Manufactured Home Talk Dominates Williamstown Planning Board
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. — Following a familiar pattern, the second Planning Board meeting of its 2023-24 cycle was dominated by an issue the board hoped to have settled at the 2023 annual town meeting.
The board Tuesday heard both support and criticism for its proposed bylaw amendment that would have allowed the placement of a manufactured home on any parcel where a single-family "stick built" home currently can be erected in town.
The proposal was narrowly rejected at May's annual town meeting, where the majority of participants favored the zoning change, but it failed to achieve the two-thirds majority needed for passage.
At a May 23 meeting to reorganize the board and discuss priorities for the year ahead, its newest member explained his reasons for voting against the manufactured home bylaw a week earlier.
On Tuesday, one of the residents who addressed the meeting from the floor of the May 16 gathering was at town hall to expand on his objections.
Paul Harsch cited a number of conversations he had with unnamed residents who joined him in opposition to the idea.
"'If the goal is to trash Williamstown, adding mobile homes, now being called manufactured homes, is the quickest way to do it,' that was a town resident who caught me at Wild Oats," Harsch told the board.
Harsch, a longtime real estate agent in the area, repeated the principal argument he made at the May 16 meeting. Manufactured homes, he said, do not appreciate in value, and it would be a disservice to potential homeowners to allow them to use the structures in town.
He said anyone who argues that manufactured homes can appreciate in value (as the Federal Housing Finance Agency did in a 2018 report) is perpetuating a lie perpetuated by the manufactured home industry.
"Just like the NRA pushes guns, the mobile home manufacturers are clearly pushing mobile homes to try to sell more," Harsch said. "That's the American way."
Harsch said that before the most recent iteration of the Planning Board, people in town government worked to "enhance, improve, beautify and protect this town."
The real estate agent said that allowing manufactured homes would do the reverse.
"They will harm the reputation of the town," Harsch said. "They will lower — and I've spoken to appraisers about this — they will lower the valuations of a neighborhood for the properties next door."
In comments that consumed more than half an hour of a two-hour meeting, Harsch twice suggested that had the Planning Board's Article 21 passed at May's annual town meeting, the decision itself would not have been valid.
"The total number of registered voters is 5,071," Harsch said. "The total number of voters at the May annual town meeting was 380."
Had the article received the 221 votes it needed for passage (it got 216), the yays would have represented .04 percent of registered voters, Harsch argued.
"Such a low number cannot rationally be considered an endorsement of the concept by the town," he said.
Harsch, who recently was re-elected moderator of the fire district with 23 votes, or .004 percent of the town's registered voters, presided over a February fire district meeting where a $22.5 million bond was approved by 509 votes, or .1 percent of the town's registered voters.
On Tuesday, he suggested that the Planning Board mail out a townwide survey to find out what every resident thinks about the manufactured home bylaw.
Harsch was just one of several residents who addressed the manufactured home question from the floor of Tuesday's meeting. The other, Abigail Reifsnyder, spoke before Harsch but referenced the discussion at the annual town meeting.
"I think it's arrogant and patronizing to say, ‘It's not good enough housing, so people shouldn't have it,' " Reifsynder said. "I've see, personally, folks who I know become first-time homebuyers by buying what we're now calling a manufactured home, and it's life-changing for those people,"
Reifsnyder encouraged the Planning Board to bring the idea back to a future town meeting in hopes of winning a few more votes to get the "super majority" needed for adoption.
Later in the meeting, Planning Board member Ben Greenfield, who was elected in May to fill the remaining year on an unexpired term on the panel, took objection to the characterization of his opposition as "arrogant."
Greenfield explained that his issue with allowing manufactured homes by right on residential parcels is that the Housing and Urban Development standards referenced in Article 21 are substandard when compared to the building code applied to other construction in town.
"Really what it has to do with is I fear the creation of a two-tier housing system where a landlord could set up a situation where people are living in houses that, by definition, don't meet the code of the surrounding community," Greenfield said.
He said he would not be bothered if the bylaw could be fashioned as to allow owner-occupied manufactured homes but preclude using the homes as rental units.
"My only objection is I feel someone will take advantage of somebody else by renting them a substandard home," Greenfield said.
Greenfield told the board that he felt the HUD standard for manufactured homes is unacceptable in the region because the residences would not perform well in winter and would be susceptible to mold.
He said he was encouraged by the specs he saw for at least one manufacturer, Singapore-based Nestron, which markets "tiny houses," and he was trying to get more information on that company's standards to see if they could be incorporated into a revised version of Article 21.
In the meantime, Town Planner Andrew Groff said he would look into whether the town could insert an "owner occupation" provision into a bylaw on manufactured housing and report back to the board.
In other business on Tuesday, Roger Lawrence told his colleagues that he would at a future meeting give details about a high-density modular home development in Northampton that he thinks can inform development of a potential "cottage court" bylaw proposal.
And consultant Steve Whitman of Plymouth, N.H.'s, Resilience Planning and Design gave the board an update on the comprehensive plan process.
Whitman said that the consultant and town steering committee are getting ready to start drafting the plan, including an implementation plan. Whitman said the Comprehensive Plan Steering Committee would see a draft to the plan in August.
That committee has spent the last year and a half collecting data about the existing conditions in town and input from residents about what changes they would like to see over the next couple of decades.
Tags: mobile home, Planning Board,
