Ground broken in West Brattleboro on 31 apartments at the former Dalem’s Chalet
Main Street in downtown Brattleboro, the nearest city center to the Swan Pond Lane project in West Brattleboro. Photo: Artaxerxes, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Windham & Windsor Housing Trust and Evernorth broke ground Oct. 15 on a $16.7 million apartment building at 72 Swan Pond Lane in West Brattleboro, the first new housing in a multi-phase plan to remake the former Dalem’s Chalet property.
The 31 affordable apartments will rise on the 17-acre parcel, The Commons reported, and about half will be permanent supportive housing for people who have experienced homelessness. Many of those residents already live on the site in former motel rooms the trust converted in 2020. Vermont Business Magazine, in a release from the developers, put the current community at 27 homes, with services coordinated by Groundworks Collaborative.
“Unlike many groundbreaking ceremonies, in our experience as housing developers, we begin with a blank canvas where there’s no existing residents on the site,” WWHT Executive Director Elizabeth Bridgewater told The Commons. “But this parcel is already home to a community of people.” She said construction would be “messy and very inconvenient” for the next 12 to 16 months. Gene Clerkin, a Citizens Bank senior vice president for community development, told the newspaper the building should reach stable occupancy by April 2028.
The new building will include an office for on-site support staff, a community room, storage and laundry, rooftop solar, and electric heating and cooling, both accounts said. Vermont Integrated Architecture of Middlebury designed it, and New Hampshire-based HP Cummings Construction Company is the builder. Groundworks will keep serving supportive-housing residents.
A separate “Phase Zero” covers infrastructure for the whole development: a redesigned entrance, the new Swan Pond Lane, and water, sewer, electric and stormwater systems. Federal funding for that work came through congressionally directed spending secured by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, Bridgewater said, without which loading all shared infrastructure costs onto the first building would have made the project unworkable. Later phases call for eight shared-equity homes for sale and about 30 more rental apartments, including homes in the historic Chalet building, whose banquet hall is slated to be preserved.
The Commons, citing the developers, said the 31 apartments are financed with about $8.5 million in federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit equity from Evernorth’s Housing New England Fund VII, more than $6 million from the Vermont Housing and Conservation Board, a $6.8 million construction loan from Citizens Bank plus sponsorship of an $850,000 Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston Affordable Housing Program award, a $400,000 permanent loan from the Evernorth Loan Fund, and contributions from Efficiency Vermont and Green Mountain Power. Clerkin said Citizens also made an equity investment of about $4.5 million in Evernorth’s fund.
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