Your Questions, Answered

  • The project will deliver new zoning recommendations for the Hampshire campus.

    The Town will review its long-range plans and community needs when developing zoning options. The Town’s intent is that zoning options will be in alignment with the Town’s overall needs, goals, and long-term vision. It is also desirable that the zoning study will support the College’s needs.

  • All communities in Massachusetts establish zoning for land regardless of size or ownership. Currently, the zoning for the land owned by Hampshire College dates back to the late 1960’s – when the College was first formed – and allows the land to be used for higher education purposes only. 

    The Zoning Study seeks to gather information about the property that will guide updated zoning. This will provide an understanding of the areas that are developable, the capacity of infrastructure (i.e. water, sewer, roadways), housing market demands, opportunities for economic development, and other options that could allow creative reuse of existing buildings.   

    The Zoning Study is being conducted by a team of experts who will assist the Town with gathering data, organizing information, hosting community engagement sessions, and sharing important updates throughout the process. 

    • The Town is not initiating a land purchase, taking, or acquisition.  

    • The Zoning Study is not attempting to limit the options available to the College regarding the sale or future use of its land. It is intended that future zoning options will allow a wider range of uses on the site.    

    • The Zoning Study will not be making land use decisions for the College.   

    • The Zoning Study is not intended to impact or delay the sale of the campus.   Property transactions by the College are not dependent on the completion of the Zoning Study. The College’s Board of Trustees has the final decision on who the land is sold to, and when. 

    •  The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art, Yiddish Book Center, and Hitchcock Center for the Environment are not closing. These entities are independent from Hampshire College; each owns or leases the land they occupy.   

  • The Amherst Town Council adopted the following statement identifying the Town’s priorities for the future uses of Hampshire College’s property:  

    “The future uses of Hampshire College land are of critical importance to the Town of Amherst, and comprehensive, consultative, and inclusive land planning efforts are being undertaken by staff. As this effort continues, and as Hampshire College decides what to do with its land, the Town Council identifies the following key priorities and stands ready to provide zoning and regulatory support for them:  

    •  Buildable land should be prioritized for housing, small business development, and other appropriate tax revenue-generating uses.   

    • Sensitive habitat, farming, or resource areas should be prioritized for preservation, creating a balance between potential redevelopment and preservation.   

    • Housing development should prioritize a wide range of housing types, as reflected in the Town’s 2021 Comprehensive Housing Policy and 2025 Housing Production Plan.   

    • If components of the property could support identified Town space or facilities needs, those needs should be considered.” 

  • The Hampshire Campus Zoning Study began with a meeting of stakeholders including the Hampshire College President and staff, the Amherst Town Manager and staff, and the MassDevelopment team.  The Hadley Town Administrator and a Hadley Select Board member were also consulted. The project will also include:   

    • Creation of a website to share important information about the project.

    • Economic analysis, interviews, and small group meetings.  

    • Assessment of existing infrastructure including water, sewer, and electricity, as well as mapping relevant environmental considerations.  

    • Scenario planning to create conceptual level illustrative plans for different redevelopment themes such as mixed-use villages, continued education, or housing.  

    • Draft Zoning Amendments and a final report by January 2027.  

    See the Project Details page for additional information.

    • Town of Amherst staff, led by Planning and Economic Development Director Jeff Bagg, will guide the Zoning Study. Staff from Conservation, Public Works, Fire, Inspection Services, and other relevant Town departments will be involved.  

    • Hampshire College, as the property owner, will provide information and input throughout the process.  

    • Through MassDevelopment, the Town is receiving technical assistance from a skilled team bringing environmental, land use, and economic development expertise to the effort: Horsley-Witten Group, Dodson and Flinker, and U3 Advisors.   

    • Town of Hadley will be regularly consulted and provide input.  

    • Community members will be invited to be engaged throughout the process.  

  • We believe now is the right time to begin a study looking at the future potential for the campus. The closure of the college should be seen as a call to action for the town to take steps to consider how the land can meet the future needs of the Amherst community.  It’s pretty normal for the town to consider the zoning of private land but sites this large are less common, and we believe that by holding public engagement and analyzing a broad range of appropriate uses and building forms, we can develop a zoning and development framework that embodies a vision aligned with the diverse needs of the Town. We are launching an equitable and accessible outreach process to kick off the zoning and visioning discussion. 

    We have this opportunity now; this help from Mass Development with the consultant team is perfect timing. The flip side of the question is why not wait? This is a large potential real estate transaction. We've experienced that once a real estate transaction has occurred, the pressures and the expectation is going to be immediate. If it goes to an educational institution, that's a lot easier. But in terms of something that's non-educational, the expectation would be immediate solutions to zoning problems, and we need a runway. We need time to assess the property, talk to the community, and look at the zoning. That time is now. 

    We did get some questions about how our process can unfold in parallel or separate from whatever the college needs to do, but it is informative for everybody to know that we are looking at this, we're trying to incorporate the goals of the community in zoning, and that's something that is very normal to do, and the timing just helps kind of get us moving ahead of a real estate transaction. 

    Knowing how town government works, we're moving at warp speed on this zoning. The amount of work that has been done by our consulting team and with our planning staff in the last two months is just remarkable. The Town Councilors and the Planning Board members who have worked on zoning know how long zoning changes can take. It can take years. This will be a gigantic task for us to put together a zoning proposal for the Planning Board and the Town Council to consider. 

    We're moving very quickly on this, and I think there is probably never a perfect time, but now working in tandem or in parallel with the college is a worthwhile endeavor. 

  • We're trying to understand the land and the features, the characteristics, where there's improvements and where there's not, and help guide the outcome. 

    I'm not sure that this is just going to be one big zoning district. There might be opportunities to tailor it to specific areas. 

    One thing to keep in mind is that zoning is a tool to implement a plan. If you don't know where you're trying to go, it's really hard to create zoning to get there. The first task, and what we'll be moving forward with in the next couple months, is to work on that plan collectively, to look at different options, and then to try to see what we want the future to be, and what uses we want to encourage and what uses, if any, we want to discourage. 

    Based on that plan, hopefully the zoning is pretty straightforward. So, if the plan says that there are certain isolated parcels which could be split off easily and developed for a particular use or be protected as farmland or some other conservation use, then the zoning could be written separately for those parcels. If the plan determines that there is one big use, we want to keep it as a big campus, or a new village of some kind, maybe the whole thing gets zoned as one zone. That's why the planning process is going to be so important. 

  • Of course, it's basically a walkable village center now. It really represents an extraordinary opportunity because of that existing infrastructure. You have a concentration of uses, you have water and sewer service, you have existing roads, and within that existing campus, there's a lot of space to do a lot of stuff. 

    If you could imagine trying to develop a walkable village center of any kind on a vacant site, you would have to build all that before you could build any housing or any other uses. Here you have an opportunity to start with what's there, and add wonderful new uses to it, so that would certainly be one of the alternatives that we will be looking at. 

  • There is a demand for housing that's been shown in the housing production plan. I think the potential for development on this site, at least this early, very early preliminary development of up to 200 acres of being developable, would help address that need that's been identified by the Housing Production Plan. 

  • We're in the process of moving in that direction. Some of the next discussions are going to be more focused on the types and variety of housing that we need and would like to see. Given the size and scale of the property, we do have a pretty unique opportunity to potentially create zoning areas or pockets that might allow different types of housing, so that's something that we can do through zoning. 

    We see the opportunity to provide the mix, and that's often something that we don't quite get the chance to articulate is the mix of housing. That's one of the key things that we can do to help identify the cost of housing as the type of housing. We’ve got a couple great examples of different types of housing being built in Amherst and the surrounding communities--small home ownership units, the smaller multifamily, this missing middle concept. We can kind of try to arrange the zoning to allow those types of housing densities, maybe based on location or characteristics along those lines. 

    The Town also has an inclusionary zoning by-law, which, at a certain threshold, requires the inclusion of affordable housing. We could examine that, we can talk about requiring some areas be affordable housing or incentivize affordable housing. We could do a lot of different things that would get through this initial round of baseline information. There are some tools we can examine to ensure that we get a mix of housing types, including income levels and cost. 

    The town has done a really good job at creating affordable housing, capital A affordable housing, in the sense that it is subsidized by the state, and it's regulated to be affordable forever. We have examples of land that the town has purchased and will be utilizing on Belchertown Road and on Southeast Street, and in North Amherst, adjacent to Ball Lane, for community homes, which are home ownership opportunities that the state is supporting. That's a really unique opportunity for people to purchase a home that's affordable. I think there's 30 of them up there.  

    The town can't do it alone; we can't subsidize enough units to meet all of these housing needs. We are going to have to depend on the private sector and developers to help meet the need; not all of it has to be capital A affordable. It does need to be affordable or attainable based on incomes that people are being paid. 

    You typically gain that kind of affordability is through density, and that's going to be the sort of question and conversation the town will need to struggle with in terms of higher density often means more affordability, and that's going to be a pivotal question for what kind of housing gets built on this site, if it does become a housing site. 

  • We’ve talked a lot about housing, as that was coming through in a lot of the comments we're receiving, and there is an openness and an understanding that some commercial development could be potentially allowed under the zoning. What we're trying to look at carefully is the demand for those uses and make sure that we put our emphasis and our focus on things that we know there's demand for. We often talk about encouraging things like mixed uses, but we want to be careful not to require certain things that may not be feasible. 

    There are some opportunities for potential reuses of existing buildings, so there is a potential opportunity there that we want to make sure that the zoning allows for a potential reuse of an existing building. Our best-case scenario for zoning is to make it as flexible as possible. 

    Zoning is a bit like a menu. We're going through this process to create a menu of potential options that could exist on the campus. Educational institutions and educational uses are always allowed, and we're not preventing any potential reuse as another university, college, or educational institute. What we're trying to do through this discussion and process is just broaden the types of uses that might be available in the future. We're definitely looking at commercial and other business-oriented uses, especially if they can help generate tax revenue, which is a major goal. 

  • Yes, the Town will assess demand and need for new facilities and services. 

  • Yes, we will continue to finish this study to discuss zoning. 

    They don't have to be mutually exclusive. If another educational institution is selected, we do want to continue with the zoning, because we don't know what the future will hold, and this is an opportunity for us to examine that now.  

    For some context, the Red Barn is a feature out here that, without an educational institution, is not allowed to be reused under current zoning. We want to make sure that that could exist as a business or a private entity to operate that same building. 

    If an educational institution was chosen and acquired all the land, but they wanted to monetize a portion of the campus or sell off a piece of property or a building, the additional zoning would allow them to potentially do that. It would give flexibility for those ideas to be nurtured. 

  • While the Town will not be doing any specific assessment of buildings, the team understands any future zoning should allow for reuse of buildings where that may be feasible. 

  • Yes, not without a zoning change, and that's definitely something that's high on the list, is to ensure that if the property is sold to a non-educational institution, that we can allow something like that to continue operating. It’s normal to automatically think the red barn will be something someone can just operate, but under the current zoning, it has to be owned and operated and managed by an institute of higher education, so that's a huge constraint that we also want to discuss as part of this process. 

  • Yes, there are parts of the campus where this would be ideal. Hampshire's been very generous with allowing the public to use its campus. There are tennis courts there that people use. They use it for pickleball courts. People use the paths around the college, and the college has never put any restrictions on that access or use. The college has always been very generous. 

    That's an important feature we would like included in a development, that the public would maintain some kind of access of some portions, but it's really hard to judge. In terms of the recreational uses, the town needs additional recreational venues, especially tennis courts, pickleball courts, the swimming pool, the multi-sports venue--so there are things like that that the town is interested in maintaining access for the public. 

  • Hadley is right by our side through this process, in the way this is designed. The land that Hadley has is, for those of you who are familiar with the area, different in terms of its opportunities. Some of it holds a lot of solar fields, some of it's very wet. 

    Of course, Amherst can only zone for Amherst, in terms of their legal abilities and obligations. But we've met with Hadley already to talk about the project as it goes forward, and the focus is to just keep everybody in the loop, communicate all the way through, and make sure that everybody just understands how this goes forward, and certainly they're invited to the table for any of our public engagement process. 

  • The Pioneer Valley Transit Authority already serves the Hampshire College campus and the non-profit institutions with a bus line that goes down Route 116 into South Hadley. Previously, there were also van sand microbus services, from Hampshire College to Smith College and to Mount Holyoke College under the five college system. So it's not unusual to have a density of people living in this area, and public transit currently goes onto the campus. 

    There is opportunity for bus service there. The PVTA is open to additional routes. It will be a little bit different, because the routes in Amherst are subsidized mainly by the five colleges, by Five College Inc. If we look for an extension of routes, they will do a study, an analysis of the ridership, and then they'll test it out, and if there's enough riders, they'll maintain that service. Their service is currently being provided. We want them to continue to provide it, because it does service our nonprofits who are on the campus site, and it is an important link between Amherst and South Hadley and Granby. 

  • We do know that population dipped a bit during COVID and then recovered over the last couple years. In terms of long-range forecasts, the county will slowly lose population over time. It's not significant, but it does show a slight reversal long-term. It's somewhat challenging to know how much of it is true demographics versus how much is wrapped up in the housing market, and sort of the lack of affordable housing options. Based on the numbers we see now, in the long range, there is a slight decline at the county level. 

    That may be the actual population projection, but the conversations that we're hearing and having are that Massachusetts, as a totality, is in a housing crisis. There are not enough housing units to meet the demand. That has the effect of raising costs, and so there are a bunch of studies that start at the state level and at the regional level that really indicate a housing crisis. A shortage of housing is impacting a lot of different things. 

    There was another question in the mix about our housing needs. Our 2025 housing production plan does the deep dive, the detailed information about our housing stock, the numbers, the projections and the need, so we're basing this conversation about housing on all of these different elements that are contributing to the need, and so exactly how that relates to the population projections, I'm not sure, but it is something that we know is an issue, and is really important for a lot of communities to be tackling. 

    One of the trends that we've seen is that even though the population is leveling off across the whole state, household size is shrinking. So, we no longer need big single-family houses with 3 and 4 bedrooms. We have a lot of those, but what we need are smaller one- and two-bedroom units for smaller households, people that are older, younger people. We're seeing a mismatch, and there's a great opportunity here to level that off in Amherst. 

  • The town owns and operates a wastewater treatment plant. It happens to be in the town of Hadley, directly behind UMass, where their fields are. There's a wastewater treatment facility that was built to handle a significant amount of wastewater. The Town owns and operates the plant. We're reviewing a comprehensive wastewater plan, that will go on for the next several months, as we try to develop a plan for the investments that we're going to need to meet the regulatory requirements, and also to upgrade the plant, because it's needed, whether this development happens or not. 

  • There will be targeted outreach to different groups in the area, including, as we mentioned already, the three nonprofit entities, people who live in the neighborhood, but also people who have an option who would like to live in Amherst, and this would be a potential for them. We have not gotten that deep into that process yet, but we do have strong communications people in both the consultants and for the town who will be working on that. We welcome any suggestions that people have, if they want to suggest ideas to us. 

  • Yes, starting tomorrow, we will have this presentation posted. It will take us some time to go through all the written questions that we've received and provide written responses to all of them, but you can see that in the coming weeks, and as soon as we have more information on the next round of public meetings, that will be posted there as well. 

  • The Town encourages proposals that combine productive uses, including housing and commercial uses, with preservation and conservation of sensitive natural resources, critical habitats, and open space. 

  • There are three parts to the response. One: members of the Commission, members of other boards and committees can participate in this public process as we move forward. 

    The Commission, like any other project or initiative has a regulatory role through the state wetlands laws and regulations, as well as our local bylaw and regs. They will consider things like wetlands, buffers, perennial streams, perennial intermittent streams, and vernal pools--any of those resource areas that come under the jurisdiction of the Conservation Commission. 

    Historically, Amherst and the Conservation Commission, as well as other boards and committees, have supported the protection of prime farmland. We know that there are prime soils in and around the Hampshire College farm. As the College moves forward with their plans, and they are engaging with potential buyers and future uses of the property, there may be a role, from the town and through the Commission and other boards, to help protect and conserve some of those important farmland resources. 

  • It's important to recognize, in Amherst history, we've had many, many decades of taking an active role in the production of natural resources, both open space through conservation acquisition, as well as the protection of farmland, prime soils throughout town. I think it's a little too early to say as there are currently no proposals. We want to work with the college and with this process. This process is mainly focused on zoning and not the active preservation of those lands. However, we will work with potential buyers and look at that in the future. 

    The college has been very thoughtful about those natural resources through the years, and much of the development has occurred outside of those areas, so there will be protection through regulatory processes of natural resources along streams and other regulated wetlands, etc. And we'll just see how that plays out with regard to prime farmland and other resources. We'll also take our cues from the Town Council's goals, and those are very clear, that housing is a priority, expanding the tax base, as well as protecting natural resources. We have multiple things to work on, and we will do that as the months move forward. 

See all FAQs in this document.

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