UMass Students Win Top Prize in Affordable Housing Development Competition for Proposal in Holyoke

A team of UMass Amherst students, in collaboration with students from Clark University and Wentworth Institute of Technology, recently received a first-place prize of $10,000 in the 24th Annual Affordable Housing Development Competition presented by Federal Home Loan Bank of Boston. The winning proposal, called “High Street Homes,” aims to transform 10 underutilized parcels of land in Holyoke into a mixed-use development of residential homes and communal green space.

The team included Master of Architecture students Jason Soares de Carvalho, Zahra Shah Mohammady, and Michael Chancellor, also a dual Master of Landscape Architecture student, as well as undergraduate students in the Isenberg School of Management Henry Schwarz, a finance major, and Samuel Hinrichs, a management major.

“We are proud of this student team, which looked at issues of affordable housing in nearby Holyoke,” says Stephen Schreiber, chair of the Department of Architecture. “The UMass students came from three colleges at UMass, and worked effectively with each other and with the community partners.”

The third-place prize went to the project “Newcombe Pointe and Campanella Landing,” also created by a team including UMass Amherst students. It proposes to develop two underutilized sites in Nashua, N.H., into 40 new affordable apartments and four homes for first-time homebuyers along with 4,600 square feet of green space. The development proposal was created by Mia Waters and Viraja Bhosale, both UMass Amherst Master of Architecture students, in collaboration with students from Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology as well as NeighborWorks Southern New Hampshire.