The town of Amherst is working to revise its Housing Production Plan in coordination with Barrett Planning Group to better address the needs of low- and moderate-income residents.
According to the Massachusetts Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities, “A Housing Production Plan (HPP) is a community’s proactive strategy for planning and developing affordable housing by creating a strategy to enable it to meet its affordable housing needs in a manner consistent with the Chapter 40B statute and regulation.”
Chapter 40B is a Massachusetts statute that encourages the production of affordable housing “by creating a streamlined permitting process for eligible projects,” according to Mass Housing, a subsidizing agency for low-income housing.
A HPP consists of developing a comprehensive housing needs assessment, affordable housing goals and implementation strategies. It is being developed in partnership with Barrett Planning Group, which is working “to conduct demographic, housing, and market research; engage Amherst residents and others in developing the Plan; identify housing types needed in Amherst; and consider various approaches to secure affordable housing for all residents,” according to the town’s HPP webpage.
Housing Needs Assessment:
The housing needs assessment was completed in Nov. 2024 by Barrett and highlights the current housing issues in Amherst such as an aging housing stock, a lack of affordability and widespread housing cost burden.
Despite the housing scarcity felt by students and residents alike, the production rate of housing in Amherst has increased by 10.7 percent in the past decade. “Amherst’s substantial number of new units produced reversed a pattern of declining housing production from 1980 to 2010,” according to the assessment.
“We’ve been decent in doing something, it’s just it was so long with us not doing anything that, and then the change in demographics that we’re just far behind,” Town Councilor at-large Mandi Jo Hanneke said.
Although new homes are being built, “Over half of Amherst’s housing stock, or 61.5 percent, was built before 1980 and only 14.2 percent was built in 2000 or later,” leaving owners and renters to contend with the demands of an aging housing stock.
A primary focus of the assessment was the high cost of housing as “Amherst rent prices are 11 percent higher than the national average.” Rents in Amherst are also higher than neighboring areas. According to the report, the median rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Amherst is $1,750, compared to $1,115 in the Springfield metropolitan area.
Many of these renters are students at the University of Massachusetts looking for off-campus housing as the student population has outgrown the number of on-campus accommodations. A Nov. 2024 community survey conducted by Barrett found that students were most concerned with affordability and reported that “their rents have increased by as much as 50% in the past two years.”
“Rents have been driven higher by the large student population, as students can generally afford higher rents than nonstudent renters and landlords charge per bedroom,” according to the assessment.
The cost of buying a home has also increased significantly, in part due to the economic downturn caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The median cost of a single-family home in 2019 was $379,450 while the median cost in 2024 stood at $600,000, a 14.3 percent change from the previous year as stated in the assessment.
The report also takes into account the number of households that are considered cost-burdened which the Department of Housing and Development (HUD) categorizes as households with “monthly housing costs (including utilities) exceeding 30% of monthly income.” A household is considered “severely cost-burdened” when those costs exceed “50% of monthly income.”
As stated in the report, “an estimated 43.9 percent of households in Amherst are cost-burdened, and 27.9 percent of households in town are severely cost-burdened.” Renting “non-family households,” the category that many student renters fall into, are the most cost burdened household type “with an estimated 56.7 percent severely cost-burdened.”
The high percentage of cost-burdened households align with United States Census Bureau data that reports 49.7 percent of renter households in the U.S. were cost-burdened in 2023.
Affordable Housing Goals, Implementation Strategies and Public Engagement:
The town and Barrett have engaged the public in the creation of an updated HPP through stakeholder interviews, multiple community forums, a community survey and a Jan. 2025 open house.
“It’s also important for members of the public to constructively interact with each other as they consider housing concerns, and to hear about experiences and challenges of neighbors with different priorities than their own,” said Associate Planner and Housing Coordinator Greg Richane via email.
The community survey gave respondents including homeowners, renters, low-income residents, multigenerational households, senior households and students an opportunity to share their top concerns and primary housing initiatives they would like to see implemented.
These survey responses reflected findings from the assessment as respondents expressed concerns regarding the high costs of housing for renters and shared their own experiences of being cost-burdened.
Additionally, on Tuesday, Feb. 18, UMass affiliates, town officials and Barrett representatives hosted a housing scenario workshop open to the public to develop strategies for Amherst to better meet the housing needs of residents.
The first activity required participants to consider how changes such as shifts in population demographics, higher education, construction costs, public transportation, the real estate market, employment and state regulations could affect housing in the next 15 years. They were then instructed to come up with strategies for mitigating the effects these changes could have on housing.
Some demographic factors that participants cited were an aging population, declining college enrollment and fewer young families moving to Amherst.
Increasing costs of construction was also a top-of-mind issue for participants. It is already more expensive to build in Amherst than in other communities and newly issued 25 percent tariffs on steel and aluminum will likely raise already high construction costs.
According to the Amherst Bulletin, a new “mixed-use development at the corner of Amity Street and University Drive on the edge of the UMass campus,” needed to be reworked due to the cost of steel months before tariffs were imposed.
Strategies that got the most support at the workshop were incentivizing senior housing and densification, identifying locations for student housing and prioritizing the construction of homes that fall into the category of “missing middle housing.” This style of housing is defined in the assessment as “housing between single-family detached homes and larger multi-family structures and emphasizes four- to eight-unit buildings,” which have been overlooked in housing development projects.
Despite finding common ground in regard to some potential strategies, there were many suggestions that divided participants, like implementing rent control and others that they felt were unfeasible or ineffective such as creating non-student housing zones.
“I have never liked strategies that, in some sense, otherize people,” Hanneke said of the suggestion that the town create non-student neighborhoods.
“There are strategies like that that I have a real hard time supporting that I don’t think bring our community together, that more dichotomize our community to students and non- students and I would rather see our community as a community of everyone that happens to be 50 percent students but that we can all live near each other, we can all commingle and coexist with each other in a community.”
Hanneke also placed an emphasis on supporting housing strategies that allow for the construction of dwellings “that would better match the type of housing people want.” For example, creating more housing exclusively for seniors could give older residents the opportunity to downsize.
Hanneke also wants to see the town focus on implementing strategies that do not require dependency on outside institutions while still acknowledging that creating affordable housing does require help at the state level.
“The biggest barrier to the creation of formal Affordable Housing – the kind that is available only to those with income eligibility – is cost. To be built successfully, these developments require State and Federal resources which are limited in supply,” Richane said.
“We are facing a tremendous amount of challenges to not, as some people would say, gentrify to high income only and there were some great suggestions…I don’t know… how much will it actually impact costs and affordability and attainability, I don’t know because so many other things go into that,” Hanneke said.
What Comes Next:
Multiple housing projects are currently underway including the construction of 15 duxplex condominiums in North Amherst exclusively for homebuyers “with incomes at 80% to 100% of the Area Median Income,” according to the Valley Community Development website.
The housing needs assessment reports that “only 17.7 percent of extremely low-income households in Amherst are affordably housed,” showing the need for housing projects that accommodate those needs.
UMass also announced in Jan. 2025 that they “issued a request for proposals (RFP) to explore partnering with a developer(s) to create a comprehensive, long-range plan to modernize campus housing and maintain affordability for decades.”
This proposal marks a step toward the University addressing the student housing crisis that is impacting development trends and housing costs town-wide.
The University is looking for “responsible and creative mixed-use plans to strategically renovate and/or expand the flagship campus’ existing housing stock to meet diverse affordability needs; integrate sustainable design; enhance infrastructure supporting the academic and campus life experience for students, faculty and staff; and ease regional pressures for undergraduate, graduate and non-student housing.”
The housing needs assessment is currently under review with the Amherst Municipal Affordable Housing Trust, which is set to provide feedback on the plan as it is being developed.
“I’m optimistic that we can develop a strong plan. But this will represent a process step, not a housing outcome. Reaching our goals will require a variety of stakeholders to take inspiration from the plan and implement key strategies,” Richane said.
Bella Astrofsky can be reached at [email protected].
