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WESTPORT — When a smaller, older house in town is sold to a developer, it is often knocked down to make way for a larger home.
“It happens constantly,” said Danielle Dobin, the Planning and Zoning Commission’s chairwoman. “A large portion of the homes demolished are historic homes.”
Commission members are working to find that balance of preserving Westport’s historical structures while also adding new affordable housing.
“If we preserve everything in amber, nothing is changed — then Westport becomes a museum,” Dobin said, adding she also doesn’t want to see Westport developed like a city and lose the suburban features people enjoy.
As an old New England town, Dobin said Westport’s infrastructure limits, like its narrow streets, also need to be considered with development.
Dobin said both aspects are important and the commission is currently working in that gray space between the two.
Several ideas for how to encourage preservation are included in the draft affordable housing plan, including creating cluster cottage communities where historic homes are preserved, repurposing historic homes for adaptive use, offering economic incentives to preserve the historic buildings and establishing a housing fund to help cover the costs.
Westport has a mix of housing styles, including bungalows from the 1920s, houses from the 1930s, Victorians and even colonials from when Connecticut was still a colony. The newer homes are often whatever style is trending in that moment, which now is a modern farm house, but was a shingled, Hamptons-style home before that.
“We lose something when all of these smaller homes are being redeveloped into these larger, much more expensive homes,” Dobin said.
The biggest challenge is that developers can often get more money for tearing down the smaller, older homes and replacing them with larger, more expensive homes or apartment projects, Dobin said.
“If we want to encourage the preservation, then we have to offer an economic incentive,” she said, adding there has to be a financial benefit for the developer to want to invest in preserving a site.
She said someone likely isn’t going to invest $1 million into restoring a home, to then deed restrict it which limits who it can be sold to and for how much.
The buying demands are also different, Dubin said. People might be looking for certain items — like tall ceilings, a lot of closet space or bathrooms with every bedroom — that aren’t generally found in historic homes.
Homeowners are already able to add accessory dwelling units on any property in town. The commission and housing plan is now suggesting an elevated approach by allowing greater density in residential districts that would let developers create pocket neighborhoods with a shared common area, like a garden, when an antique home is preserved. The idea is to have these small cottages that look historic and blend in more with the aesthetic of that area, but have at least a portion of those units be deed restricted affordable.
The plan also calls for taking advantage of new technology to get these prefab cottages in housing projects on town-owned land so that it’s more affordable to do these affordable pocket neighborhoods.
Dobin hopes these cottages could be an option for downtown where different proposals in the General Assembly are encouraging affordable housing be built.
The units and likely the restored house would be rented.
“Most of the demand for affordable housing is for people looking to rent than to buy,” Dobin said.
The regulations themselves have evolved to accommodate the diversity of the historic housing needs. Last week, the commission mentioned looking into a text amendment inspired by an individual project that could be used townwide to help with preserving historical homes and adding affordable housing.
“The commission has also adopted various regulations permitting the ‘adaptive re-use’ of existing building to encourage their preservation and allow for a new use,” Planning and Zoning Director Mary Young said.
This was recently seen with the redevelopment of Lees Mill, a former factory that’s now condos on Richmondville Avenue. As part of the project, the developer is redeveloping a former single-family historic home on Riverside Avenue now owned by the town into a home for up to five adults with special needs.
Young said the town encourages historic preservation in general with zoning regulations and the Plan of Conservation and Development.
“Historic Residential Structures are zoning regulations unique to Westport as they provide ‘incentives’ — i.e. zoning relief — as a trade off for preserving historic homes and providing a façade easement to maintain their historic appearance,” Young said.
Dobin said the commission has become a lot more flexible for these projects, such as with setbacks and height, which is evidenced by proposals to adapt historic buildings coming before it. One recent proposal, which has yet to be formally filed, is to turn a home built by Capt. Frederick Sherwood in the 1800s into affordable housing.
Funding these projects is also a key part. Dobin said there is no endless pot of money to preserve these homes or to build affordable housing. The plan suggests creating a town-funded Affordable Housing Trust Fund by collecting fees from various filings people do with the town, such as licenses or permits, that would be set aside for affordable housing.
Dobin said New Canaan has had success with this and she expects it to do well in Westport too if passed.
“I think it has a lot of promise,” she said.
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