Westbrook Housing:Changing with the TimesChanging with the City
Westbrook Housing—long synonymous with housing for this one-time mill town’s elderly, disabled, and poor—is changing. Nearly 40 years old, it continues to provide for this population, while at the same time working to assist a new constituency—those for whom home ownership is increasingly an impossible dream.
In taking on this challenge, Westbrook Housing—working with Westbrook Development Corporation, a non-profit Community Housing Development Organization (CHDO)—is not only providing badly needed home ownership opportunities but also placing once tax-exempt properties back on the city’s tax rolls. It’s even taken city landmarks—like an abandoned elementary school and a once-healthy textile-mill-turned-shoe factory—and restored them as housing for a new generation of homeowners.
The development of such properties also provides funding that will, in a time of ever-shrinking state and federal support, allow Westbrook Housing to continue its mission of meeting the housing needs of its most vulnerable citizens.
Addressing the Greatest Need
Since its founding, Westbrook Housing has worked tirelessly to assist the city’s most needy. As their numbers have grown, so too has the federally funded Section 8 program that it administers.Low-income participants—many of them faced with the additional burden of a disabled or critically ill child or adult—are able to obtain private housing that meets program guidelines. Tenants pay 30 percent of their income toward the rent, with the remainder covered by their Section 8 voucher.Today, more than 650 Westbrook families are dependent on this program, which pays more than $5 million annually to some 300 registered local landlords.
A Community Within the Community
Westbrook Housing has long recognized the needs of senior citizens and the disabled. Indeed, concern for this population was the impetus for its creation in 1969.Today, this population remains the agency’s largest single responsibility, with the majority of its eight rental communities designated for older residents (with age restrictions of 62- or 55-plus and/or income limits)—many of whom have taught generations of Westbrook schoolchildren, worked in local businesses, raised their families there, or returned home after living away.As Westbrook Housing, indeed Westbrook itself, changes to meet the needs of all its citizens, these special residents will always be a priority.
Making Home Ownership a Reality
With an eye to the changing economic landscape, Westbrook Housing and Westbrook Development Corporation are helping fill another void—that in affordable, or workforce, housing. Largely priced out of home ownership, young families and other first-time buyers now have help.By purchasing city-owned property and developing it into single-family homes and condominium complexes, Westbrook Development Corporation has created an opportunity for residents who, facing soaring prices, had all but abandoned thoughts of home ownership.
Since its establishment in 1987, the WDC has been charged with the acquisition and development of Westbrook Housing’s myriad residential communities—both rental apartments for seniors, the disabled, and low-income and, more recently, “affordable” condominiums.
Thanks to these innovative developments—like Homestead Village, a new 18-unit townhouse community; Forest Street School, an 1880s schoolhouse converted into 12 market-rate condominiums; and Riverfront Lofts, an abandoned mill building now housing 44 modern, urban condo-units—purchasing that first home and laying down roots in Westbrook has become a modern day reality.
With more projects on the horizon, Westbrook Development Corporation is not only boosting the impact Westbrook Housing is having on the community but is expanding the number of people who call this Southern Maine town “home.”
For more information, visit our website at www.westbrookhousing.org
