Lack of Assisted Living Demand Has Sweetwood Eyeing Apartments

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
04:57AM / Tuesday, March 21, 2023Print Story | Email Story

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The owner of Sweetwood assisted living facility on Cold Spring Road is looking to change its zoning to allow its vacant units to be leased as apartments.

Sweetwood hopes to ask town meeting to rezone its property from Rural Residence to the Southern Gateway District, which currently runs along Route 7 with a southern terminus at the intersection with the Taconic Trail (Route 2). And it wants the town to change the use table to allow by right the conversion of existing buildings to multi-family housing; currently, that is allowable by special permit in the Southern Gateway District, but it is a by-right use in other business zones.

The owner is hosting a community meeting in the Sweetwood auditorium on Monday, April 3, at 6:30 p.m.

Attorney Karla Chaffee of Boston's Nixon Peabody LLP told the Select Board last week that the owners want to repurpose some of its existing assisted living units to use as all-purpose rental units and are asking for a pair of zoning bylaw changes to allow modifications in the operation of their business.

"We have an existing building that's developed very much like a standard multifamily building with a mix of one-bedroom and two-bedroom apartments," Chaffee said. "We're operating at about half capacity and are really looking for options where we can continue to invest in the property, continue to run the assisted living business on the property but exploring some options with opening up some underutilized facilities for housing that is available to the wider public."

The Select Board referred the request to the Planning Board. Boyd, the current chair of the Planning Board, said she thought warrant article language could be ready to be vetted at the board's statutory public hearing along with the rest of the planners' bylaw amendments and stay on track for inclusion on the warrant for May's annual town meeting.

The facility, once paired with the now defunct Sweet Brook nursing home, was purchased for $3.8 million 2010 by DES Senior Care Holdings LLC. The 20-acre property has 70 studio, one-bedroom and two-bedroom units in a three-story structure as well as common areas and enclosed parking. It was built in 1987 and added onto a decade later.

Sweetwood says the RR2 and RR3 zoning doesn't permit it to operate outside the definition of "assisted living."

"To support Sweetwood's ongoing operation and care for its current residents, Sweetwood seeks the flexibility to rent its existing units to any individual, not just those who may require assistance with their daily living," the company states in a legal notice posted on iBerkshires.

This rezoning would be consistent, it states, with existing zoning along the Route 7 corridor. The proposed text amendment would allow for conversion of an existing building for multifamily use by right but require a special permit for new construction.

"Given the crucial need for affordable and market rate rental housing in the region, this requested amendment will serve as at least one step towards alleviating pressure in the local housing market," states the legal notice. "Utilization of existing buildings and structures in business zones will help achieve this goal without significant impact to Town resources and infrastructure."

Tags: assisted living, zoning,

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Mount Greylock School Committee OKs Updated Policy on Seclusion, Restraint

By Stephen DravisiBerkshires Staff
05:57AM / Tuesday, August 25, 2026

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — The Mount Greylock School Committee recently approved an updated policy on time-outs, seclusion and the physical restraint of students.

The policy is based on updated state regulations that came down last winter. Superintendent Joseph Bergeron told the panel at its August meeting that his office waited on recommendations from the Massachusetts Association of School Committees that were released in May and ran the proposed changes past the district's legal counsel.

That timing — and an expectation from the commonwealth that districts have the updated policy in place for the start of the 2026-27 academic year — led to an expedited process for the School Committee, which did not do a first read with a vote at a subsequent meeting as is its practice.

"Policy JKAA speaks to the ways the school district and our procedures shall abide by the updated state regulations," Bergeron said. "We're not going to have a lot of leeway.

"Nothing about the way we interact with our students on a day-to-day basis is being shifted by this."

For example, the commonwealth does not allow schools to use "seclusion," or, "the involuntary confinement of a student alone in a room or area, with or without adult supervision," except some extreme cases, like when, "when student behavior poses an imminent threat of assault, or imminent serious physical harm to self or others, but only if safeguards are accounted for," the updated policy reads.

"From the state's perspective and my perspective, the idea of locking a child in a room without adult supervision is something we've never done," Bergeron said. "And it's something the state wants to make explicitly that nobody ever does."

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