On September 25, CommunityCare of Lyme held a Health and Wellness Fair on the Lyme Common.
Rich Brown and Liz Ryan Cole represented Pinnacle Project with a table that had materials talking about Housing – how it affects wellness, what kind of housing can be built in Lyme, and what kinds of housing might be desirable. A number of people stopped by to listen:
- Good housing options promote physical and mental health; decrease loneliness, and provide essential fairness to people of all income ranges
- Housing is expensive in Lyme. The average new home is $392,000; the average of recent sales is $632,000
- The Lyme Master Plan does not have a chapter on Housing
- The Lyme Ordinance makes it infeasible to build modest price housing. Its restrictive rules for lot size and emphasis on single-family zoning means that multiple families cannot share the expense of the lot and any infrastructure – each homeowner must pay the full cost.
- Furthermore, the ordinance makes it impossible to build needed (and highly desirable) kinds of homes: smaller homes, skilled nursing or dementia care, starter homes, homes for people “in the workforce” – teachers, nurses, firefighters, etc.
- Why are these restrictions important?
We displayed a number of handouts from Keys to the Valley as well as several books on a variety of housing types. Here are the posters from our table.
