Housing Headlines

BOSTON --- A long-standing civil rights suit between Lowell public housing tenants and the city's housing authority has been settled, with the agreement calling for a program to help former residents of the Julian D. Steele housing project find good housing in neighborhoods of their choice, including in "opportunity areas" that are racially integrated. Tenants had charged they had been relocated to more racially-segregated areas of the city to make way for a new mixed-income housing community.

SUDBURY --- Nearly two years after offering to pay a Sudbury family $600,000 to keep 35 acres from being developed, town officials have learned that AvalonBay has reached an agreement to buy the land and plans to build 200 units of rental housing.

SPENCER --- Officials in this town west of Worcester gathered on Friday August 22 to celebrate an agreement that will allow Mental Health Programs Inc. of Boston to transform the town's former high school into 35 units of affordable housing for low-income seniors.

DORCHESTER --- Earlier this month, the public got to see Corcoran Jennison's proposal to build 350 units of rental housing, 250,000 square feet of retail space and 200,000 square feet of office space on the current site of the Bayside Expo Center. The plan also includes a major reworking of the roads around Columbia Point.

CHICOPEE --- Ousted Community Development Department Director Jeanne M. Kidwell is preparing to sue the city for wrongful termination. Mayor Michael D. Bissonnette dismissed Kidwell from her duties on Aug. 1, citing federal audits that found that the city did not properly award and administer $8.4 million in block grant funding. Kidwell says the mayor is using the audits to fire her after she questioned the addition of Thomas Haberlin and Kathleen Lingenberg as part-time directors of economic development and housing respectively.

EASTHAMPTON --- A legal review and a third public hearing are the next steps in this community's bid to create an ordinance that would encourage developers to build more affordable housing by allowing them to build more units per acre than is currently allowed.