Housing board commits $13.8 million for homes, parks and a Woodstock farm
An apartment building under construction in White River Junction in 2017, a reminder of the housing work under way in Vermont communities. The photograph is not of a project in the Oct. 1 awards. Photo: Artaxerxes, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
The Vermont Housing & Conservation Board, at its Oct. 1 meeting, committed $13.8 million in state, federal and philanthropic funding to affordable housing, manufactured-home communities, historic preservation and land conservation, the agency announced Oct. 7.
The awards, VHCB said, will help create 35 new affordable senior apartments, preserve and rehabilitate 52 rental homes, permanently protect 44 lots in two manufactured-home communities, replace failing heating and ventilation systems in 82 affordable apartments, restore an 11-building historic hill farm, and conserve more than 725 acres of farmland, forest and natural areas.
“These investments show what Vermont can do when communities, landowners, and public partners work together,” Executive Director Gus Seelig said.
The largest housing award is $5.42 million to Cathedral Square Corporation for Severance Park in Colchester, a new 35-home, SASH-supported senior building in the town’s Downtown Growth Center for households earning 50 to 80 percent of area median income. It would be the first residential building in a planned mixed-use neighborhood of up to 585 homes, the board said. Champlain Housing Trust received $1.5 million to preserve and rehabilitate 52 homes at South Meadow Apartments in Burlington’s South End, part of a 148-home mixed-income neighborhood, and to place permanent affordability restrictions on 44 of those homes.
In Rutland, Cornerstone Housing Partners received $1,325,500 to acquire and preserve the Allen Street and Brookside manufactured-home communities, with 44 homesites. Residents had voted for Cornerstone to buy the parks after working with the Cooperative Development Institute, VHCB said, a step meant to prevent a sale that could have closed the Allen Street community. Evernorth received $1.75 million to replace 82 failing Minotair heating and ventilation units, after the manufacturer went bankrupt in 2025, at properties in Hartford, Morrisville, West Burke, Bristol and Burlington, in work with Twin Pines Housing, Downstreet, RuralEdge, Addison Housing Works and COTS, the board said. The replacements are planned over five years and are intended to preserve heat for 93 homes.
Other awards include $500,000, described as VHCB’s largest historic-preservation grant to date, to help restore King Farm in Woodstock, a 157-acre National Register property with 11 historic buildings dating to 1793, including classroom and learning-kitchen space for Woodstock High School’s CRAFT program. The board also granted $50,000 to Headwaters Community Trust for predevelopment work on permanently affordable housing at the former 155-acre Sterling College campus in Craftsbury, where the group has raised more than $2 million in private pledges, VHCB said.
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