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Company spurs lower-cost house project
BY NICK GRABBE STAFF WRITER
[ Originally published on: Friday, February 17, 2006, Daily Hampshire Gazette ]
AMHERST- The price of houses in Amherst has gotten so high that most teachers, police officers and firefighters can't afford to buy one.
That's ridiculous! said Cinda Jones, vice president of W. D. Cowls, the timber and building supply company in North Amherst.
So she decided to donate a building lot.
Graduate students at the University of Massachusetts will design a small house on the donated lot on Henry Street. The cost to the buyer will be the construction expenses of $200,000 to $250,000, about half the price of the least expensive new house in town.
'We know there should be more housing in this town for the people who teach our kids and protect our safety - and the people who work in our sawmill,' Jones said.
The goal is to demonstrate that it's possible to build truly affordable housing, and to create a prototype that can be duplicated, she said.
The average price of the homes that sold in Amherst in 2005 was $373,600. The price of a building lot has increased from $75,000 to $175,000 in the last five to eight years, said builder Peter Jessop.
This spring, a group of UMass graduate students will compete to see who can design the best four-bedroom, 800-square-foot house on the Henry Street site. The winning design will be transformed into architectural drawings in the fall, said Max Page, associate professor of architecture and history.
Page is one of the organizers of a conference this week on innovative solutions to the problem of housing affordability. About 115 people are expected at the conference at the Campus Center, which continues today, he said.
Jones and Page are both Amherst natives who have seen their hometown get much more expensive because of a high demand for housing and a low supply of buildable land.
'The town is dedicated to the beauty of its landscape and preserved a lot of land, and the campuses are not developable,' Page said. 'Because of the number of students in the community, there's a fear of denser housing because it implies it will be like apartment complexes, which people are scared of. Our job is to show how it can be attractive.'
Corrections
[ Originally published on: Wednesday, February 22, 2006 ]
AMHERST- A story in the Feb. 17 Gazette misrepresented the intended price of a small house to be built by University of Massachusetts school of architecture students on land donated by W.D. Cowls, Inc. The projected market price of the home will be $250,000, including about $150,000 in construction costs. The extra $100,000 would be used to fund future UMass architecture programs.
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