Since Housing Assistance was founded 50 years ago, the agency has developed 585 units of housing across the Cape and Islands. Over 200 more are in the pipeline, but the process is neither quick nor straightforward, as David Quinn, Vice President of Real Estate Development, explained in a recent Zoom talk titled “Housing Development: Why it takes so long and costs so much.”
“There’s a gap of understanding as to what it takes to capitalize a project and the length of time it takes to complete it,” said Alisa Magnotta, Housing Assistance CEO, in her introduction to Quinn’s talk. “We wanted to take a step back and educate people about what the obstacles are for us and any developer that’s trying to bring affordable housing online. Hopefully, we can build some momentum toward that outcome.”
Brewster Woods is an example of a housing project that took many years to come to fruition.
“Anyone who’s tried to develop housing or been involved in advocacy around housing knows that there’s this pressing need for housing and there’s a lot of people trying to respond to it, but it still seems like it takes forever,” said Quinn. “I think that’s true for a private developer doing market-rate housing as well as affordable developers, but for affordable housing, you have this added complexity of all of the state and public sources of funding that can drag them out.”
He laid out the four big steps of affordable-housing development, which he said can take five years in a best-case scenario.
• Feasibility: “We probably look at 10 to 15 possible projects a year,” he said. “We do our due diligence in looking at the zoning, funding sources and environmental issues. Do we think there will be community support for it? Do we think it’ll get a lot of opposition? How likely are we to succeed with this project?”
• Pre-development: This multi-year stage includes conceptual plans, permitting, construction estimates, funding applications, design development, contractor bidding, final construction plans and building permits, and financial closing.
“The permitting phase is one of the big wild cards in the process,” said Quinn. “The zoning on these projects on the Cape varies from town to town. We’ve had projects that had a ton of support and just took a month or two to go through. However, on our most recent experience in Bourne with Cape View Way, we had a project that took over a year and 13 public hearings and ended up being reduced in size as the result of the zoning process.”
• Construction: This time period varies with the size of the project but is usually somewhere between a year and a year and a half.
• Lease up: The last phase is “a very prescribed marketing and lottery process,” Quinn said. “We try to time it so that the lottery is happening a couple of months before the end of construction so that when we get our occupancy permit, the tenants are selected and ready to move in. We want to try to minimize the amount of time that we have any units vacant, as that gets costly in terms of the carrying costs for the project.”
We’re trying to have about 200 units in the pipeline at different phases at the same time,” said Quinn. “Some of them are in the very beginning phase where we’re checking the feasibility, applying to the RFP (request for proposals) and waiting. Some are in permitting, some are under construction, and some are under leasing. We try to have about 50 or so in each phase.”
In response to an audience question about whether the process can be sped up, Magnotta said “part of the shortening has to come at the town level where you could have either form-based code or by-right zoning.” At the state level, a seasonal communities designation and a real-estate transfer fee would help ease approvals and enhance funding, she said.
Click here to learn more about Housing Assistance’s housing development pipeline, visit haconcapecod.org/about/housing-development.
