Chatham To Participate In ‘Innovative Opportunity Atlas’ Project, Looking At Intersection of Climate Change, Affordable Housing

CHATHAM – The town will host a summer intern as part of a project to build an “innovative opportunity atlas” to address the intersection of climate change and affordable housing on Cape Cod.

A project of the Massachusetts Housing and Climate Innovation Center (MassHCIC), the work involves identifying specific municipal priorities and challenges in addressing climate resilience and adaptation and housing affordability, as well as finding town buildings, assets and coastal and inland resources that could serve as proving grounds for testing promising innovations.

Taking a page from the Cape Cod Baseball League, MassHCIC board president Rob Brennan said interns will be housed with local host families for eight weeks and paid a $7,000 stipend. The select board agreed to contribute $2,500 at its May 28 meeting.

Some town officials had been working on attracting academic researchers to town prior to the pandemic, board member Shareen Davis noted. The MassHCIC program not only aligns with the board’s goals, it could serve to reinvigorate that effort, she said.

“I think it’s forward thinking,” she said. The anticipated results will extend beyond the borders of the town. “Then it’s an economic engine for a new economy that’s driven toward conscientiousness and understanding of what our real needs are.”

“If Cape Cod is your petri dish, then Chatham is your number one petri dish,” added board member Jeff Dykens.

Formed in 2023 as a nonprofit, MassHCIC aims to use the Cape’s natural and built environments to deploy, test and evaluate innovative material, products, technologies and construction models that can both promote affordable housing construction, climate resilience and net zero carbon emissions.

The innovation opportunity atlas is designed to build a catalog that can be used by academic, government, and private industry working to develop innovative technologies, Brennan said. Built on the backbone of the Cape Cod Commission’s GIS database, it will help identify conditions and resources for demonstration projects of innovative technologies that are ready to make the leap “off the bench and into the field,” he said. This will allow MassHCIC to promote the Cape as a proving ground for what the organization is calling “shelter-tech innovations.”

“The message this carries to organizations is that the Cape is open,” he said, “for housing, resilience, decarbonization, innovation and the climate economy.”

Affordable housing and climate change are often in tension. “Building for climate resilience means building [more robustly], and that often means more expensive, and that has a negative impact,” Brennan said. “The challenge really is how do we build for climate resilience, how do we build for net zero, and how do we do that affordably.”

With $16 billion in assessed property value in flood hazard areas most vulnerable to climate change, the Cape has a vested interest in attracting innovative technologies, he said. The peninsula’s 15 towns can serve as “living laboratories, proving grounds for climate resilience, decarbonization and net zero construction and housing affordability.”

A number of labs the group is working with are looking for field testing opportunities, Brennan said, which can in turn attract additional investment to move toward broader mainstream adoption. “We want to see them go from white boards onto the shelves of our hardware stores, so that we are building with these new materials, products, technologies and models. But making that leap is often the most challenging one, of finding the places that can put them to the test, but also places that are open and welcoming to those things proven in the field.”

Six towns will participate in the program this summer. Host families are already lined up, Brennan said. Host families will be paid a $1,200 stipend, and each municipality will contribute $2,500. Corporate sponsors, at $10,000 each, are also being lined up, he said. The undergraduate and graduate students will work two to three days a week in the town and spend two to three days working collaboratively at Cape Cod Community College.

There is a broad coalition supporting the program, he added, including the parent company of Mid Cape Homes and the Home Builders Institute, the nonprofit arm of the National Association of Homebuilders. MassHCIC is working with those groups as well as schools in the region to train students in shelter-tech.

“I’m thrilled with this,” said select board chair Michael Schell. “I think it’s great.”