WEST BRATTLEBORO-Housing officials, lenders, and lawmakers gathered Oct. 15 on a freshly dug construction site at 72 Swan Pond Lane to break ground on a $16.7 million apartment building, the first new housing in a multi-phase plan to transform the former Dalem’s Chalet property.
Windham & Windsor Housing Trust (WWHT) and its co-developer, Evernorth, will build 31 affordable apartments on the 17-acre parcel. About half will be permanent supportive housing for people who have experienced homelessness, many of whom already live on the site in former motel rooms WWHT converted in 2020.
“Today, we’re standing on a building site and celebrating a literal groundbreaking that, for a time, as we can see, is going to be muddy and messy and noisy, but it will give rise to something beautiful and new,” said WWHT Executive Director Elizabeth Bridgewater.
A groundbreaking with neighbors already home
The groundbreaking was unusual because people already live where the construction work is happening. The Chalet has been home to 27 households since 2020, with on-site services from Groundworks Collaborative.
“Unlike many groundbreaking ceremonies, in our experience as housing developers, we begin with a blank canvas where there’s no existing residents on the site,” Bridgewater said. “But this parcel is already home to a community of people.”
For those residents, she said, the new building means “a new home on the horizon, one with modern amenities, greater accessibility, more spacious living areas, and a neighborhood that’ll be easier to navigate on foot and by public transportation.”
However, for the next 12 to 16 months, they’ll be living next to an active construction zone.
“The process is undoubtedly going to be messy and very inconvenient,” Bridgewater said, admitting the site stirred mixed emotions.
“I loved the meadow, and we had spent so much time working on invasive species in this meadow and working as a community,” she said. “And then to show up and see it as a big dirt pile brought up a lot of feelings of sadness, actually, even though I’m really excited by what’s coming next.”
The moment, she said, calls for “grace and compassion for those who call this place home right now” and for nearby neighbors who will also live through the transition.
Born of the pandemic
Dalem’s Chalet, the motel and banquet hall that was built by hand in the Bavarian style by German immigrants Oskar and Ursula Dalem in the 1960s, was sold to WWHT in 2020, at the height of the pandemic.
That year, Vermont lawmakers set aside $23 million in federal federal coronavirus relief money, distributed through the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, for groups that could quickly create permanent supportive housing for people leaving homelessness.
“‘Quickly’ meant three months,” Bridgewater said.
WWHT closed on the property in September 2020 and, under federal rules, had to spend the money by Dec. 31. Crews installed sprinklers, replaced the Dalems’ handmade doors and windows, built a code-compliant kitchen for residents of the former motel rooms, and set up an office for Groundworks staff.
“Even then, we envisioned a plan to redevelop the parcel to create higher-quality homes that better met the needs of residents and the broader community,” Bridgewater said in a statement released with the ceremony.
Gus Seelig, executive director of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, recalled the pressure of that period.
“We were given an awful lot of money and told to spend it in nine months,” he said. “And I’m happy to say we turned back about $100.”
Seelig credited trusted staff members who could be on-site rather than at home.
“You can’t get an apartment ready [remotely]. You can’t manage construction [remotely]. You can’t do maintenance remotely. You’ve got to show up,” Seelig said. “Taking this project on from just a housing development point of view took courage, but doing the work every day that you did took an enormous amount of courage.”
In 2021, State Rep. Emilie Kornheiser, joined by other state House members and senators representing Brattleboro, honored Ursula Dalem with a House Concurrent Resolution, recognizing her family’s contributions to the community and “her exemplary proprietorship of the Dalem Chalet in Brattleboro.” Bridgewater presented it to Dalem at her home.
Dalem died on Jan. 30, 2025, at the age of 97.
Roads first, then homes
Friday’s ceremony marked the start of two phases.
“Phase Zero” covers infrastructure for the whole development: a redesigned entrance to calm traffic; the new Swan Pond Lane; water, sewer, and electric service; and stormwater systems.
Federal funding is from congressionally directed spending secured by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders.
“This project simply could not have moved forward without him,” Bridgewater said, explaining that loading all shared infrastructure costs onto the first phase of building would have made the project financially unworkable.
Phase One is the 31-apartment building. It will include an office for on-site support staff, a community room, storage, and laundry, rooftop solar, and electric heating and cooling.
Groundworks will continue providing services to supportive-housing residents. Vermont Integrated Architecture of Middlebury designed the building, and New Hampshire-based HP Cummings Construction Company is building it.
Later phases call for eight shared-equity homes for sale; about 30 more rental apartments, including homes in the historic Chalet building — whose banquet hall will be preserved — and new buildings closer to South Street.
Neighbors found ‘common ground’
Bridgewater said the plan was shaped in a series of meetings with Chalet residents and neighbors, people she described as having different backgrounds, life experiences, and communication styles.
Rather than polarized conversation “that is very common today,” she said, people found common ground. She recalled one neighbor remarking, “I think we all want the same things here.”
“What people want is safe, attractive, accessible, and a welcoming community, and that’s what we’re aiming for together,” Bridgewater said.
Many of those residents later spoke in support at the town’s Development Review Board and offered ideas the developers adopted, including traffic calming on South Street and bike lane access.
Bridgewater also credited Brattleboro’s planning and zoning staff for laying regulatory groundwork that made a project like this possible.
‘There’s infrastructure that makes that reality true’
Kornheiser, who represents West Brattleboro, said the project tackles something harder than adding a few units at a time.
Vermonters like to say they take care of each other, she said.
“And I think that’s true, yes. But there’s infrastructure that makes that reality true. It’s not just like a magical, mystical Vermont thing.”
A big part of that infrastructure, she said, is mixed-income neighborhoods, where modest homes and multimillion-dollar properties share the same dirt road, “and those folks are neighbors, and they act like neighbors.”
WWHT has long bought and fixed up homes in established neighborhoods, Kornheiser said, “but in these times, we need more than just a couple units, right?”
Swan Pond, she noted, aims to house people of various incomes, backgrounds, and ages within the project itself, set inside an already mixed-income neighborhood.
She praised the “grace and the curiosity” that WWHT staff members and residents showed through planning, zoning, and neighborhood meetings, and she urged the crowd “to think big, to not fiddle around the edges in this time, but to continue to also hold on to the core values that make our community great.”
Evernorth President Nancy Owens echoed that theme.
“It’s about building a neighborhood where people with different housing needs can live, connect, and be part of a thriving community,” she said in a news release.
At the ceremony, Owens said shrinking state and federal resources for healthcare, housing, food, and education can make people’s choices “feel smaller.”
“We are not powerless in the face of those constraints,” she said. “When we work together as a community, we bring optimism, discipline, and partnerships together. We can build the kind of neighborhood that gives people the room to choose and to grow and to dream.”
Paying for it
The 31 apartments are financed by a mix of public and private sources:
• Federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit equity: About $8.5 million from Evernorth’s Housing New England Fund VII — more than half the phase’s cost comes in the form of these credits, administered by the Vermont Housing Finance Agency.
• Vermont Housing and Conservation Board provided more than $6 million in federal HOME-ARP and state general funds.
• Citizens Bank funded the $6.8 million construction loan, plus sponsorship of an $850,000 Affordable Housing Program award from the Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston.
• Evernorth Loan Fund made a $400,000 permanent loan.
Efficiency Vermont and Green Mountain Power also contributed.
Citizens Bank Senior Vice President for Community Development Gene Clerkin said the bank also made an equity investment in Evernorth’s equity fund of about $4.5 million. Citizens also provided construction financing and was the bank partner for the Federal Home Loan Bank grant.
He called the Federal Home Loan Bank award “very hard to get” and said the building should reach stable occupancy by April 2028, when permanent financing will replace the construction loan.
“It’s quite an endeavor. It’s a very complex development,” Clerkin said, noting the federal housing tax credit program turns 40 this year. “You would think by now we could press a button and have these deals closed simply, but it doesn’t work like [that].”
‘A person for work that is real’
Seelig said his board has invested in about 1,000 homes in Brattleboro over the years. He pointed to a nearby Brattleboro Housing Partnerships project in West Brattleboro that will soon add 30 apartments.
“Lots of good things happening on this side of town,” he said.
He closed his remarks by reading Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which ends, “The pitcher cries for water to carry / and a person for work that is real.”
“Thank you for being so useful,” Seelig told the crowd, “for getting the work done.”
Owens offered her own closing line.
“I like to always say that any day we break ground on new, safe, affordable homes is a day to celebrate,” she said. “[When] everybody has a home they can afford in a thriving community like this one here in West Brattleboro, then our work will be done.
“But until that day comes, we’re just going to keep building more homes,” Owens said.
With additional reporting by Commons News Editor Randolph T. Holhut.
This News item by Virginia Ray was written for The Commons.