I used to wonder if the town had a welcome sign out to developers who wanted to rape the town for their own profit. They come here and dump home upon home on a town which can’t support the ones we already have, let alone the services needed to accommodate everyone’s needs.
    Alas, very few of the new homes being constructed here are in the upper price range, something we need badly to help with the tax rate. Generally, those in the higher tax bracket put less of a burden or demand on local services, including schools.
    I have yet to see the welcome sign. Actually, I can’t really put my finger on the reason why land is more attractively priced here, therefore more attractive to those hoping to make a quick killing under the guise of helping the less fortunate with affordable housing. With all these developments, attractiveness to those with a little more flexible cash goes down daily, and that’s troubling.
    Not all of what is billed as affordable really is, especially since the town, for some odd and unexplainable reason, falls under the affordable guidelines as South Shore communities and Boston as outlined in Chapter 40B.
    I guess I’ll never understand why the town, officials or otherwise, have done little or nothing about the situation. I mean, you can accuse the town of robbing people of apple pie and motherhood by not offering affordable housing for just so long. We’ll never get out of the mire.
    I’ll tell you what got me going most recently. I overheard a conversation in the car parked next to me on Onset Pier last Friday as I consumed my salad to go and indulged in the free sunset and free parking. The two men were discussing the location of a proposed 140- unit affordable housing complex somewhere across Cranberry Highway from Stop & Shop. Lord, I hadn’t heard any discussion about it for months and felt it was a dead deal. Wrong!
    Granted, the units, as first discussed months ago, are supposed to be apartments, but apartments with up to three bedrooms. You know what that means? Kids. Do our schools need more? Can they handle more? I’m guessing not. That means one of these days, should the development come to pass, there will be a school building committee looking to spend the money none of us have. Can you say override? Honestly, we make more progress going backward than we do in the other direction, the one we should be striving for.
    It seems Community Development Director Marilyn Whalley is all fired up about how wonderful the 140 units will be for the town. She thinks it would make a wonderful LIP - Local Initiative Program - and score us lots of brownie points with the state and that horrible quota that looms over our heads. That quota is something we’ll probably never meet given the fact that only a small percentage of the units in any of the 40B projects to hit town are considered and marketed as affordable. The rest just add to the housing stock numbers and we lose more ground than we gain in reaching our 10 percent mandate.
    The only all affordable project on the books is the Cornerstone one slated for 815 Main Street, and which could get underway soon, wiping out a swath of South Wareham woods for construction. It started out as 80 rentals and now is less then 50, thanks to some fine negotiations by the Board of Appeals.
    Is Whalley nuts? Maybe it doesn’t matter to her what the town looks like because she lives in the next town over, you know the one with the higher income level just to the west, the one staving off 40B development as long as it can. But she should care. It’s her job.
    Strangely enough she was not very supportive of the selectmen’s proposal to build 80 units of rental affordable units on the town-owned Westfield property. Those units would be designated for people over 55 and the handicapped. Why the change of heart?
    I’ve heard she’s been trying to arrange for meetings between the 140-unit developer and individual selectmen on a one-to-one basis. She has been told selectmen will hear what she and the developer have to say at a public meeting of their board. If she can air the proposal to one and all, and over cable television, no less, why would she want private meetings?
    And where is the Wareham Land Trust in all of this? They want to save open space, well, the acreage for the 140 units is indeed open space, woods, and I understand, an adjacent pond. What a nice spot for residents to enjoy the out of doors. Imagine; something for their tax dollars. That type of purchase would do the town a lot more good for a lot of reasons than some of the others they’ve promoted.