PUTNEY-Stormy Gammon didn’t prepare a speech. She told the crowd so before she began.
“I’m not that type of girl,” said Gammon, one of the first residents of Alice Holway Drive, a 25-unit, permanently affordable housing complex.
Then she described a life-changing phone call.
“We got the phone call that we were able to move in, that we were no longer homeless, and our combined nervous systems just relaxed,” she said. “It was the most amazing feeling."
Gammon’s story drew the most emotion on Sept. 30, when residents, neighbors, funders, and elected officials gathered under a tent beside the Putney Community Gardens to celebrate the project, co-owned and co-developed by Windham & Windsor Housing Trust (WWHT) and Evernorth.
Five of the apartments are set aside for households experiencing or at risk of homelessness, with Southeastern Vermont Community Action (SEVCA) providing wraparound services (individualized, comprehensive support plans) to those residents. The Housing Trust’s SASH (Support and Services at Home) for All program offers individual and community services to every resident who wants them.
WWHT Executive Director Elizabeth Bridgewater said organizers purposely waited until the building was fully occupied to throw the party.
“Often the very people who are struggling with housing stability or have no home at all actually have no voice during the planning and permitting part of projects like this,” Bridgewater said. “We wanted them to have an opportunity to celebrate with us.”
‘We weren’t homeless by choice’
Gammon said her family had been homeless and staying with the Springfield Supported Housing Program. She had long wanted to live in Putney so that her son, who is autistic, could attend school here.
When they arrived, the building was still quiet.
“We were the first people to live here, the first people to move in,” she said. “Since being here, the community has opened up to us. People have been so kind.”
She said some neighbors told her they hadn’t wanted the building. She told them what it meant to her family.
“We weren’t homeless by choice. We weren’t homeless because we did anything bad,” she said.
Now, she said, she drives eight minutes to work five nights a week, her husband also has a job nearby, and her son “gets the help that he needs.”
“I want to thank all the people who supported this, and even the people who didn’t,” she said. “It means a lot that you’ve accepted me into your community. Regardless, this place is home, and this is where my son is going to continue to grow up.”
She hopes to buy a home in Putney someday.
“For now, I have stability, and my husband and I have great jobs very close by,” Gammon said.
A long road through the courts
Speakers returned again and again to the project’s delays. Bridgewater said the Housing Trust “never wavered in our commitment to build these homes, despite multiple delays and challenging moments.”
The town of Putney issued the project permit in 2022. The permit was appealed by a few neighbors to the Environmental Court and the Vermont Supreme Court, and an appeal of the project’s Act 250 jurisdictional opinion went to both courts as well.
Those four cases delayed construction by two years.
In a press release, Bridgewater said the vision, developed more than five years ago, was “to create a new opportunity for residents to live in beautiful, affordable homes within walking distance to food options, cultural amenities and other essential services.”
“Despite some strong headwinds, this vision has now come to fruition,” she said.
Kathy Beyer, senior vice president for real estate development at Evernorth, was more blunt.
“I have worked over 25 years as a nonprofit housing developer, and I can tell you that when your project gets killed, it is difficult and it is deflating,” Beyer said. “This team did not waver. We shared frustrations, but we supported each other with grace and tenacity. And we believed in these 25 homes.”
Alex Farrell, Vermont Department of Housing and Community Development commissioner, used the moment to call for change.
“Right now we do have a system that makes it a little too easy to say ‘no,’ or to derail or delay these potential future residents, these neighbors, these key members of our community,” he said. “It really is time that we rebalance this so that we don’t have to go to Superior Court twice, the Supreme Court twice, to finally hear ‘yes.’”
Farrell said he hoped lawmakers representing Windham and Windsor counties join him in seeking changes “so that it’s so much easier to say yes than to say no.”
Gus Seelig, executive director of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, referenced a button handed out at the May 2025 groundbreaking: “Putney’s Worth It!” He was wearing it on his suit jacket.
“Why would anybody give up on Putney?” Seelig asked the assembled group.
Homes and gardens on one parcel
The development shares its small parcel with two longtime community fixtures, the Putney Community Gardens and the Putney Farmers’ Market, both preserved as part of the project.
The project extends pedestrian access along Alice Holway Drive in Putney village. It will also be served by the MOOver, with access to two morning and two afternoon commuter bus routes between Brattleboro and Bellows Falls.
“It’s not often you see a housing and conservation project on such a small parcel of land,” Bridgewater said.
Residents, she said, have been “remarking about how amazing it is to look out the window and look at the gardens.”
Beyer called the site “a beautiful example of a land ethic” that answers two questions at once: where people should live and what land should be conserved.
“Every time I visit this parcel and I pull in, I see the gardens overflowing with produce and flowers, and I see our housing,” she said. “My heart is full.”
In the press release, Beyer said by opening permanently affordable housing in Putney, “we are taking care of the community, because all communities prosper by supporting housing for all income levels.”
The building uses geothermal heating and cooling, a high-performance thermal shell, and rooftop solar panels as alternatives to fossil fuels. As a result, Beyer said, the building avoids emitting 92 tons of carbon a year.
Housing and the workforce
In his remarks, Vermont State Treasurer Mike Pieciak, whose office was among project funders, recalled speaking at the rainy groundbreaking in May 2025.
“I said then, and I’ll say today on this sunny day, that any day in Vermont is a good day to celebrate new housing,” he said.
He added that business owners and nonprofit leaders across the state tell him the same thing: “We’d love to expand our business. We’d love to open a second location, but we can’t, because we can’t find the workers, because those workers can’t find the housing.”
Pieciak, who grew up in Brattleboro, said he’d stopped that morning at St. Brigid’s Kitchen, the soup kitchen on Walnut Street which his mother started 46 years ago.
He said the project “sends a message loud and clear to everyone who lives here and everyone who calls Putney home: that when you live in Putney, you matter.”
Rep. Mike Mrowicki, D-Putney — whom Bridgewater credited with first suggesting over a cup of coffee that the Housing Trust buy the land — shared a similar story.
One resident, he said, had been ready to give notice at a local firm because they couldn’t find a place to live. Then they were accepted at Alice Holway Drive and got to stay.
“Putney, like Vermont, is a beautiful place, but it’s the people that make it beautiful,” he said. “The work now is to welcome people, to welcome the new people, as many of us were welcomed when we came here.”
He closed with a quote from anthropologist Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of committed, thoughtful citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
‘Planting seeds’
Maura Collins, executive director of the Vermont Housing Finance Agency, compared building homes to tending a garden.
“These buildings are finished, but they’re not the finished product,” Collins said. They’re just the beginning of where neighbors are going to be meeting each other.”
The project, she said, “is here today because people refused to stop planting, even when they could not yet see the harvest.”
Seelig tied the project to the civil rights roots of the community land trust movement.
“All of us who work in housing see housing fundamentally as a human right, and that’s why we’re here,” he said. “The arc of justice has absolutely been bent here because people put their shoulders to the wheel of change.”
Honoring the land’s history
The development is named for Alice Holway, a Putney woman whose niece described her, at a Housing Trust story-gathering event, as known for her welcoming spirit toward newcomers. The land was once home to U.S. Sen. George Aiken’s wildflower nursery.
Stories from that event inspired public art that will be installed on the front of the building. Local artist Briony Morrow-Cribbs, known for work depicting the natural world, is still completing the piece; stickers with its image circulated at the Sept. 30 event.
A group of local residents guided the selection of the artist and the artwork. Amber Paris, a resident and placemaking artist, is working with WWHT on community events that will shape a gathering table between the lawn and the gardens. Bridgewater said it will build on Putney’s tradition of community and lantern suppers.
Who paid for it
The project cost $15 million, raised from public and private sources, according to the press release.
• Evernorth’s 481 Fund II, with TD Bank as investor, provided $8.6 million in federal low-income housing tax credit equity, which VHFA administers, plus $525,000 in federal investment tax credits. That’s the more than $9.1 million Beyer cited.
• TD Bank provided the $8 million construction loan.
• The Vermont Housing and Conservation Board contributed more than $4 million: $3 million in American Rescue Plan Act funds, $818,000 in general funds, and $585,000 in federal funds from the Home Investment Partnership Program.
• VHFA added $700,000 in Local Investment Advisory Committee partnership funds and $400,000 through its Housing Investments for Vermont (HIVE) program.
• The Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development’s Recovery and Revitalization Program provided $500,000.
• Efficiency Vermont and Green Mountain Power initiatives also contributed.
• Brattleboro Housing Partnership awarded eight rental-assistance vouchers so people of all income levels could live there.
Bridgewater also credited the Vermont State Treasurer’s Office, the Vermont Department of Economic Development, and NeighborWorks America. Vermont Integrated Architecture, based in Middlebury, designed the building, and ReArch Construction, of South Burlington, managed construction.
Bridgewater closed the program by thanking staff members, including Sandy Garland, WWHT’s director of finance for 28 years, who retired that day.
When Garland started, Bridgewater said, the organization had only a few properties. It now has almost a thousand housing units.
This News item by Virginia Ray was written for The Commons.