New affordable condos coming to Winooski by next year
Rendering from Champlain Housing Trust plans.
A new affordable housing project, consisting of 20 condos on Malletts Bay Avenue, should be completed by next year.
The Champlain Housing Trust will build the future Butternut Station, with some coordination on outreach being done with the city of Winooski. Plans call for completion by July 1, 2022.
The project is designed to help alleviate the housing crunch in Winooski and in the county. According to the 2020 Vermont Housing Assessment, there's less than a 2% rental vacancy rate in Chittenden County, meaning that the amount of available rental space is quickly drying up and houses are not staying empty long.
This is coupled with high average rent prices in Chittenden county, with the average rent in the area hitting $1,187 and home prices hitting $304,000.
Winooski residents who are Black, Indigenous and people of color are particularly impacted by a tight and expensive housing market, said Yasamin Gordon, Winooski’s Equity director.
“Winoosski's census data shows that it's BIPOC residents continue to fall well below the poverty line as compared to their white neighbors, and the majority of our population are renters,” Gordon said. “If someone needs to rent a 2 bedroom, they will need to work 81 hour per week in order to afford that. I don't know any humans who could work an 80 hour work week period, let alone do so and maintain their physical and emotional health.”
The CHT plans to pitch these new condos with a focus on providing housing to BIPOC folks in the Winooski area.
“We’re going to be communicating and coordinating with those organizations that serve people of color and making sure they have the information that's needed in order to be an owner,” said Michael Monte, the CEO of the Champlain Housing Trust.
Gordon says that the Champlain Housing Trust recently began coordinating with the city to get more BIPOC renters and buyers in the Butternut Station project.
“My hope would be that the city looks for my expertise in providing opportunities for community voice to be not only heard, but also considered during this process, and ensuring that
transparency and information is communicated effectively and equitably throughout the community to ensure residents are in the know,” Gordon said.
The structure the CHT plans to use to keep homes affordable in Butternut Station is to provide an investment of 20% to 50% of the sales cost while also agreeing to buy back the housesat a limited number in the future.
Units at Butternut Station will cost anywhere between $184,500 for a rowhouse to $149,500 for a flat. Prices are lower due to CHT covering about half the true cost of a unit.
This isn’t new territory for the CHT to cover, either. According to their description on the Lake Champlain Chamber of Commerce, they already operate over 2000 apartments in the area.
“We have, at this point, a couple hundred apartments we’ll be building over the next year, but we haven’t been able to build many big condominiums for sale. It's hard for us to do principally because there's a lot of support for affordable rental housing but not a lot of support for affordable homeownership,” Monte said. “We do expect to be doing more condominiums and developments in the future.”
