Cozy Hearth Project Backers to Appeal

Hotly Debated Owner-Built Home Plan for Watcha Path Area of
Edgartown Will Go to State Housing Board

By IAN FEIN

At its first public hearing in May of last year, affordable housing
advocates hailed it as a model grassroots effort that would allow
working class residents to stay on the Vineyard, while conservationists
warned that it would set a dangerous precedent for development density
in an environmentally sensitive area.

Now, after a lengthy regulatory process at both the municipal and
regional levels, passions on both sides remain strong and the fate of
the Cozy Hearth subdivision is still unclear.

The Edgartown zoning board of appeals last week approved the project
with a reduced density, but developers immediately vowed to take their
case to the Massachusetts Housing Appeals Committee. The 11 acres of
wooded land off Watcha Path have become the front lines of a living
battleground between the sometimes competing interests of affordable
housing and environmental conservation.

"From our perspective it's the right project, but in the
wrong place," said Matthew Pelikan, Islands program manager for
The Nature Conservancy, which has focused its Vineyard activities on
protecting the globally rare coastal sandplain habitat near Watcha Path.

"As a Vineyarder, I have a lot of sympathy for people involved
in this project. They are the kind of people you want to share an Island
with," Mr. Pelikan said. "But as a conservation
organization, we really look at that area as an invaluable ecological
resource."

Affordable housing developer John Abrams sees it a little
differently.

"It's not an ideal place, but I think of small
affordable housing efforts like I think about wind farms," said
Mr. Abrams, who is also a vocal supporter of the Cape Wind project
proposed for Nantucket Sound. "It's not about: ‘Is
this the place or isn't it?' It's about: ‘We
need more and more, and we need to do them all.' "

The Cozy Hearth project has created a different kind of conflict
because it was proposed by a group of Vineyard residents who banded
together to build housing for themselves using Chapter 40B - a
state law that allows affordable housing developments to skirt most
zoning regulations - but in an area that is important to both the
water quality of coastal ponds and the biodiversity of rare moths. The
original plans call for building 11 homes on 11 acres in a three-acre
minimum zone. Mr. Pelikan in a letter to the Martha's Vineyard
Commission, which reviewed the project as a development of regional
impact, last August warned that relaxing requirements for a project like
Cozy Hearth would render existing zoning virtually meaningless.

Commission members noted the undesirable location when they approved
the Cozy Hearth project last December. Smart growth planning principals
call for housing developments to be built near existing development and
infrastructure, while conservation groups have focused efforts in the
coastal sandplains precisely because large tracts remain undeveloped.

"This has always been the rural, agricultural part of
Edgartown. It's the last of it; this is it," said Watcha
Path resident Robert Greene, who lived out of a wind-powered tent when
he first moved to the neighborhood more than two decades ago and now has
horses, hens and turkeys sauntering around an open field on his six-acre
lot. "If you put a suburban subdivision in a rural area,
you're going to take away the places where people can have small
farms. We won't have any of them left."

Cozy Hearth president William Bennett explained that economic
realities determined the proposed location. When he and a group of
family members, employees and friends joined together more than four
years ago, the Watcha Path site was the only one available in their $1
million price range that would allow them to build enough homes.

"To be honest with you, I didn't give any thought to
where it was. There was nothing else available at that time that we
could afford or that would work," Mr. Bennett said. "Smart
growth is great if you have the resources to find the right places. But
the phrase ‘beggers can't be choosers' comes to
mind."

Citing environmental concerns and potential impact to neighbors, the
zoning board late last month approved the project with only nine homes
on the 11 acres. But Mr. Bennett this week maintained that the original
proposed density was appropriate for the location and necessary for the
lots to remain affordable.

"From the start, we as a group worked together to find a
number of units on our land that we thought was reasonable," he
said. "I don't see any affordable housing developments from
now that will be able to afford an acre per lot. Developments that come
down the pike are going to have a lot more density than we have."

The Cozy Hearth corporation is now off to the state housing appeals
committee, an independent adjudicatory body within the state department
of housing and community development. At least two other Chapter 40B
proposals ­on the Island - Fairwinds in Vineyard Haven and the
Wampanoag Tribal Housing in Aquinnah - were appealed to the
committee but then resolved at the local level. Edgartown zoning board
chairman Martin (Skip) Tomassian Jr. last week chose not to comment on
the appeal.

Mr. Bennett yesterday said he plans to continue forward, even though
many of the Islanders originally involved in the project have left the
group or plan to leave in the near future. Prior to any legal expenses
associated with the appeal, each of the eight lots available for Cozy
Hearth members would cost roughly $170,000, according to numbers
presented to the zoning board last month.

"The people who are leaving right now are the people who
needed it most. And those are the ones that we have all let down,"
Mr. Bennett said. "I have a home in Chilmark, so I can go home
every night. But they can't. These are real people that have a
real need, and they have no house yet. And the cost is only going
up."

Proponents during the public hearings praised the ingenuity of the
Cozy Hearth proposal and said they hope other Island residents looking
to build their own homes might follow suit. But as the regulatory
process stretched on for a full year and a long list of conditions were
added to the project, some advocates warned that the hefty review would
have a chilling effect on future projects. Others, however, acknowledged
that the lengthy review resulted in a better project.

"I think they went in there with a project that was poorly
designed but with a great social concept, and I think the process helped
make it better," Mr. Abrams said. "The whole thing is a
perfect example of the spirit and the kind of work that we all need to
do with affordable housing on the Vineyard."

"We have such limited resources on an Island like this that
there really needs to be some sort of process for airing all the
concerns and trying to balance everything," Mr. Pelikan said.
"Clearly it is an involved and complicated process, but I think it
needs to be. There is a lot at stake," he said.

Brendan O'Neill, executive director of the Vineyard
Conservation Society, which also weighed in with significant concerns
about the Cozy Hearth project, said he hopes that the Islandwide
planning effort under way at the commission will help the affordable
housing and conservation interests come together on mutual goals instead
of battling each other. He noted that both camps have a common foe in
the developers of expensive market rate homes.

"Generally, land is best conserved to protect drinking water
or farm soil or rich habitat, which is often not the land best developed
for affordable housing. And the land best suited for affordable housing
is ideally located near transportation and other services and
infrastructure, which is often not the land ideally suited for
conservation," Mr. O'Neill said. "The question is: If
you're dealing with a blank slate, how do you identify which areas
are suited for which purpose? How do you make these two groups
communicate together well?"