Housing Opens New Life for Two Families

By MANDY LOCKE

The phone call came at just the right moment for one Island family.

The couple - we'll call them Joe and Sarah - was
being driven out of yet another rental, this time because of the
owner's decision to put the house on the market. They know the
routine all too well, having moved more than a dozen times in their
eight years of living on the Island.

Then Joe and Sarah learned that their family was one of two selected
to live in a duplex on Halcyon Way in West Tisbury, a collaborative
affordable housing project completed earlier this month. They had
finally climbed to the top of the regional housing authority's
list - nearly 200 names long - of families in search of
affordable housing.

"The news came not a moment too soon. We'd been on that
list for two years," Joe said this week. "Before this, we
had resigned ourselves to being the generation of downward
mobility."

Just days before the call from the authority, Joe and Sarah had
scrounged together $3,000 to put toward a 500-square-foot rental cottage
in Tisbury for the remainder of the winter.

But it was their five-month-old baby girl who made that latest
rental option harder to stomach. Because the old cottage contained
lead-based paint, Joe had invested $400 in supplies to strip and repaint
the cottage's walls before they set up yet another temporary home.

"We'd already decided that if something didn't
happen in the next year, we were going to have to pack up and go,"
Joe said, obviously relieved that they'll be able to enjoy Island
life a while longer.

With jobs in the restaurant, construction and auto repair
businesses, they'll earn enough to pay monthly rent of $885. And
now that they no longer have to shoulder rents as high as $1,400 a month
for a single room in the summer, they will for the first time be able to
start saving for a down payment on a house of their own.

"No matter where you live, there is always this underlying
feeling of it not being your home," Joe said. "It certainly
added stress to our lives. At any point in time, you don't know
where you'll go next season."

Joe and Sarah are two of the 2,000 or so Islanders who struggle to
secure an affordable place to live in a community where median home
prices soar 85 percent above the state average, even as the average wage
is 27 per cent below average.

Their opportunity comes thanks to a gift of sweat and time from an
Island builder and fellow tradesmen invested in the affordable housing
problem.

Standing on a newly finished terra cotta kitchen floor at lunchtime
Monday, veteran builder Tucker Hubbell deflected praise, rattling
through a list of businesses and individuals who donated goods and
services at cost to bring the bottom line for the two new apartments
down to $213,000.

But other affordable housing advocates were quick to praise Mr.
Hubbell's willingness to step up and address the affordable
housing problem.

"I have a new kind of faith today," said Island
Affordable Housing chairman John Abrams. "It's a faith that
comes from the way that Tucker Hubbell took on this project."

Using land donated to the regional housing authority in conjunction
with approval of a subdivision in 1990, the Island Affordable Housing
Development Corporation hired Mr. Hubbell to build two 950-square-foot
two-bedroom apartments. He and fellow carpenter Ben Clark took on the
year-long project, laboring for only an hourly wage.

After obtaining many materials at cost and holding a volunteer
shingling party earlier this fall, the duplex was ultimately built at an
expense of around $112 per square foot - about $70 less than the
average new home built on the Island.

The regional housing authority has secured a $100,000 state grant,
which will pay nearly half of the already modest project cost. The
$1,770 in combined rent payments from the two resident families will go
to pay the remaining $113,000 mortgage.

"I think it's wonderful people were willing to do
this," Joe said. "Knowing this, I will do anything I can to
help in the future. My hats are off to them. Had I known, I would have
been out there helping."

Both Joe and Sarah and the other family selected to live in the
Halcyon Way duplex earn less than 80 per cent of the county's
median income - $42,000 for a family of three. The rent and
utilities will not exceed 35 per cent of their income.

Now Joe and Sarah are counting their blessings that the gamble of
life on the Vineyard dealt them a full house just in time for the
holidays.

"We didn't want to leave the Island," Joe said.
"We really appreciate the beauty of this place. Our
daughter's an Islander, and we'd like to keep her here as
long as we can."