 Everybody hear me OK? Cool. Hi. Thanks so much for coming out today. My name is Zachary Watson. I'm the executive director for Central Vermont Habitat for Humanity. And I'm sure some folks will be coming in here throughout the meeting. But we are asking everybody to wear a mask today. Thank you all very much for that. Appreciate being mindful of keeping everybody healthy. There is a sign-in sheet circulating right now. And so if you haven't signed that yet, yeah, keep passing it around so we can make sure that everybody gets signed in and we can continue to communicate. So we are here today to, this is the first stakeholder meeting for a housing development project, which we are exploring the feasibility of for a project located on Northfield Street. And you'll see lots of maps. I'm not going to try to describe it for you. But so the goal of this meeting, we're really bringing a blank slate today. We have an idea of some of the constraints and the restrictions of the site. And we'll go over those. But before we get any further into this process, we really want to hear from you. We want this to be a discussion about how do we capture the interests, the needs of the people in our community, and as stakeholder, as community members, you are stakeholders. But I know there are butters. There are folks that have interest in actually the development themselves. What type of housing is going there? Zach, I guess we don't have audio. Sorry. Oh, thanks. We're on mute. Thank you, Peter. You didn't miss anything important, I just said a lot of stuff. And I let somebody in. Thank you, Kevin. Sorry. So the internet here is not letting us on the computer for some reason. So I was going to say that would make sure it didn't run. Yeah. OK. So yeah, this is the first stakeholder meeting. And we want to get all your thoughts. And we have a really nice format for the meeting tonight, which will review the agenda. And the intent of the style of this meeting is to make sure everybody has the opportunity to speak and be heard equally on every aspect of this. And so there's plenty of opportunity to be engaged. We then are going to take your comments. And we're going to build them into some concept designs. And where we'll have a second stakeholder meeting. And where we'll have a chance to review multiple designs. And you'll have another opportunity to engage in that process at that point. So the first question everybody asks us is why is central Vermont Habitat for Humanity doing this? Don't you guys just build single-family households? It is a legitimate question. We typically do only build single-family households for low-income homeowners between 30% and 80% area median income. All of our homeowner projects are for home ownership. And we offer mortgages, which are designed to be affordable. So there are always less than 30% of the income of the people we work with. Folks that have worked on Habitat for Humanity homes know that we basically keep the cost of construction low by engaging in volunteers using donated labor. And the homeowner themselves actually commits time on that house through what we call sweat equity. And then we offer them a 0% interest mortgage. Those payments then get cycled into a revolving fund, which then helps us build our next home. So that's our traditional process. But I don't know if folks got a chance to read an article I recently wrote about the state of housing and how ARPA funds are going to impact it. And what it has to do with is the amount of incentives and programs that are out there are primarily to support rental housing. And so as a result of that, oftentimes Habitat for Humanity and homeownership in general is left out of the mix of our major housing developments. And so as a result, if we want to be in a part of that housing development where we can build houses on a long-term scale and really plan and be effective in making a dent in the housing crisis that we have right now, we have to think long-term and bigger. And honestly, we did a lot of praying about trying to find that parcel that we could build house after house. And it just so happened that one of our volunteers that was serving as a liaison for one of our homeowners for a house we built in Barry. So he's a liaison helps our homeowners who oftentimes have never owned a home, generationally at all, navigate the homeownership process. And he came to us and he said, Zach, I just got 50 acres in Montpelier. You know, I never thought about it. It's in current use. I don't really know what to do with it, but I wanted to do something good. I want to leave some sort of legacy here. What do you guys think about this? So myself, our architect, our builder, a local engineer walked the parcel and just to see if it made sense. And there was a lot of question marks, but it did feel like it's at least worth exploring. So we applied for and we received a community development block grant through the Vermont Community Development Program of $50,000 to conduct an engineering and architectural feasibility study to determine how many houses we can build up there. What's the access look like? What are the site constraints? We also received a $10,000 feasibility grant from the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board. So that's sort of where we're at. We've had three public meetings with the abutters. We walked the property and we did two Zoom meetings, or sorry, a Zoom meeting. Then we had a public meeting before we submitted the application. And we've also had lots of comments about this when we looked at rezoning the parcel both through the Development Review Board, two meetings, and City Council, two meetings. So we're about seven meetings into this, but we still have not put anything on paper because it's really important to us to hear from you about what you want to see in this project. So we're focused on housing, building as many houses as we possibly can. Also recognizing that this is a beautiful piece of land with some serious constraints in regards to the forested land on it. And so we are committed to housing and conservation. So we went through a feasibility, we went through an RFP process and we selected Engineering Ventures who partnered with Park Architecture, Gossin's Bachman, as well as VIS. And they are an amazing team. We could not have asked for a better team. These guys are involved with every project that's going around in the state. If anybody knows anything that's going on, they do. And they have a lot of good answers, good connections. So we can work with them. We feel very confident working with them to come up with a project that meets our needs. So we're doing that feasibility study right now. Our plan is to complete it by August. So I'm gonna step down because I'm the bureaucrat here. And I'm gonna leave it up to Kevin Warden who's in charge of engineering ventures, who's gonna walk through our agenda and everything else. Great, thanks a lot, Zach. Just to give you an overview of the format, the next thing we have an agenda up here, that was one intro. Next, we're gonna talk about existing conditions. We've got everyone on the same page as to the site we're looking at and what's on the site now. Then we're gonna have three important categories that we wanna talk about. The first is conservation development design, which is the way we're proposing to look at this site. Then we're gonna talk about housing and sustainability. And then we're gonna talk about park and public access. And certainly if you have a question, a brief question, please feel free to ask it. But our goal then is to do breakout groups. We'll divide everyone into three groups and meet with each of those professionals that deal in those three areas. And then if we have the time, rotate around because we really wanna give a chance for everyone to contribute their ideas and questions and thoughts about each of those ideas, about each of those three areas of consideration. So first, and this is gonna be tricky, we're gonna go over to existing conditions and we just had to blow it up to make it visible. But as Julia goes to the next page, when we might have an issue, you can try to go over, I'm happy to do it, just paged out. I thought I couldn't have any else on. But then we gotta go to view and we're gonna go third. Yeah, that's exactly what I was gonna call. All right, so if you can see this, this is up here, we're up here on Main Street and across the river and up Northfield Street is the project site. It's 54 acres, it's at 102 to 110 or so Northfield Street. If you're at this kind of south end, it's about a 15 minute walk into town. There is a right-of-way, if you wanna go to the next image, I'm sorry, it fronts, yeah, it's fine. It fronts up Northfield a little bit. It fronts, it has a point where it connects to Pleasant. It fronts on Hill and it has an easement across 116 and 120 Northfield onto the parcel of here. Question? Question. Yeah. Now, we know that we have GMTA and what type of transportation is there and if there's not transportation, especially for people with special needs, can we have GMTA or possibly another transportation company help with bringing people back and forth? Great question. Don't know the answer yet. But we're gonna take that down and be able to get back to you on that. But certainly accessibility and connection to the city is an important part. I think we'll be talking about in the housing and sustainability section, mobility and access is certainly a key point. So on the site, there's a network of existing trails which show up here as green, woods roads leading off from that easement I mentioned, up through the site, there's a drive up to here which then goes to a single family and then a beautiful woods road up the side of the slope that west side that heads down to Northfield and there's also a fairly significant and beautiful ravine right up the middle here. Picture there, there's some dry stacked stone walls, one that runs through near that ravine and then sum up at the high point. Site is around 700 feet at the low point and elevation 900 is a little above at the high point. So a couple hundred feet of elevation change. We go to the next slide. This is a slope map. So wherever you see red is steep and wherever you see green is flat basically. And so if anyone's familiar with the site, it's definitely bounded on the west and on the east with steep wooded slopes. But when you traverse those woods trails and get up to the higher parts, there's areas there that are certainly less than 10 or 15% and flatter. Go to the next slide. This is a soils map. It's really all one kind of soil and it is moderately shallow to ledge, although I did walk up throughout the field and used a hand probe and got at least four feet to soil. But as we look at areas through the development in very shallow ledge areas, maybe we want to stay away from or find areas where we can instead of cutting in and cutting down through the existing topography fill above. Next slide. This is just a quick solar access. It is sloping to the north, down to the north. So it's not one of those perfect south facing meadows, but it's got quite good solar access, especially up in the upper area. We walked it before the leaves were out and you can kind of get a sense if there was some clearing in the middle what it would look like. We're pretty close to the solstice here, which is representing by this upper arc. So you're gonna have sun rising kind of up in that corner there and sun setting up in this corner. Then in the winter solstice down in this lower arc, you can see sun is rising down in this area and sun is setting down over here. Obviously a much narrower band. And then I think we have another one. Yeah, and this is just representing, I think one of the first tasks we had, Zach said no preconceptions, but before we could even come and meet with folks, we'd understand, would we have vehicular access to the site? And legally there's an easement to the site through 116 and 120, by the Imperial Housing Authority there. And one thing I didn't mention at the intro is there's a three acre parcel here right on Northfield, which is really all under the same ownership, but it is a separate three acre parcel and would remain that way. And right along the east boundary of that, there's a woods road represented by gradient just a little below that. There's a really nice traverse in that brings you up to the higher plateau. So we're right now looking at that as a likely point of access vehiculately to this parcel. And I think that really brings us to Julia, who's going to talk about conservation development design. So I think I can do the agenda, would that be helpful? Yeah, yeah, I can do that while you're, I'll zoom in while you're doing that. I'm Julia Ginorio, I'm also with Engineering Ventures. I just wanted to talk a little bit about conservation style development, because that's sort of one of the main methods that we're going with. It's an alternative to more conventional cookie cutter style developments that I can't hear you very well. It's an alternative to conventional cookie cutter style developments that have been really common. The goal is to balance the protection of the important natural features with the sustainable long-term development. The first step in this is identifying natural and cultural resources that we agree need to be protected. The primary constrained areas like Kevin was talking about, like steep slopes, things that don't really apply on this site, but other things like wetlands or flood plains that need to be avoided at all costs. Then the next step is identifying other cultural features or historic sites, scenic views, woodlands, things that we'd like to discuss today when we break out into groups. Then after that, we determine the areas that are going to be put aside to be permanently conserved. And this is all done before we choose the building sites, before we draw the lot lines so that we're assured of balanced development in the future. Sometimes this development style results in more dense cluster developments, though not always, but it is a tool to get more housing in there as opposed to more land and consumptive styles of development. This is just one part of the framework. There's lots of other challenges and opportunities with the site that we plan to look into and take into consideration. And I think we'll hear more about that now from Steve and Greg about housing and sustainability. Yeah, I'll just add on to what Julia said. DNRC, which is headquartered down here on their website, has a great little intro to conservation development design. If anyone wants to look at that. My name is Greg Gossens and this is Steve Grinnell. Steve Grinnell, I'm here at GBA Architects. We're going to be looking at the building aspect of this when we get into the whole affair. We are looking to do net zero carbon neutral development so sustainability is really going to be important to us. Also linkages, make this a walkable integral part of the community. I live up on College Hill. Naturally, this site is closer to downtown than my house is up in College Hill with about the same amount of vertical challenge to it. So I'm accustomed to schlepping up and down the hill to get to downtown. So I know it's doable and I know we can create some meaningful linkages to downtown and link it with mass transit. We designed the transit center here in town so I'm all over mass transit, getting GMT. So when we get into the housing, we're going to look at every style of housing we can think of. The sky's the limit. It's going to be rental for sale, townhouses, tuplexes, triplexes, single family, large buildings. We're going to do whatever's appropriate for the site. Right now it's a blue sky conversation. We have no preconceptions. There's no agenda to what kind of housing we're going to put up there. What kind of income group, except for we want to make it affordable. As everybody knows, we have a shortage of affordable housing in this entire state and this community in general. So we're going to be looking at affordability both as something that people can buy and get equity and something people can rent. So we're going to look at everything in that respect. You know, it looks like we can get about 260 or zone for 260 units here, but we're thinking more of the, again, it's wide open, but thinking target more about half that for 130 units. And that's going to be aggressive in that respect. So obviously we're not going to build it up because this is a beautiful piece of property and there's a definitely a larger amount of the property we want to conserve and make it into that public use. However, regardless of what housing you build, the housing must have some kind of ramp or some for accessibility regardless. Oh, absolutely. Universal design. Universal design is extremely important. So, you know, the juries out here to listen today to see kind of what your housing preferences are as we move forward, but right now, like I said, it's totally a blue sky process. Great. I think so. Paul, if you could, Paul from Park Architecture is going to speak a little bit. One component of this project is very likely to be a public park or public access. So Paul is going to speak a little bit about that process. My name is Paul Simon. I'm a landscape architect with Park Architecture, LLC. And yes, we focus on park design, housing development work. And, you know, with 50 acres here, I think it's safe to say that there's going to be more green space than hardscape. So the focus will be much instead of trying to integrate a park. It's more integrating the housing to a park that's already there. So I think that's the thinking here. And of course, universal design is going to be important with that to make sure we have accessibility, not only to the housing units, but to the park features as well. So what I'd like to think about when we get into the breakout groups too are some of your thoughts with existing trail networks, both passive and active recreational opportunities to the site. Maybe some areas where you believe could have a great overlook, scenic areas, conservation areas as well that probably don't even need to be touched. Important buffer areas between adjacent residential neighborhoods and whatever you, everything's open basically. So we haven't drawn anything up yet. We just, we've walked the site as well and we've taken a look at this and we think there's tremendous opportunity and it's great that it's a large site because with the conservation style development, like Julia mentioned, like what we could do is really focus in on consolidating the housing in such a way that we're really emphasizing more of the park as the feature here instead of the housing as the feature, perhaps, because we have that opportunity as well. So thanks. Great, thanks, Paul. So that brings us to our group sessions. If anyone has any brief comments or questions I can take them, but otherwise. Yeah. People talk about affordable housing. What is the range of what's affordable these days? Is that, do you wanna jump in on that? Yeah, no, that's a great question. So we, affordability is mostly determined by the housing and urban development based on the individual's median income based on the area and based on their family size. So Habitat for Humanity, we work with very low income families that are range between 30% to 80% of area median income and that doesn't probably mean much to you, but for Orange County, or sorry, Washington County, a family of four, which is pretty, which is kind of the average, is somewhere around 30% that's $25,000 annually for the whole household, up to about $62,000 annually for the whole household. So that's who we work with. But the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board and Community Housing and Community Development, oftentimes they will go up, they can, I don't know how often they do, but they can go up to 120% of area median income, which off the top of my head, I think it's somewhere around 80 or $90,000 a year for a family of four. So that gives you an idea of just kind of the spectrum of incomes. Does that answer your question? If I wanna buy an affordable house. Oh, okay. What is the range of price that... Well, so the reason we look at the median income is because affordable is based on what you, what is affordable to you. So typically a house is considered affordable if your payments are less than 30% of your income. And so that's what's determined to be affordable. So when you look at, if it's a mortgage, you're looking at your escrow as well as your mortgage payment. So it's all those things combined. But typically that's what we're looking at. A lot of Vermonters is something like 35% of Vermonters are cost burden, which means they're paying more than 30% of their money on their house. But again, it depends on what your income is to determine what is actually affordable. The house that we just did in Barry, we gave a mortgage for $124,000. So I would say for the folks that we work with, it's usually somewhere between $100 and $150,000 is a mortgage. But that's different for different organizations. One thing we haven't mentioned either, and I think is the intent, we've worked with these other team members on developments that have a whole range of affordability right up to market too. And all intermixed. And that could be a possibility here. Yeah, I think it's, we know from our own experience, so a big part of component of Habitat's program is community. The volunteers that we work with is not only about making our houses more affordable by using volunteer labor, it's also about building a community, a network of support. Because we know that oftentimes poverty comes to folks that don't have a network of support. Folks that they can ask for money from, ask for a little bit of assistance here and there. And so we build that community. And we also know that means that we're intermixing low-income housing with moderate and high-income housing. So it is generally bad practice to do an exclusive affordable housing development. It doesn't lead to much financial success. And that's why we are really committed to having a mixed income community. Greg, we worked on one down in Hanover, Lebanon area right near the Dartmouth Hospital that has, I know, janitors from the hospital and- Mixed income. Head surgeon, we're living all in the same communities. Wide range. And it makes it a more vibrant community when you don't kind of organize income groups. So I saw there was two hands back there. I have one last question. Hi again? Yeah? In your affordability question, do you include the cost of utilities? The operating like utilities and stuff like that? So we include those in our, for us specifically, we include those in our, we look at what is their monthly operational expenses total. And so we kind of estimate that there's a certain amount that people are spending on those things. But we do, we do, we can factor in those things. A lot of times, mostly when we look at affordability, we're looking at debt to income ratio. So we're looking at what is your recurring debt? You know, car loans, private loans, credit cards, things like that. And for us and a lot of organizations, we usually don't want more than 10% of your income going directly towards recurring debt because then that bumps into that utility is an operating cost. But you know, one thing that we're really excited about is how it has been really pushing for high performance homes and we just rehabilitated a home in very a hundred year old Victorian to high performance standards. And why that's important for our homeowners is we're giving them an affordable mortgage. We're also saving the money on the utilities. And I see somebody from the passive housing institute and we, you know, we actually did a passive houses in East Montpelier for that same reason. We can help those utility costs. We want to save our homeowners when we build them. You kind of answered my question. I know the quiet mire and factoring in operational costs for heating and cooling and flood loads into a mortgage and everything. But if you can energy model those down to an extremely low level, doesn't that make the rental units and the units for the open market more affordable? So we can, I can't speak to rental units. We don't deal with rental units. So we'll have the rental units who you act as developer and pay the operational expenses. Unlikely that we will be building the rentals now. We only build home ownership. We'll be looking for partners. There's more about the market. We'll be looking for partners to take on your rental fees. Yeah, yeah. Well, it's no question when you bring down the operational loads for heating and cooling, not only are you acting in a climate action way, you're creating more renewables, you know, more renewable production on your net zero project will be available for other things like charging electric cars or so, yeah. And not to tout around who important, but as non-conventional mortgage lenders, we can look into those things. We can look at how much is this house going to save you and does that mean that you might have a little bit more flexibility on a mortgage? Banks don't really have that flexibility. I think there's some more momentum towards that direction where they want to start to consider that. I don't know how much has been done with that, but that's a, I appreciate your comment. That's about energy modeling can produce the most accurate estimates on plug loads, energy for heating and cooling, and also in sizing all your HVAC equipment. And there's cost savings there in smaller HVACs. I'm excited to hear more about it. Yes, you're the speaker. Claire? My question comes to like environmental. My question comes to environmental. Can or does habitat for humanity when in terms of this parcel or going forward with other parcels? Will they maybe include solar eating and other things like that? Solar panels? I think that's a great segue. Yeah, so the question is, no, no, that's great. The question is, will there be solar? And we don't know it yet, but we're ready to kind of hear those questions, take some notes. One of the breakout groups with Greg and Steve is gonna talk about housing and sustainability. And I thought if the folks in the two rows behind them and Larry, if you wanna jump over there, we'll get a plan there and some notes and start taking those questions. Paul, do you mind doing a park in the back? Sure. So if the last row and folks standing could hang out with Paul. My idea is here after about 10, 15 minutes, it'll rotate. So after about 45 minutes, you'll have a chance to share some thoughts and questions about each category. All right, I guess if everybody, I just have a couple more comments. I wanna let folks know about next steps so that you're continuing to be engaged in the process. Cool. So I first just wanna thank our engineering ventures and Gosses Bachman and partner architecture. Thank you for leading this. You guys were really smart. So thank you and appreciate you doing that. Yeah, I mean so I think this was an interesting structure. We were trying to develop a way that everybody got a chance to participate. I think a lot of times when you just get this type thing where I'm up here talking, it ends up being me or one other person like this way, everybody got a little chance to talk. And I know maybe 15 minutes wasn't enough to really dive into the details. It kind of felt like at about 15 minutes we got into the details. But the conversation doesn't have to stop here. I'm available. You all should have my contact information. You either got it on Front Porch Forum or I sent you a letter or a special invitation. I encourage you to be in touch with me to talk about this. If you had additional thoughts, something comes to you later. You're like, oh, Zach, I've got this thing. Get in touch with me. And I'm working directly with Kevin weekly. And we have a committee that's reviewing all this. So this is not the end of the conversation. We're gonna take everything you guys have gave us today, which was a lot I think. And we're gonna consolidate it into a couple design plans. So we'll have a little bit more. Our plan is to meet on June 21st right now. That's what I emailed about. But we have to kind of follow up after all this discussion. So it'll be June 21st here, 5.30, 7.30. Again, that was in the letter I sent to a butters and I also sent it on Front Porch Forum. We may need a little bit more time to work with our team and to pull these meetings together. And if that's the case, we will let you know. But that's gonna be our last public meeting before we complete the feasibility study. And then the next meeting after that will either happen or it won't. Because after we go through the designs, we look at the cost. We're gonna make a determination by August about whether we wanna move forward with this project or not. If we decide not to move forward with the project, the city gets all the work that we've done. And so they have the plans and they can move forward with it if they wanted to. But we're committed to this. We wanna make this happen. And your guys is buying to this project. Our local community members, our businesses, our butters, your buying makes this possible. And even though it's a challenging project. So our hope is that after we finish the feasibility study, get a green light that this is a kick-butt project and we wanna move forward. And the next meeting we will have will be a presentation of the site plan of this project. And then it's fundraising. So. Yeah, and Zach, it's fundraising. And for those that don't know how development works, it's the beginning of a formal review process with the planning to DRB and a lot more common opportunities. Thank you, yes. No, we don't go from there to building a street. It's probably a year and a half long of permitting for a street. And then a lot more permitting after that. So it's, you know, and we're thinking, we're doing a hundred units. This is multiple phases and it could be somewhere between five and 12 years before this whole thing is completed. It's a long, long-term project. But we don't know until we complete it. But thank you all for being here today. I really appreciate it. And Anastasia, you continue to be in touch. So have a nice rest of the evening. Thank you, Zach. Oh, yeah, and if you haven't, where's the sign-out sheet? Right here. Oh, okay. If you haven't signed our sign-up sheet, we would love to be in touch with you. So please come up and sign your name before you leave. But thank you again for joining us. How's it going? Great, how about you? Good. Thank you for that. Go by.