of a broader infrastructure issue that BHA is facing. “We just get insufficient dollars to address annual capital needs, let alone decades of deferred maintenance,” Alperin said.
The Black N Brown Club
The “Housing Economic Equity Plan,” or HEEP, comes from leaders of the Black N Brown Club, a nonprofit that works on racial and economic equity in Brookline. They are requesting $1.2 million in funding to help purchase a four-unit building on Boylston Street for a “rent-to-own” housing program for low-income residents.
Tenants could apply their section 8 rent vouchers to the housing project, then elect into a home ownership program after 10 years of renting, according to the project description.
The building is mixed-use — three of the units are residential, and the bottom floor is commercial. While Community Preservation funds cannot be used for commercial development, committee member Jenny Raitt clarified that the acquisition of a mixed-use property is allowed, as long as the grant agreement clarifies where and how the funds can be used.
The idea for the project stemmed directly from residents through community outreach sessions, said Sana Hafeez, one of the leaders of the Black N Brown Club.
“It’s not possible for these families to generate any kind of home ownership, to have generational wealth,” Hafeez said.
The units will be given on a first-come first-serve basis, Hafeez said, and the club already has a waitlist of people ready to sign preliminary paperwork.
“We can’t create this standard of rent for your whole life, because that is the standard that we’re living,” said Ade Ijanusi, a director of the Black N Brown Club, during the committee’s meeting. “I don’t know if that’s a reality to you people, but [it is] for the majority of our community.”
Brookline Community Development Corporation
The Brookline Community Development Corporation (BCDC) is asking for $320,000 for its rental assistance program, which helps renters who are behind on rent payments because of a temporary setback or unexpected expense.
“We try to only award money when the amount of money we have available will stabilize the tenancy and allow the tenancy to continue,” said Bob Van Meter, executive director for BCDC, which develops and maintains affordable housing in Brookline.
The organization already received a $50,000 grant for the rental assistance program from the Brookline Community Foundation, Van Meter said, and was able to help 13 families before funds ran out.
The Community Development Corporation also requested $1,374,249 and $919,348 to do work on affordable housing developments that it owns on Boylston Street and Beacon Street, respectively.
After assessing the needs of both properties in 2021, the nonprofit is looking to address deferred maintenance to preserve the buildings and reduce future maintenance costs.
The committee’s next steps
Having reviewed all 15 applications across the three categories, the Community Preservation Act Committee will meet again on March 4 to discuss how to prioritize funding projects.
While the committee has a little over $9 million to spend right now, the housing proposals alone seek over $10 million, and Heller said the committee has not decided whether it will allocate all of its available funding at once. The committee will receive some more funding before Town Meeting, due to investments and the next round of tax income, but the incoming amount is unclear.
The committee will try to make a “drop-dead decision” by April 8, Heller said, to recommend the projects ahead of Town Meeting in May.
Corrections: A previous version of this story called the Black N Brown Club a group, when in fact the organization is a nonprofit. The story was also updated to include the specific title of Ade Ijanusi, who is a director of the nonprofit.