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Barracks ready-made for housing

EDITORIAL | Paul McMorrow

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December 27, 2011|By Paul McMorrow

Vicksburg Square at the former Fort Devens Army base includes buildings… (Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff )

BY ALL reasonable measures, the old Army barracks at Devens is a perfect place to build housing. The barracks at Devens’s Vicksburg Square sit near an active rail line, down the street from a growing cluster of jobs. Utilities are already in place. Building at Devens means putting a historic development back into productive use, instead of bulldozing forests to build far-flung subdivisions. It’s exactly what planners envision when they talk about building smart.

But this is Massachusetts, so reasonable measures don’t apply. Instead, Boston-based developer Trinity Financial is facing stiff opposition to its bid to turn an abandoned barracks complex into housing for seniors, veterans, and working-class families. Devens includes territory in three towns — Harvard, Ayer, and Shirley — and Trinity has to get all three to go along with the proposal. Officials in Ayer and Harvard are kicking up plenty of opposition.

These kinds of fights are precisely why housing costs are such a burden for Massachusetts residents. States that build housing grow jobs, while states that don’t build housing don’t grow. The inability to add to the state’s supply of housing also explains why apartment rents around Boston have hit record highs in the middle of a deep economic slump. If Trinity is having difficulty building 246 new apartments on an old base that used to house 9,000 people, where, exactly, can anyone build around here?

Getting permission to build housing in Devens is inherently difficult. The law that governs the former Army base was written nearly two decades ago, at the depths of New England’s last real estate crash. It protected neighboring towns’ battered real estate markets by capping the amount of housing allowed on Devens at 282 units. To lift the housing cap, the three towns all have to agree. While the state agency MassDevelopment owns the former base, the bulk of it lies in Harvard. Meanwhile, suspicion of MassDevelopment also runs high in Ayer, where most of the Trinity Financial site lies.

Thousands of military housing units were demolished after the base’s 1996 closure, and since then, Devens’s neighbors have come to think of it as a 4,400-acre industrial park. This view was evident in 2006, when Harvard and Ayer voters shot down a bid to spin off the complex as the state’s 352nd town, and again in 2009, when Ayer voters torpedoed a proposal to allow the construction of 350 apartments at the abandoned barracks.