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As published on August 17th in the Hamilton Wenham Chronicle, “Wenham readies for affordable home lottery” by Lucy R. Sprague Frederikson, describes the information session that Beth Rust and I presented on August 10th and Wenham’s new buy-down program. The application deadline is September 16th.
A short excerpt:
Wenham held open houses for two affordable homes last week and followed up with an information session on how to obtain one. The event represents the culmination of a year’s work for Wenham’s Affordable Housing Trust (WAHT) and the first housing lottery in Wenham, which is scheduled for October.
Members of the WAHT, Board of Selectmen, town officials and two potential buyers attended the information session. According to Molly Martins, chairwoman of the WAHT and the Board of Selectmen, three or four families had visited each property during the two-hour open house and many applications had been taken from the Hamilton-Wenham Public Library. Town consultants Jennifer Goldson and Beth Rust hosted the information session, designed to give details on the process of applying to be in Wenham’s first housing lottery.
The first property is located at 105 Pleasant St., and is a three-bedroom single-family dwelling on an 8,200 square foot lot with 1,260 square feet of living space. The second property is at 11 Friend Court #2, and is a two-bedroom unit on 47,500 square foot lot with 1,080 square feet of living space on the second floor.
Many of my readers may be uncomfortable with the subject of this article. However, I believe it is an important topic to reflect on: the actual costs of “free” parking.
The article, “Free Parking Comes at a Price” by Tyler Cowen, was published on August 14, 2010 in the New York Times. Here is a short excerpt:
Car owners may not want to hear this, but we have way too much free parking.
Higher charges for parking spaces would limit our trips by car. That would cut emissions, alleviate congestion and, as a side effect, improve land use. Donald C. Shoup, professor of urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, has made this idea a cause, as presented in his 733-page book, “The High Cost of Free Parking.”
Many suburbanites take free parking for granted, whether it’s in the lot of a big-box store or at home in the driveway. Yet the presence of so many parking spaces is an artifact of regulation and serves as a powerful subsidy to cars and car trips. Legally mandated parking lowers the market price of parking spaces, often to zero. Zoning and development restrictions often require a large number of parking spaces attached to a store or a smaller number of spaces attached to a house or apartment block.
If developers were allowed to face directly the high land costs of providing so much parking, the number of spaces would be a result of a careful economic calculation rather than a matter of satisfying a legal requirement. Parking would be scarcer, and more likely to have a price — or a higher one than it does now — and people would be more careful about when and where they drove.
Together with my colleague, Beth Rust, I’m assisting the Wenham Municipal Affordable Housing Trust with launching a new buy down program. The Trust has purchased two units (a single-family house and a condo in a two-family house) and is offering them for sale to low-income homebuyers through the Town’s new buy down program. The Town is establishing a “ready-buyer list” through a lottery for these two initial units and also hopes to offer additional units in the future.
We are holding open houses at the two units and an information session at Wenham Town Hall on Tuesday, August 10th (See flyer for more details: Wenham Buy Down Program Flyer).
For more information, please see the Town of Wenham website: http://www.wenhamma.gov/ under “Affordable Housing Home-ownership Opportunities” or down load the application here: Wenham Lottery Application Package 061610. The application deadline is September 16th.
As lottery agent, you can also contact me (Jennifer Goldson) directly for more information: 617-990-4971 or jennifer@jmgoldson.com.
To find out how well your community is doing in its 2010 US Census mail-back rate, check out this link on 2010.census.gov. The link provides access to an interactive map where you can check out the participation rate throughout the country.
Donovan Rypkema, principal of PlaceEconomics, offers his perspective on sustainability in the May/June 2010 issue of Planning magazine. His is a valuable perspective that emphasizes the importance of broadening typical sustainability initiatives to include a critical component that is often overlooked: historic preservation.
But consider what happens when we diligently recycle our soft drink cans while acquiescing in the destruction of older, still usable structures. Razing a two-story mansion building wipes out the environmental benefit of recycling almost 1.5 million aluminum cans. And that equation doesn’t even consider the loss of embodied energy in the building and its components.
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