As he attempts to gain support for his company's plan to turn the former military housing at Vicksburg Square in Devens into 246 rental apartments, 80 percent of which would be income-restricted affordable housing, Trinity Financial president Jim Keefe met with the Press for an interview on Friday, Dec. 2.

On the surprising lack of support in Harvard

In order for the Vicksburg Square project to go forward, town meetings in Harvard, Shirley, and Ayer must approve changes to the Devens Reuse Plan and the Devens By-Laws, which govern zoning in Devens.

This won't be the first time "Super Town Meeting" has convened to vote on changes to Devens. In June 2009, the three bodies voted on a proposal from MassDevelopment, the quasi-state agency that has authority over the former army base, to rezone Vicksburg Square to allow residential housing, 25 percent of which would have been affordable. Of the three towns at that time, Ayer was the only one that voted against it, 73 to 22. The article passed in Harvard by what the Press characterized as a "large majority" of the 189 voters present.

"When we first started this process, everybody said that Ayer was going to be the problem community and voted against it the last time, and that Harvard had strongly supported it, and Shirley had strongly supported it," Keefe said. "And so we initially spent a lot of time thinking about Ayer and meeting with people in Ayer, and I think, by and large, we've had a lot of progress in terms of getting people to understand what we're trying to do and we came up with a proposal that reflects a lot of input we got from Ayer…The part that really surprised us, and continues to surprise us, is the pushback we're getting from certain people in Harvard."

On low-income housing residents

The difference between Trinity's proposal and the failed 2009 article, which didn't have a developer attached to it, Keefe noted, is the level of affordable housing, and, he said, "That's what is at the heart of, I think, some people's anxiety about this."

"For us, who do a lot of this, people complain about parking, they complain about traffic, they complain about density, but really, in the end, it winds up being about [the level of affordable housing]," he said. "…The way we have been successful in the past is reassuring people that, first of all, for all of the visceral reaction that people have to the words 'low-income' and 'very low-income,' the individuals and families we're going to be housing here are individuals and families people in all three towns interact with all the time. Maybe not so much here in Harvard, because the demographic here is significantly different from the other two towns, but we have argued that even here in Harvard people would qualify."

Very-low income housing, which makes up 10 percent of Trinity's proposed units, means those who make less than 30 percent of the area median income. Low income, 80 percent of the units, means 60 percent of the area median income.

"Perfectly good people, hardworking, sincere," said Keefe, describing the individuals and families who might live at the complex. "They're not going to steal anybody's car. They're not going to rob any banks. They're just regular people just like everybody else."

The key to appealing to voters who are hesitant about the project, Keefe said, is to "break down that visceral reaction and the negative associations to anything affordable and put a human face on who we're really housing here."

On the DEAT report

Harvard's Devens Economic Analysis Team released a report in September that proposed selling the units at Vicksburg Square at market price rather than renting them as affordable housing. Keefe maintains that plan is unfeasible and it's blocking his project from getting a fair hearing.

"I think up until now, in Harvard anyway, I think it's really been about the DEAT report," Keefe said. "…It's really hard to have us compared to something that's just never going to happen, but that's really been what the discussion's been about. It's been about us having to defend ourselves in light of their conclusion that paints a picture that's just never going to happen. And so that's really prevented us from trying to put a human face on this."

On his interaction with town officials

Before the proposal goes to Super Town Meeting, two public hearings on the article must be held in the Devens region, according to the state law that created the Devens Enterprise Commission. A meeting on Nov. 21 at the Harvard Public Library was billed as a public hearing, but Planning Board Chair Kara Minar disputed that (see sidebar, below), questioning if proper notice had been provided and if the hearing could go on without a quorum from a town board.

When she confronted Keefe that night, Minar told the Press on Nov. 23, he reacted angrily in an encounter she characterized as "hostile."

When asked about it last Tuesday, Keefe's only comment was, "I find that humorous, very funny."

Friday, he expanded on his comments.

"It's really bad form for me to be picking fights with town officials, really bad form," Keefe said. "It's not my style, and I think some of my actions have appeared adversarial, and I regret that…I have to be strong enough and tough enough to just bite my tongue and keep my mouth shut. There's no excuse and I'm not going to offer any excuses."

The "tit-for-tat" adversarial approach doesn't "play well," Keefe said.

"I don't think there's anything I could have done one way or the other to change how people feel, although some of them, I think, will change," he said. "There are others who I mistakenly thought that, if we had some kind of conversation around the issues, that that could sort of evolve into something where we could find some common ground and in those conversations I probably took a tone that was probably inappropriate…I can't be the angry developer from Boston who's indicting all the elected officials in Harvard."

Read part II of this interview in the Harvard Press next Friday, Dec. 16.