Bradley Square’s Broken Dream

The Island Affordable Housing Fund has reached the end of the road with Bradley Square and this week the depressing but unsurprising news was announced: Bradley Square, the rundown Masonic avenue property planned as an innovative bit of small-scale urban renewal in the heart of Oak Bluffs, will be put up for sale. And the plan to convert the old Denniston House, the site of the first African American church on the Island, to affordable apartments and office space for the Vineyard chapter of the NAACP, will be scrapped.

So what went wrong at Bradley Square?

If it’s true that hindsight is twenty-twenty, just about everything.

The story of the project begins with the story of a previous executive director, who it is now clear, did much damage before he left the fund fourteen months ago. Patrick Manning led the charge to buy the Denniston House property in the summer of 2007, all with much fanfare, although looking back today it sounds more like the workings of a snake oil salesman. The pitch went like this: The property was on the market, highly valuable, and the window of opportunity was very small. The asking price was just over $900,000, and time was short. Money was needed for a down payment so the Island Affordable Housing Fund, a nonprofit organization that was itself the hottest new trend on the Vineyard, could buy it and convert it to badly-needed housing for Islanders of modest means. No price was too great to pay for this noble project.

An emergency fund-raising campaign was launched; the newspapers wrote stories about it and about $200,000 was raised, practically over a weekend. Mr. Manning and his fund were jubilant; the dream of Bradley Square was launched.

There were plenty of bumps with the neighbors and the Martha’s Vineyard Commission as a very large, very dense-for-the-neighborhood project with a highly questionable business plan went through a rigorous process of review, but here again, an emotional zeitgeist of sorts trumped common sense. Affordable housing was so important. Judgment was clouded. Bradley Square was approved. In August of 2008 Gov. Deval Patrick and Prof. Charles Ogletree were summoned for a ceremonial groundbreaking.

No one wanted to talk about the fact that there was no money to build the project and that the fund was carrying a huge mortgage of $700,000 on the property with no secure means to pay it down.

One year later Mr. Manning was gone and the Island Affordable Housing Fund was broke, forced to pull the plug on its commitment to the county rental assistance program, putting hundreds of Islanders at risk for losing their stable year-round rentals. And the Bradley dream began to break apart, one piece at a time. Executive director T. Ewell Hopkins, who took over thirteen months ago, has been working tirelessly with an impossibly bad situation, facing not only the tanking economy that has impacted nonprofits broadly, but revelations that soured donors on the fund specifically: The housing fund had raised far less than the huge amounts of money Mr. Manning claimed it had raised. And the fund that was set up to provide affordable housing for needy Islanders had been extravagant; Mr. Manning paid $20,000 for a dance floor for one summer fundraiser and earned hefty commissions on large gifts, all with his board’s approval. Mr. Hopkins swiftly ended these practices, but by that time the horse was out of the barn.

Looming even larger at this juncture is the future of the fund itself, which is out of money and quite possibly at the end of its own road.

But when there is no money left, there is nothing left to do but close the door on a nonprofit.

And absent a small miracle, that may be the only commonsense option left for the Island Affordable Housing Fund.