The Acton Housing Authority cut the ribbon Monday on housing for seniors and people with disabilities, built with a 91% Town Meeting vote, state and private financing, and one family’s memories.
When Keith McManus was in seventh grade, he spent a summer helping his mother finish Windsor Green, Acton’s first public housing. One of his jobs was labeling the mailboxes in the mail room with the names of future residents. On move-in day, he carried their boxes off the trucks, matching each name to a face.
On Monday, at the ribbon cutting for McManus Manor, the new 41-apartment building named for his mother, Betty McManus, he described what happens next. “Soon these empty units behind us will be buzzing with life, just like Windsor Green was all those years ago,” he said in prepared remarks. “The names on the mailboxes will have meaning once again.”
About McManus Manor
McManus Manor, at 362-364 Main Street near Kelley’s Corner, is a 41-unit rental development from the Acton Housing Authority (AHA). It serves seniors and people with disabilities. All 41 apartments are income-restricted, including 11 for households earning no more than 30% of area median income.
The building is fully electric and designed to Passive House standards, with solar panels and other energy-efficient features. “It’s a beautiful building, one Acton can be proud of,” AHA Chair Nancy Kolb told the crowd. “Whenever I drive past McManus Manor, I am filled with great pride,” Kolb said, crediting everyone who “joined together and worked to make this possible, no matter how we vote or what side of the aisle we sit on.”
How Acton got here
Kolb said the AHA board had prioritized senior housing because its waiting list topped 1,000. But the authority’s last project, Whittlesey Village, was built on land it already owned, and it had no land left. Board members “spent many months, days and hours looking for land,” she said.
The answer came when the Town bought the Main Street property. An AHA commissioner, Ryan Bettez, joined the Town committee that recommended how to use the land. Community Preservation money paid for predevelopment work, including an architect. Kolb said the AHA consulted neighbors along the way. When the proposal reached the Select Board, she said, every neighbor who spoke supported it. The board voted unanimously to send it to Town Meeting, where 91% of voters backed it. “You can be proud of your town,” Kolb said.
The Town’s support went well beyond that vote, Kolb said:
- The Town joined the AHA in a MassWorks grant to extend the sewer, then waived the tie-in fees.
- It committed $250,000 in ARPA money and waived part of the development fees.
- Town Meeting approved $1,485,400 from the Community Preservation Committee.
- The Acton Community Housing Committee contributed $425,000.
Private and state partners filled out the financing. Citizens Bank provided an $18.3 million construction loan. Redstone Equity invested $11 million in low-income housing tax credits, which Kolb called the project’s largest funding commitment. Mass Housing Partnership provided early support. “It takes a village working together to house its neediest,” Kolb said.
Kolb also thanked the team that built it. Winslow Architects and Anser Advisory handled design and project management, and Maura Tsongas served as development consultant. Delphi Construction’s project team met with the AHA every week. Kolb said the Delphi team “cared about McManus Manor, even the small details,” and were “highly skilled.” She singled out Kelley Cronin, the AHA’s former executive director and now its development coordinator, as “the lynchpin.” “Without Kelley we would not be here,” Kolb said. She also credited current Executive Director Melissa Bible for coordinating “the millions of details” involved.
“It’s a huge challenge for small housing authorities to build these days, almost an impossible task, but we did it,” Kolb said.
Kolb singled out Acton’s three state legislators, who spoke, saying that when the process “slowed or hit a speed bump,” Senator Eldridge and Representatives Sena and Cataldo were “front and center supporting us through the endless hoops of governmental requirements.” Eldridge began his career on the AHA board and knew Betty McManus. Sena, an Acton schools graduate, is “a staunch advocate for affordable and public housing.” Cataldo toured AHA sites soon after his election and, Kolb said, “prioritized public housing from the start.”
Select Board Chair Alissa Nicol, and representatives of Citizens Bank, Redstone Equity and Mass Housing Partnership also spoke.
Who was Betty McManus?
Betty McManus directed the AHA for 27 years, until she retired in 2005. Under her leadership, the authority built Windsor Green, a 68-unit elder and disabled development, then McCarthy Village, and added 27 family units during the condo-conversion wave. It also bought a 12-unit group home for people with disabilities. She co-founded the Acton Community Housing Corporation to promote affordable homeownership. She also created a family self-sufficiency program and served as president of the Doli Atamian Campership Program, which sends children from low-income families to camp.
Kolb said she first met McManus when she invited her to speak at the Acton-Boxborough Schools’ Summer Leadership Conference. “Betty understood this with her whole heart and soul,” Kolb said, recalling McManus’s stories of growing up poor in Acton and Boxborough. “Betty always moved heaven and earth just as we are doing today.”
“Team Betty”
Keith McManus spoke for the family. His sister, Naomi Mathis, reviewed his remarks.
He said the AHA began for his mother as a desk and a phone in the family home. The office line rang at the house even after the AHA moved to Windsor Green. She didn’t answer on weekends, but she checked every message. “If it was warranted, she would drop what she was doing and take care of whatever crisis had emerged,” he said. “Everyone got her time.”
At Windsor Green, he said, the office was attached to the residents’ community center, so “she saw them every day, and they saw her.” One resident called her “Wonder Woman” because he thought she looked like Lynda Carter. When he and his sister eulogized their mother, Keith said, they estimated she had helped more than 1,000 families and individuals find more stable lives. “What I don’t think we understood at the time was what that took,” he said.
He asked the room to think of the work behind the rewards: late-night board meetings, zoning hearings, permit applications, grant writing and financing packages that “have to line up just right.” Then he widened the dedication. “This was not one person’s career; it was a team of people,” he said, and he named everyone who worked with her as part of “Team Betty.”
He closed with two memories. In fourth grade, he came home to find an article about his mother in the newspaper and shrugged, “So what?” Half an hour later, he found her crying in the living room. “I don’t care about being in the paper,” she told him, “but I do care that you recognize that I’m doing something important and working very hard at it.”
The week before she died in 2017, she showed him a lifetime achievement award, then a videotape of a high school graduation where she had been honored. He didn’t much want to watch a graduation video, he admitted, but he sat with her and a glass of wine and never reached for fast-forward. “Being recognized was never my mom’s goal, but it was icing on her cake,” he said. “So, I’m going to soak up the rest of this day for my mom.”
About the residents who will move in, he said: “They’ll know they’re going to be okay, because their community stepped up for them.”
Greg Jarboe is Acton Exchange’s beat reporter on senior issues and serves on Town committees including the Economic Development Committee and the Finance Committee.
