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Photo Pru Sowers
Housing and planning consultant Karen Sunnarborg presented a draft assessment of Truro’s need for affordable housing to the Housing Authority this week. |
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Housing gap grows
By Pru Sowers
Banner Correspondent
TRURO — With a large disparity looming between local housing prices and what the average resident can afford to pay, Truro’s need for affordable housing is becoming acute, according to a consultant hired by the town’s Housing Authority.
Karen Sunnarborg, a Boston-based housing, planning and community development consultant, presented a draft of her study of Truro’s housing needs to the Housing Authority on Friday. In it, she said there is a $350,000 “affordability gap” between the median home price in Truro and what a local resident with a median income can afford.
“Truro is a very unusual place,” she told the housing board. “It has average lower incomes and very high housing prices. The town has obvious needs for affordable housing.”
Sunnarborg is in Phase 1 of a two-phased project for the Housing Authority, where she will assess the need for affordable housing in town and then help develop strategies to create that housing. She expects to have a final assessment ready for Housing Authority members by the end of July.
Assessing Truro’s need for affordable housing may be easier than creating a plan to meet those needs. There are several challenges to building affordable housing in the area, Sunnarborg said, including a lack of infrastructure — there is no town-provided water and sewer —, zoning laws that prohibit year-round occupancy of condominiums, and the fact that there is little developable land because approximately 70 percent of Truro is owned by the National Seashore.
“Truro is a victim of its own natural beauty. People want to live here and are a major component of the dynamic for housing,” Sunnarborg said.
“We don’t want this to be a town or area just for rich folks,” said Art Hultin, Housing Authority member. “But the challenges are extremely large due to the cost of land.”
While Sunnarborg is still working on a final assessment of Truro’s need for affordable housing, some of the statistics she presented on Friday clearly point to a growing concern. In addition to the “affordability gap,” Sunnarborg reported that 61 percent of Truro’s current housing stock is classified as seasonal housing, versus 32 percent for Cape Cod and 3.6 percent in Massachusetts.
Conversely, as of 1999, 11 percent of Truro’s year-round residents were below the poverty line, as defined by federal guidelines, Sunnarborg said. That compares to 7 percent in Barnstable County and 9 percent statewide.
“There is a large older population in Truro, by which I mean people in their prime earning category. That relates a lot to how expensive it is to live here. So you have people in their early earning category who can’t afford to live here,” Sunnarborg said, adding, “The only area of [housing] affordability is for condos, but you’re not allowed to live in them year-round.”
Read the entire text of this article in this week’s Banner.
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Jun 15th, 2006