Swampscott Receives Grant to Develop Housing Production Plan

Editor’s note: The process for 40B projects being built in town has been clarified below.

Swampscott has received a $10,000 grant from the Department of Housing and Community Development to help the town create a Housing Production Plan.

That money, along with funds from the Massachusetts Area Planning Council (MAPC), will allow Swampscott to fully develop a Housing Production Plan focused on identifying the housing needs in the community.

Town Planner Pete Kane said that Housing Production Plans generally focus on affordability of housing in a given community, but Swampscott’s plan will be “looking at affordability as well as senior housing. Do we have the proper mix for seniors to stay in our community?”

Kane said that a particular benefit of Housing Production Plans is that they protect a town from state-reviewed affordable housing, or 40B, projects. He explained that the state mandates each town must offer 10 percent affordable housing and if the town doesn’t have a plan for achieving that percentage, the state can review and approve projects proposed by developers, as opposed to those projects needing to go through local review.

With a Housing Production Plan, developers can still propose 40B housing, but the projects must go through local channels to get it built, he explained.

Swampscott’s Housing Production Plan will be a chapter in the larger master plan currently being developed, Kane said. Earlier this year, the MAPC awarded Swampscott a District Local Technical Assistance grant to create the Housing Production Plan. The new grant from DHCD will offset some of the costs of MAPC’s work.

“I had originally scoped out the ’costs’ of a Housing Production Plan for Swampscott at about $23,000,” Kane explained. “The combination of the DHCD and MAPC grants will cover the entire cost of this plan, no local money will be needed.”

The Housing Production Plan is being developed simultaneously with Swampscott’s 2025 Master Plan. The current timeline has the HPP being finalized by the end of 2015.