His home for sale, Hastings says he’s fine
What struck me in this article was that the particular developer had a Chapter 40B project with "market rate" housing units selling for over $1 million while the affordable housing was selling in the $170,000 range. This seemed like quite the range of prices. The story below provides information on these affordable units.
Affordable housing available in Hingham
Looking further at the project the "market rate" units start at $825,000. These "market rate" housing units exceed the average household in Hingham's ability to pay by nearly doble what they could pay. The median household income in Hingham being $110,699 in 2007 which would qualify them for just under a $400,000.
In fact, this affordable housing project, if it could be called that, will mix households with incomes of about $60,000 with households of about $170,000 to almost $275,000 annually.
Chapter 40B is intended to provide "equivalent" housing, such that you cannot tell the difference between the Chapter 40B units in a project and the market rate housing units. In a project with and 800% difference in unit sales prices, it is hard to imagine that the units are equivalent on the inside and outside.
Perhaps, the project in question could have been of greater benefit to Hingham than the 5 units (as a Chapter 40B project 25% would require at least 12 of the units be affordable???) of housing described by the Patriot Ledger article had the developer been required to provide a local housing trust with 25% of the gross project value to be used for development of appropriate mixed income housing.
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