Two housing developments roughly a dozen miles apart are taking shape as test cases for whether the Monadnock region can deliver homes at price points working families can afford.
In Peterborough, just four of the 30 condominium units at Our Town Village remain available, with seven units already closed and residents moved in nine months after excavators broke ground at 241 Union St. In Jaffrey, the former St. Patrick School site on Main Street has been cleared and is on track for construction to begin this year on 58 new units — 28 market-rate townhouse duplexes and 30 units of workforce housing.
Together, the two projects will add more than 80 homes to a region where housing demand has consistently outstripped supply.
Our Town Village
Realtor Sadie Halliday of Halliday Real Estate, who is marketing the Our Town Village project for Mathewson Company, said the remaining units are expected to be spoken for within the next two weeks.
“Everything else has either closed or is spoken for,” Halliday said. “We’ll be completely sold out in the next week or two. I can guarantee that.”
The pace of sales, Halliday said, reflects the depth of demand for moderately priced housing in the Monadnock region. Developers Phil and Ziggy Mathewson held to the price range first announced last summer, with units listed between $289,000 and $325,000 — a range Halliday said was preserved through deliberate cost decisions throughout design and construction.
“It came from a lot of very strategic planning on the part of the developer, in terms of knowing that we could hit that price point and that was the goal,” Halliday said. “It was very, very deliberate, and a lot of planning goes into that.”
Halliday described intentional trade-offs in the units’ design — skipping $700-per-unit side panels on refrigerators, for example, while preserving granite countertops in every kitchen.
“The decisions were intentional around keeping it a quality product, but figuring out where it was important to spend money and where it wasn’t,” she said.
The project, as reported by the Ledger-Transcript in July 2025, consists of three buildings — a 20-unit main building, a six-unit building and a four-unit building — on a nearly three-acre parcel across from Nubanusit Farm and Community. The development will be managed by a homeowners’ association.
Halliday said she has come to prefer the term “attainable housing” over “affordable housing,” arguing that the latter can stigmatize developments. “It means that it’s attainable for everybody in our community to be a part of it,” she said.
And, it has proven attainable for all ages. Buyers at Our Town Village span a range of ages, Halliday said, a mix she expects will translate into a stronger sense of community over time.
“It’s not just one age demographic that’s there. It’s a really varied age demographic,” she said. “So I think organically, it’s going to create a really strong sense of community.”
Halliday said she believed there is room in the market for all price points.
“Communities need housing at all price points,” she said. “Everybody’s constantly moving in and shifting. And for a community to be dynamic, you need all of those price points.”
The St. Patrick’s School development
Twelve miles south in Jaffrey, construction at the former St. Patrick School site has gained substantial momentum after months of winter delay, according to developer Michael Shea of MJ & MJ Realty Ventures LLC.
“It’s really, really picking up steam now,” Shea said. “We’re actually hoping to begin pouring foundations and starting construction on the first few duplexes in early June.”
Once framing begins, Shea said, he expects each duplex to take roughly four months to complete.
The Main Street parcel, where St. Patrick School operated until its 2015 closure, has now been subdivided into three separate lots. MJ & MJ Realty Ventures purchased the property in April 2023 for $725,000 and has an agreement to sell one parcel to Keene Housing, which plans to build a 30-unit workforce housing apartment building. Shea’s company will develop 14 market-rate duplexes — 28 townhouse units in total — on a loop road around the site.
Workforce housing, as defined under state law, is affordable for a four-person household earning up to the area median income, or a three-person household earning no more than 60% of the area median income. According to Census.gov, the median income in Jaffrey is around $92,330.
A third lot holds the former St. Patrick’s Convent, a stone building that once housed nuns who taught at the elementary school. Shea said the building’s future use remains undetermined.
“Perhaps it’ll be a residence. It could be a multifamily. It could be a professional building, or it could be potentially a restaurant,” he said. “We’re open to really any thoughts on any, whatever anybody might have a desire to do with it.”
The demand driving the project is visible from inside Shea’s day job. He also serves as president of Jaffrey-based Belletetes Inc., one of the town’s largest employers alongside manufacturers like MilliporeSigma and Teleflex.
“It’s challenging for a lot of our employees here at Belletetes,” Shea said. “On a few occasions, we’ve had employees come to inquire about any rental properties that we may know of that are available, because they may have been informed by their landlord that they’re going to sell the house or the apartment building where they’ve been living. It’s just very challenging to find affordable housing. So there is a true need, for sure.”
Eighty-eight units, spread across two towns, will not close that gap alone. But both developers said the projects prove the gap is closeable — that with the right land, the right partners and enough discipline on price, the region can still build housing for the people who already live and work here.
“If we’re going to make a commitment to it and not just talk about it,” Halliday said, “but actually do it.”
