AMHERST — Companies, rather than families or individuals, acquired an average of more than 10 single-family homes each year from long-term residents over a recent five-year period, according to information presented to the Amherst Affordable Housing Trust on Thursday.

The 52 single-family home transactions from residents to limited liability corporations, or LLCs, between 2019 and 2023, and another 23 home sales from one company to another company, are among challenges the town is facing in increasing the housing stock and making living in Amherst more affordable, based on a presentation by Tony Duong, a community planner with the Barrett Planning Group. The consulting group from Hingham has been hired by the town to create a new housing production plan.

Duong said he was sharing key compelling points in ongoing research, including into what is called the affordability gap, which is based on price of a home that a family with a median household income can afford. While the area median household income can afford a $285,176 home in Amherst, the median sales price in town in 2024 was $600,000, meaning there is an affordability gap of $314,824.

“Which is double what we had deemed that the median household can afford in Amherst,” Duong said.

Barrett is continuing to put together a housing production plan, with the last such plan having been completed in 2013. That document over the following five years helped produce 487 units, with 226 of these defined as affordable, or less than 80% of the area median income, and since that time there have been other strategies to increase the amount of available housing.

The new production plan will guide future development. “We want to have ambitious, but also very realistic goals,” Duong said.

Last Tuesday afternoon, Greg Richane, the town’s housing coordinator, and Barrett had a work session at Jones Library, which allowed residents to offer input, following up on community surveys.

Richane explained that Barrett will develop both a “roadmap for affordable housing” and a “comprehensive game plan.”

“Barrett Planning is collating and organizing all this information,” Richane said. Barrett will soon be creating goals for affordable housing and then developing an implementation strategy.

At the work session, people had the opportunity to use sticky notes to offer written input at several stations, where they could also interact with members of Barrett’s team. The idea was to address problems that have been identified, including the lack of affordable housing, impediments to housing choice, limited housing options for local college students, and the shifting demographics that have caused young families to leave and schools to have historically low enrollments.

Many of those who wrote the notes said the simplest solution would be to get the University of Massachusetts to build more on-campus housing

“More housing = more for everyone, students or not,” another wrote. Another suggested building more of the “missing middle” housing.

People appeared to favor solutions such as cottage cluster development, two- to three-family homes and accessory dwelling units, Duong said.

Recent surveys show almost one-third of non-student residents, or 32% of respondents, said they would move from the town within five years, citing the high cost of housing, and 44% of the non-student residents reported being cost-burdened at least once over the past year.

Retired Amherst planning director Christine Brestrup told the Planning Board last week that the housing production plan can give the town protection from housing developments that may not be appropriate for town, including “unfriendly” projects under the state’s Chapter 40 B law. Assessing housing needs is also critical, she said.

“I think it’s a very important process to go through,” Brestrup said.

Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.