37 Children Are Living at Wellfleet’s Lawrence Hill
With all 46 units leased, 91 people now call the affordable complex home
WELLFLEET — Five months after the first tenants started moving into the 46-unit Lawrence Hill affordable housing complex in April, the apartments are officially full. Among the 91 residents of the new units are 37 children age 17 or younger — 41 percent of the total population there.
According to Wellfleet Elementary School Principal Adam O’Shea, three of those children had already been attending the school last year, and eight of them are newly enrolled this year — a significant boost for a school that was built for 150 students but enrolled 82 last year.
“I appreciate the direction we’re headed in, and I hope it continues,” said O’Shea on Sept. 22. “I hope this is just the beginning of having more students in our community.”
Demographic data on the Lawrence Hill project was provided by the two nonprofits that developed it, the Community Development Partnership (CDP) and Preservation of Affordable Housing (POAH). According to their tallies, exactly half of the 46 units are occupied by households that previously lived on the Outer Cape.
Thirteen of those households had already lived in Wellfleet, while 10 of them arrived from a home in Provincetown, Truro, or Eastham, according to Cory Fellows, a vice president of development at POAH.
Three more households came from the Lower Cape, eight came from Dennis, Yarmouth, or Barnstable, and one came from Falmouth. That means 76 percent of the units at Lawrence Hill are occupied by households that had already lived on Cape Cod.
Eight households came from other places in Massachusetts, and three came from outside the state. Ten of the new residents are age five or younger, and 27 are between the ages of 6 and 17, Fellows reported.
...Michelle Fogarty, who lives with her husband in a townhouse unit at Lawrence Hill, said she loves seeing all the children walking back and forth to school every day.
Her daughter, Sabrinna, attended Wellfleet Elementary in the early 2000s, she said, and watching the students “reminds her of all the wonderful years” her daughter spent at the school.
Dorjee Gyadatsang grew up in Provincetown and works as a landscaper. Before moving into Lawrence Hill, he, his wife, Leah, and their two children, Arya and Karma, lived with two other people in a rented condo in Provincetown.
It was “a roof over our heads,” Dorjee said, but now his family can spread out into two bedrooms.
Leah Gyadatsang said that when she learned her family would get an apartment at Lawrence Hill, they were only 11 days away from the end of their winter rental.
“I hardly slept for months,” she said. “We were going to apply for a Truro campground. All I thought about was my two kids not having a home.”
Fogarty said she’s found “more of a sense of community in the last two months living here than in 23 years” living on Old Paine Hollow Road.
Read the full The Provincetown Independent article here.
Dorjee and Leah Gyadatsang walking their daughter, Arya, to Wellfleet Elementary School this week. (Photo by Agata Storer)