BELLOWS FALLS-Last week, several staff and executive board members of the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board (VHCB) toured housing projects that they have supported around Vermont, including ones in Bellows Falls and Putney.
They were joined Oct. 27 by local housing activists and by Elizabeth Bridgewater, the executive director of the Windham & Windsor Housing Trust (WWHT), which has worked with the VHCB on several projects in the county, including the recently completed Alice Holway Drive Apartments, which opened on Sept. 30.
That project added 25 permanently affordable apartments to downtown Putney, with the three-story apartment building now serving as the gateway site at the south end of the village.
In Bellows Falls, the group visited the Mary Exner Block and the Bellows Falls Garage buildings.
The Exner Block on Canal St., remodeled into its current three-story structure around 1907 and restored in 2000, offers 10 one- and two-bedroom apartments on the upper two floors and six street-level commercial spaces.
VHCB was instrumental in funding the project. Created in the mid-1980s, the organization works statewide with a network of private and nonprofit entities to “fund the development of permanently affordable housing, land conservation initiatives, and the restoration of historic properties,” according to its website.
One of those organizations, the Rockingham Arts and Museum Project, was created in the mid-1990s by Robert McBride, who served as the local guide for the group.
They also visited the Bellows Falls Garage project, which offers 27 affordable studio and one- and two-bedroom apartments, community spaces, and a street level storefront. The Rockingham Street project was completed in 2023.
The WWHT manages both properties, whose units are among the more than 1,000 apartments, homes, and mobile homes throughout Windham and Windsor counties that the nonprofit stewards.
The VHCB board visited Bellows Falls “to see the impact of the board’s investments over the years,” said Pollaidh Major, the organization’s director of policy and special projects.
“VHCB’s investments have supported both new housing and the preservation of historic buildings that help define the village,” she added.
Major noted that “while board members hear about projects when they are first seeking funding, they rarely get the opportunity to see the impact of the investments over time or hear from community voices about what it took to get a project done and what those homes and gathering spaces mean to the community.”
She said the “tour is an opportunity for the board to see how things are going and hear about the community’s goals for the future.”
Created out of a concern for Vermont’s disappearing farmland, decaying historic buildings, and lack of affordable housing, since 2020 the VHCB has funded conservation of 22,674 acres across 25 towns in 10 counties, 14 historic preservation projects across 12 towns in eight counties, protection of 12,677 acres of farmland for 78 Vermont farms, and provided permanently affordable housing programs for 4,530 Vermont households.
Overcoming low-income housing negativity bias
As challenging as developing funding for these projects is, a lunch-time panel presentation about the Alice Holway Drive Apartments in Putney noted that local opposition to affordable housing projects — often rooted in the fear that the projects lead to increased crime — is one of the biggest hurdles these organizations face.
Two neighbors, Deborah Lazar and Laura Campbell, took the original permitting for the project to the state Environmental Court on technical grounds, appealing multiple court rulings favoring the development all the way to the Vermont Supreme Court.
But along the way, while steadfastly rejecting the label of being foes of public housing, they also cited multiple reasons for their opposition, including traffic safety concerns, predictions of arson and crime, the loss of an open field as the gateway to the town, and the lack of robust public transportation.
The appeals delayed the project, approved by the town Development Review Board in 2022, for several years.
Bridgewater said that the WWHT has collected a lot of data “to answer the question of whether there was more crime at our housing sites than other locations” in towns they are built in.
There isn’t, she said.
Bridgewater said her “thoughts are rooted in the knowledge that we all have an ancient survival instinct called ‘negativity bias,’ whereby in our more primitive circumstances, our very survival, hinged on our ability to spot and remember danger so that we could respond to it quickly in the moment and in the future.”
She said that research strongly supports the fact that “people tend to experience and remember bad events more vividly than positive ones.”
“Even when one experiences a combination of a good and bad event, it’s the negative part of the experience that is more sticky and hard to shake,” she observed.
Bridgewater added that “this research can help explain why people are not so swayed by facts, which carry much less emotional weight.”
One major factor shaping affordable housing biases today has been the mid-20th century changes in public housing in some cities. There, high-poverty families were crowded into public housing projects, which led some of these buildings to become highly publicized centers of crime.
In addition to these projects often being very large and involving hundreds of families, other major factors causing their failure were their poor management, with reduced applicant screening, little or no security, and poor maintenance.
WWHT has worked to avoid these mistakes with Vermont housing projects, Bridgewater said, noting that even the largest endeavors have mostly had fewer than 30 apartments. She cited an effective screening process, regular maintenance, and hands-on management as the means by which the WWHT has kept its projects crime-free.
Bridgewater said that for two years she “tracked every police call to each of our properties in Brattleboro. What I found was that the percentage of calls to our properties fluctuated between 3% and 4%, and only a small number of these calls were related to a crime. So again, the myth doesn’t add up.”
Sheriff Mark Anderson of the Windham County Sheriff’s Office agreed.
“From a public safety perspective, we have not seen housing developments become a driving factor in crime,” Anderson said. “While each project and community are different, the outcomes rarely match the predictions made by opponents.”
Anderson said that he has “frequently pushed back on NIMBY arguments related to housing projects because facts and actual experience, not assumptions, should guide public decisions.”
He added that “the housing developments I have observed have generally been positive additions to our communities, and I welcome them.”
Bridgewater said that people’s fears and defenses “inform how we view and respond to any given situation, even when the facts don’t support our viewpoint. And the fact is, crime is not caused by affordable housing.”
She said that negativity bias about affordable housing causing crime “sometimes gets used as a proxy for simply not wanting a housing project in their neighborhood.”
Bridgewater said it explains why it’s such an effective proxy because “it taps into people’s survival instincts, often at an unconscious level.” She said that understanding this dynamic “has helped me connect with opponents of affordable housing with compassion, knowing that at the end of the day, we’re all navigating this world the best we can and that most of the time, people are simply scared of the unknown.”
Anderson has said that the major factors driving crime in Windham County are the opioid crisis, untreated mental health conditions, food insecurity, and lack of housing, all of which affect the entire community, but that the root cause of these issues has nothing to do with specific housing.
“As I frequently say in public meetings,” Anderson said, “Vermont needs housing that my staff can afford. There are a variety of factors that make living in Vermont hard. Opposing housing projects that support working people and help local communities thrive doesn’t solve the crime [problems].”
Major pointed out that “the people who live in these homes are our neighbors.”
“They are the nursing assistants and homecare workers looking after our parents, the paraeducators and bus drivers in our schools, the cooks and servers keeping Main Street restaurants open, and the people stocking shelves in the area grocery stores,” she said.
Many of these housing projects, she said, are for “older Vermonters on fixed incomes who want to stay in the towns where they raised their families, young families getting a stable start, and people with disabilities who want to live independently in their own community.”
Major said that this is what affordable housing does.
“It lets the people our communities depend on live in those communities,” she said. “Employers state that finding staff is hard enough; finding staff who can also find somewhere to live is harder still.”
Major explained that what has happened with housing in Bellows Falls is “something we’ve seen happen in towns across Vermont.”
“Well-designed affordable housing, often in buildings that had sat empty or in disrepair, brings people, foot traffic, and care back into a downtown,” she said.
Among the many benefits of affordable housing in downtown areas, she said, are that the residents “shop locally, [and they] volunteer, coach, and send their kids to local schools.”
“That investment tends to spark more, and we’re glad to be able to support work like this in communities throughout the state,” Major said.
Anderson said that in his experience, “perception rather than reality often drives concerns that housing developments will lead to significant increases in crime.”
“Well-managed, diverse housing is good for Vermont and strengthens our communities,” he said.
He referenced Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, a theory proposed by psychologist Abraham Maslow in 1943, which acknowledges that people are more likely to succeed when they can meet those needs, which include safety, love/belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.
n the familiar triangular diagram, physiological needs form the base, a prerequisite for the other four.
“Shelter is literally in the base level of needs,” Anderson said.
This News item by Robert F. Smith was written for The Commons.