Press: News clips

Senior housing draws resistance
by John Briggs
Free Press Staff Writer

A proposed 256-unit senior-housing and assisted-living complex, on 16 acres in Appletree Point close to the bike path in the New North End, is mobilizing neighborhood resistance.

Nearby residents defeated a proposal from Keystone Development Corp. in 2006 at the end of Starr Farm Road to build 148 units on 40 acres, and they're confident they can do it again.

"The whole group of us is up in arms," said Art Frank, whose home on Cumberland Road backs up against the site marked for development by Infill Development Services of Burlington. "We're not against development, but we're against the project being proposed. If he built seven houses back there, it'd be fine. We have enough traffic issues down here as it is."

Traffic to and from the development would move along Staniford Road, which residents say is too busy. About 40 New North End residents met Monday to discuss the Infill proposal and other development issues in their part of the city. When Bill Niquette of Infill tried to enter the meeting -- which he understood to be a Neighborhood Planning Assembly meeting -- to explain the project, they wouldn't let him in.

"There's no benefit from our view in anything but an open conversation at this point," Niquette said the day after that incident. "We're happy to sit down and meet with any group at any time. There's no benefit in being clandestine."

Infill applied Dec. 7 for a permit to build the infrastructure for the project. The application, accompanied by a 127-page explanation and blueprints, lays out the company's master plan for the entire undertaking.

One of the sections of the development will have 146 elderly apartment units, with as many as 80 of them designed as assisted living apartments. It will also have 24 rooming units for convalescent care.

Three additional building areas on the 15.74 acre plot will have additional apartments for the elderly and, according to the plans, as many as eight single, detached dwelling units for elderly residents.

Niquette said the term dwelling units may be misleading in terms of impact, given their small size.
He said that more than half of the total area will remain open and the wetlands on the land will be protected "from Day 1."

Open process
Infill anticipated objections to the size of the project, Niquette said, but wanted to provide a master plan from the outset rather than "nibble off a corner at a time."

"Here," he said, "folks can have a clean view of all the development intended for the site. It avoids the pretense that the project as a whole won't have an impact."

Niquette said 30 percent of the units would be reserved for low- and moderate-income residents and added: "I respectfully suggest this use is something people should be excited about."

Brian Pine, the city's housing director, said a September report from the Vermont Housing Finance Agency documented the acute need across the state -- and including Burlington --for senior housing.

"The zoning for that neighborhood is low density," he said, "but the city has offered a bonus for the last 20 years to encourage the building of low/moderate-income senior housing. That is still the city's policy."

He said he hadn't yetreviewed the Infill application and thuscouldn't comment on it, "but it has to go through the entire regulatory review process."

Pine said Niquette's experience as the executive director of development and financing for the Winooski downtown development project suggested that the Infill company "has the qualifications to address and mitigate the concerns that will be raised."
Neighborhood mobilizes

Lea Terhune, on the steering committee of Ward 4's NPA, helped organize Monday's neighborhood meeting, which she described as an outgrowth of, but not an official, NPA meeting. She said opposition to large developments in the New North End dates at least to the 1980s, when residents organized to protect open space and natural features and developed the idea of "neighborhood activity centers" -- mixed-use zones such as the Ethan Allen Shopping Center where businesses and residences exist close together.

That would be a better location for a project such as Infill's, she said, because the senior residents would be close to bus lines and a grocery store.

Lori Sullivan, who lives on Appletree Point Road and was involved in the Keystone fight, said the fine print in the plan suggested the project could have as many as 317 units -- an assessment Niquette denied, calling the 256-unit number firm.

"A number of neighbors are concerned about the scale of the project," Sullivan said, fearing it will change the character of the neighborhood forever. While they accepted that some building was inevitable on the land, she said, "this incarnation of this project is completely unacceptable to the neighbors."

"Traffic is a huge issue," she said. "Huge. And the protection of wetlands and the water quality on the beaches."

She and other opponents of the project said the assisted-living and convalescent-care portion of the project would generate ambulance trips to and from the apartments, adding to the traffic problems.

"This is not just a NIMBY issue," she said. "We're talking about the safety of children and people driving in this neighborhood and serious concerns about impacts on the wetlands. Traffic, I think, is probably what's going to kill this project."

With two nursing homes and the Heineberg Senior Housing building in the New North End, Sullivan said, "I'm not sure senior housing is needed in this part of town."

Sullivan said she and others have met with attorneys. "A number of us are organized," she said, and would be present as the Infill application moves through the layers of permitting, beginning with a presentation by Infill to the Conservation Board in early January. "We plan on being very organized in following this through."

Senior planner Scott Guston of the city's Planning and Zoning Department said bulldozers aren't likely to move into the neighborhood soon. "I suspect we'll be dealing with this for some years to come," he said.

Niquette said he hoped the project moves along quickly but is realistic.

"Some folks would rather have nothing there," he said. "I hope, over time, we can work things out with them. So far, everyone with whom we've met has been cordial, but they are reserving judgment.

"We're very proud of the project," he said. "We expect it will be approved, or we wouldn't have filed it."