Downstreet Housing and Community Development is pursuing permitting for five single-family, shared-equity homes at Mad River Meadows in Waitsfield.
The town of Waitsfield issued a letter of support for the project last month.
Angela Harbin, executive director at Downstreet, which owns and manages the housing at Mad River Meadows, Evergreen Place and Verdmont, said that current thinking calls for building five 1,000-square-foot single-family homes on one-tenth of an acre each. Each home will be three bedrooms, one bath and net zero energy.
“The final details about the units depend on how much we can fundraise. We’re modeling these after a site in Montpelier where we’ll start site work in the fall. In Waitsfield, if we’re able to pull in additional funds, we might build bigger homes than we are in Montpelier. These units could have basements,” Harbin said.
Harbin said the fact that Waitsfield already has municipal water and will soon have municipal wastewater has a lot to do with the feasibility of this project. These homes could come on the market in 2026, she said.
The price point for the five new Waitsfield homes will be around $200,000 with the shared equity model and grant.
“We’re estimating they will appraise at $300,000 and the sale price will be $200,000 or maybe lower depending on how we can put it together,” she said, explaining that homeowner assistance will help people qualify for other resources in terms of financing.
Harbin said that with a shared equity model, a shared equity provider, like Downstreet, owns the land. Downstreet works in Washington, Lamoille, and part of Orange County, providing shared equity opportunities. The program provides subsidies for qualified buyers to make the mortgages affordable at 120% of Average Median Income for that county.
Homes in these programs, she said, become permanently affordable for future buyers because 75% of the home’s appreciation in value at the time of resale and 25% of the appreciation plus some capital improvements go with the original buyer.
The letter of support from the Waitsfield Select Board is preliminary and one of the things Downstreet will need to seek its first round of funding for these five homes from the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board.
In that letter the town expressed support for the project and noted: “This project will provide Waitsfield with much needed affordable and workforce housing. The site is located within 0.8 miles of two grocery stores and the Waitsfield Farmers Market. It is 1.8 miles from Waitsfield Elementary School. Mad River Path has one of its entrances from the Mad River Housing site, providing residents with path access to amenities in the village. For all of the reasons stated above the town of Waitsfield supports Downstreet Housing’s Mad River Meadows Homeownership Project,” the select board wrote in its letter.
