In the past two months, I’ve been on the phone with a lot of housing experts. The world of housing — affordable or not — is complex and nuanced and imbued with centuries of history. I am wading through it all for the first time; they’ve been doing it for years.
Which made me think, why not ask them to share their years of accumulated knowledge? Not just with me, but with readers of The Eagle.
In the coming weeks, I’ll continue this discussion with different local housing experts. Some will be lawyers. Others will be contractors. Some may be activists. I’ll be asking them the same set of questions, but something you learn quickly in the housing world is that people agree on a lot and disagree on a whole lot more.
This week I sat down with Eileen Peltier, the CEO of regional housing nonprofit Hearthway. Keep reading for her thoughts on the housing challenges facing Berkshire County residents and what tools we have to solve them.
THE EAGLE: Can you share a little about yourself and your housing story?
PELTIER: My name is Eileen Peltier and I fondly say that I grew up an Irish Catholic Kennedy liberal from Massachusetts, with a real sense of social mission and purpose and that one person can change the world. My family, for the most part, work in some [service] field, whether they’re teachers or nonprofit leaders, so it’s always been a big part of who I was. But then I went to business school, which is a strange turn of events if you’re thinking of the save-the-world sector. But that was the way I thought I could make a difference.
I think I’ve always been in the place of using my business acumen to make a positive difference for our neighbors and the people of our community. So that work has brought me through health care [and] HIV/AIDS for many years, and then I found the world of affordable housing about 17 years ago, and that has been my passion ever since. The relationship between health with a capital H health care and the idea of health and well being, meaning physical, mental, social, financial, all those aspects of it and how that relates to having a place to call home has been my passion for many years.
THE EAGLE: What challenges do residents of Berkshire County face in finding housing that is affordable?
PELTIER: I think that the Berkshires, like most places across this country, are struggling today with housing affordability and housing availability. What is different about the Berkshires is the rural nature of many of our communities. [People] need to have transportation to get anywhere, to be employed. That lack of transportation infrastructure, the lack of services close to home — those are some of the core challenges that rural communities have.
And then, of course, in the Berkshires, as in much of New England, we have this challenge of an aging housing stock. So housing quality is a really big challenge. And when we’re in this kind of emergent situation of housing affordability and availability being a huge problem, I think we tend to pay less attention to housing quality. I struggle with that, I think we all struggle with that, but it sort of becomes the third priority. You heard me mention earlier how I believe that health and home are deeply connected. If the home is not physically a healthy place to be, that can cause all kinds of challenges to our physical and mental health. So I do worry about that for the Berkshires.
THE EAGLE: How do those challenges fit within the nationwide housing crisis?
PELTIER: This country has had a long history of being in what we often term as a housing crisis. Housing affordability [and] housing availability have been issues in this country for a very, very long time for certain populations. What I think is a little different about the current crisis is that it is not just driven by your inability to afford [housing] because people at higher incomes also can’t afford it. So I think the whole crisis is getting a little more attention.
The housing crisis in this country is deeply rooted in many different factors. Something as simple as the size of the family unit, right? Our supply doesn’t match our need. If a third of the adults in the country live alone and they’re in a three bedroom house, we’re losing stock and capacity. But [it’s] also very much related to issues around zoning. For certain populations, of course, there was all kinds of redlining and discrimination against people of color. Our housing history isn’t the best, probably going all the way back to our roots. And that idea of owning our own piece of earth and having our own home — the American dream — has a lot of nuance to it, that in some degree has created the situation we’re in today.
THE EAGLE: What is needed to address barriers to accessing affordable housing and what tools are currently in the toolbox to do so?
PELTIER: I think looking at the components of the Affordable Homes Act is a great way to answer that question. There’s a few different things that happen in that Affordable Homes Act. One being money, lots of money to help develop and subsidize housing. That’s necessary.
There’s also a lot of policy change. There’s many things on the policy side, whether it’s zoning or accessory dwelling units to increase housing availability and affordability. There’s a lot of policy that can be a barrier to housing affordability and housing availability. And then the last piece of the Affordable Home Act is that there are places where the governor or the president can issue executive orders that can immediately address some of these challenges.
So I think it’s a combination of all of those things that put what we need in the toolbox. And then to operationalize it, we need committed community members to do that work. I work for a nonprofit that does a lot of things on housing, but I don’t do it in a vacuum. I need municipal leaders and volunteers and community members to be part of the solution and to welcome housing and affordable housing as a solution.
Eileen Peltier, CEO of regional housing nonprofit Hearthway, spoke with The Eagle about the housing challenges facing Berkshire County residents and what tools we have to solve them.
THE EAGLE: How is Hearthway helping organizations navigate the county’s housing crisis and access housing that is affordable to them?
PELTIER: Our mission statement is that through collaboration and innovation, Hearthway will find solutions to housing for all people across the counties of the Berkshires. We’re good neighbors, great navigators and allies to all.
So that’s our mission statement. But in practical terms, essentially what we do is we operate in several different areas. First and foremost, we are providers of information for anyone at any income level with any type of housing question to crisis. And that’s through what’s called our Housing Consumer Education Center. That’s a big part of what we do.
So that’s step one. That we’re that front door for anyone who has an issue. We then also operate a rental assistance program that is for emergent need. So when an individual is in a crisis financially or in a legal situation with a landlord, we are able to work with them. We provide financial assistance through the state for those types of emergencies and we provide the technical support around other types of emergencies that aren’t financial.
Then in addition to that, we are operators or landlords of about 1,000 apartments across the Berkshires. We also have some commercial spaces. Within those apartments, not only are we trying to address the housing crisis by actually adding apartments to the portfolio in the Berkshires, but we’re operating them in a way that very much speaks to our mission and ties back to how I was describing my own personal aspirations. Our apartments are not only four walls and a roof, but they are a home, they are a community, they’re a place for individuals to thrive.
So we not only focus on the affordability and ensuring that people can pay their bills and not make difficult choices between paying the rent and buying the food for the week, we also are trying to help connect residents with each other and with their community because we believe in the power of community.
And then lastly, probably the most upstream thing that we do is we are actually working with municipalities in various communities for new opportunities to develop housing. So an example of that might be Eagle Mill in the town of Lee. [It was] looking for a developer for many years, and we stepped in and were able to do that.