State financing puts Veterans Crossing work on town's clock

← All news · September 7, 2026

Veterans Crossing was selected Sept. 3 for state and federal housing financing. That makes Swampscott's unfinished work on a culvert, a Pine Street water main, an infrastructure grant, and a roughly $1.5 million ground-lease payment more urgent.

State financing for Veterans Crossing has shifted the pressure to Swampscott.

Gov. Maura Healey selected the 41-unit senior rental project with a veteran preference on the town-owned VFW site for state and federal housing financing on Sept. 3, in what state officials called the largest affordable-housing award round in Massachusetts in more than a decade. The Swampscott Tides reported the selection Sept. 7.

The award commits the private side of the deal. With the developer’s capital stack in place, four town obligations now sit on the path to construction and occupancy: a culvert relocation, a Pine Street water main replacement, an infrastructure grant the town has not yet won, and a roughly $1.5 million ground-lease payment that cannot be spent without Town Meeting action.

The public record still does not say how much Swampscott received, or in what form. The round put nearly $278 million into projects across the state, according to the Tides and Banker & Tradesman. Banker & Tradesman broke the total into $154.7 million in state subsidy plus a mix of state and federal low-income housing tax credits, and counted 29 projects. The Tides put the round at 2,547 units across 20 communities. None of those numbers is a Swampscott award figure.

The per-project award table lives on the state’s website, which could not be read for this report. No readable source carries a dollar amount, a credit type, or a subsidy program for Veterans Crossing. Banker & Tradesman’s entire Swampscott line was “Veterans Crossing: Construction of 41 homes serving residents age 55 and older.”

That missing credit type matters because a federal deadline applies to one kind of tax credit and not the other.

Four town obligations

Veterans Crossing is planned as a three-story building of 41 one-bedroom apartments, each about 600 square feet with a full kitchen, for residents 55 and older with a preference for veterans. It would be built on the two parcels at 10 New Ocean Street and 12-24 Pine Street.

The developer is BBH Community Development, the arm of B’nai B’rith Housing New England that redeveloped the Machon School in town and has used that project as its model. In the Tides’ account, Senior Project Manager Holly Grace said about two dozen units would serve households at 30% of area median income, and Senior Project Manager Yara Vergucht put another 18 at 60%. Those figures sum to about 42, not 41. The Zoning Board of Appeals record fixes the unit count at 41 and carries no income breakdown, so the mismatch is the Tides’ and does not close here. Soldier On is expected to work with B’nai B’rith on veteran services, according to the Tides.

The readable record never carried a developer financing, construction, or occupancy schedule for Veterans Crossing, so the state award is not a broken promise coming due. It turns an open-ended process into scheduled town work.

The culvert. A culvert runs under the site, and the building cannot sit on it. Relocating it is a separate town project, designed and bid by the town. Its final design was not complete when the ZBA closed its hearing in February. The permit’s final condition language records that the board “understands it is the intention of the town” to finish the culvert and water-main work before the building-permit application, but it does not bar a permit until the work is done. If the town’s work lags, the permit lets the developer temporarily tie into the old 6-inch main to obtain a building permit, an option the board chair called “a last resort for a temporary situation.”

The water main. The board’s Condition E6 requires the town to replace the existing 6-inch water main on Pine Street with an 8-inch line before it issues a certificate of occupancy. Peer-review engineers had flagged the 6-inch main as “severely tuberculated,” with a history of breaks, and balked at a building drawing roughly 4,500 gallons a day where the old use drew about 250. The town’s engineering reviewer noted that an 8-inch main is state guidance, not a statutory mandate.

The grant. The town plans to pay for the culvert and the main with grant money. Marzie Galazka, the director of community and economic development, has pursued expanding the town’s existing MassWorks grant, already allocated to the culvert, to cover the water main through the state’s HousingWorks Infrastructure Program, which has said the expansion may be eligible. No award has followed. In June, the Select Board approved a separate “One Stop” grant application for Pine Street infrastructure. That too is an application, not an award. No source read for this report shows any infrastructure grant awarded since July. Town Administrator Nick Connors has named zero-percent state revolving-fund loans as the fallback.

The ground-lease money. Because the town owns the land, the deal is a 99-year ground lease. Its base rent, described on the record as roughly $1.5 million, is treated by law as proceeds from a sale of town land. Finance Director Patrick Luddy told the Select Board in April that the money would flow into a segregated “sale of real estate” account and could not be spent without a Town Meeting appropriation. He offered that as his reading of state law, not legal advice, and the town administrator said he would ask town counsel to confirm it. No counsel opinion on the point is on the record.

The payment is not due until the building reaches a certificate of occupancy, years out. The outgoing board wanted it dedicated to rehabbing the veterans space at 89 Burrill Street, where the town plans to relocate the VFW post, at an estimate of about $600,000 from the Facilities Department. The board left that number open to amendment. But that commitment rests on a vote members recall and staff cannot find. Asked to confirm the earmark, the town administrator told the board staff had reviewed the minutes and “what we found did not redirect” the money.

Tax-credit deadline remains unclear

Federal law sets an outside deadline for one kind of tax credit and not the other.

Under 26 U.S.C. § 42(h)(1)(E), a building that receives a carryover allocation of 9% credits from the state’s annual ceiling must be placed in service “not later than the close of the second calendar year following” the allocation. A 2026 allocation would have to be in service by Dec. 31, 2028.

Section 42(h)(4) exempts 4% credits financed with tax-exempt bonds from that ceiling and from that deadline. Because no readable source says which credit Veterans Crossing received, the deadline is real only if this is a 9% allocation. This is legal context, not advice, and the town’s exposure to it cannot be settled from the public record as it stands.

Permit and lease record

The permit story ran in this paper on July 29. The ZBA granted the Chapter 40B comprehensive permit by a unanimous 5-0 vote on Feb. 10. The Conservation Commission issued its Order of Conditions on Feb. 24, under DEP file #071-0363. No official minutes have surfaced for the deciding Feb. 10 vote, only a Swampscott TV video, a gap that sits inside the town’s broader problem with vanishing committee records.

The project’s origin runs back to 2023 Town Meeting, which approved acquiring 12-24 Pine Street, with a disposition preference for veterans and a rebuilt VFW post. The town described roughly $1.7 million going into the land. B’nai B’rith answered the RFP in August 2023.

What the Tides called a “land agreement… signed in December of 2024” was the Select Board’s Dec. 4, 2024 vote authorizing the land-disposition agreement and ground-lease framework under ARPA-deadline pressure. The vote was 4-1, with David Grishman the lone no. It was not an executed lease.

Since July, one thing has moved on the ground. In his Aug. 27 report, the town administrator told the Select Board that heavy equipment would arrive at 12-24 Pine Street the following Monday, Aug. 31, for environmental testing and digging. He stressed it was “not the beginning of construction,” but the town “continuing to move through the process.”

Two questions remain open as the state money lands. Has the 99-year ground lease actually been executed? And has the town stood up the segregated account and lined up the Town Meeting appropriation the roughly $1.5 million will require? The payment itself is not yet due. It arrives at occupancy. The live question is whether the machinery to receive and spend it is in place before then.

Sources

Correction and addendum (Sept. 8, 2026, 6 a.m.)

Two sentences in the original version of this article were wrong, and have been corrected above.

Sourcing note. The lede describes the Sept. 3 round as “what state officials called the largest affordable-housing award round in Massachusetts in more than a decade.” That phrase does not appear in the Swampscott Tides article this piece relies on, and the state’s own release could not be read for this report. The characterization came to the newsroom from an editor’s brief drawn from Banker & Tradesman’s Sept. 3 coverage, which is not preserved in this paper’s files. Readers should treat “largest in more than a decade” as reported by the trade press rather than confirmed from a state document.

Both memos from the paper’s fact-checkers raised the two corrected points before publication; the corrections did not make the printed version. That is a newsroom process failure, noted here so the record shows it.