In the center of Lebanon, New Hampshire, just a short walk from Colburn Park, there is a patch of Spencer Street that has held its breath for nearly a decade and a half. Once the home of the city’s public works department, the land became an unexplained silence in an otherwise active neighborhood when the department moved out fourteen years ago. Through those years, the lot waited through big bold ideas and quiet attempts, through plans that failed, financing that fell through, and contest and disappointment. It remained an open wound of possibility. But now, after all the obstacles, with a sense of urgency and hope, planners, residents and city officials are holding on to a new voice that what rises from that empty parcel will be a home.
The building is called The Muse, and it will be an 80-unit affordable housing complex. At four stories and roughly seventy six thousand square feet, The Muse is designed to blend into the downtown and meet a need that Lebanon has struggled to satisfy. The developer, Jake Tamposi, is from Hollis, New Hampshire, and he has worked alongside his brother Joe, with their company The Muse Lebanon LLC, to move the project forward. The project has been through an unstable, uncertain funding climate, but Tamposi says the day is moving. “After an arduous and uncertain funding environment over the past few years, just given some of the changes at the federal and state levels, we were really excited in the past eight months now to see a lot of the pieces really come together for The Muse,” Tamposi said at a recent Planning Board meeting. The development doubles as more than just another building. It is designed to make space for working families, single people and those seeking a different kind of belonging. The once empty block at Spencer Street will offer a housing mix with one, two and three bedroom apartments affordable to individuals and families earning between 30 percent and 80 percent of the Grafton County area median income. In real money, that means households earning roughly $24,000 to $84,000 a year will have a chance to call the place home.
Behind the proposal is a realization that Lebanon’s needs have changed. Around the tables that talked over last week, local leaders and developers have heard something huge: Lebanon does not just need more units, it needs homes where family can breathe. In an earlier design, the developers had planned a larger number of studios and one bedrooms. But as the conversations with the city’s housing authority, Lebanon Housing Authority, began, Tamposi was moved by the reports he heard about the housing shortage for families. Families are already here; they have children, they need two bedrooms or three; they need stable, affordable spaces. The revised project now includes three studios, thirty seven one-bedroom apartments, thirty two two-bedroom apartments, and eight three bedroom apartments. The changes speak to a more truthful version of what every city needs. “It really was dramatic,” Tamposi said of the moment he truly understood the demand. At the Planning Board table, Nick Golon, a project’s engineer and president of the engineering firm TFMoran, framed it plainly: “The reality is we have families. Families need more space.” For anyone who has ever tried to find a place for a growing family in a town with rising rents and few vacancies, the words carry weight; the bedroom count is not a design detail, it is a response to what parents are saying at the kitchen table.
The story of how The Muse got here is as long and winding as the quiet road is sense of desperation for a secure home. This is not the first time a vision has landed on this lot. Lebanon’s city council selected the Tamposi plan in 2023 through a competitive bidding process that aimed to build a 100 percent affordable housing project on the public property. But before that, there had been an attempt in 2017, when a local developer, Mike Davidson of Lebanon-based Ledgeworks, proposed buying the nearly 2-acre lot for $400,000 and building 100 to 200 housing units and 20,000 square feet of commercial and office space. City officials, though, said the offer was too low. They were reluctant to let the land move for nearly half of its value of $853,000. The council refused, and the land sat. Then, in 2020, the city opened another bidding window and chose a proposal by Ken Braverman, of The Braverman Co. in Stowe, Vermont, who agreed to buy the property for $1.5 million. Braverman’s vision called a four-story apartment building with 94 apartments, 8 affordable units and 4,500 square feet of retail and commercial space. But the property contained an invisible obstacle: environmental contamination from its long life as a public works garage. The contamination created more time; tests, observations, remediation and negotiations went on. Hampered by a constrained labor force and soaring inflation, the project became too heavy. In April 2023, Braverman withdrew. It seemed as if the Spencer Street lot had collected dreams, held them for a moment, and saw them slip away.
The city went looking again, and in 2024, the Tamposi proposal was chosen from among three candidates. What struck council members was the experience and the knowledge of the Tamposi team, as well as their ability to raise funds and their commitment to include amenities that would make a real living environment. Also, Sara and Joe’s plan did not quite ask the city for money to carry it; indeed, the land will be bought for $400,000, once the funding agreements are finalized. For years, some might look at this price and see a small discount compared to the $853,000 assessment, but city leaders reasoned accommodate need for affordable housing and the need to reviving this corner of Spencer Street was worth the discounted transaction. “The city is selling the property at a price that allows the project to make sense,” Tamposi said Friday. “While other land and opportunities in the Lebanon and Hanover market are just so expensive now that it’s very difficult to do these affordable housing communities on them.” The old garage site, long an odd, open emptiness, will soon become a resource rather than a void.
Getting The Muse to the starting line has required patience beyond imagine. The most difficult standing has been financing. Even after the city had selected the team and the Planning Board gave its initial approval, New Hampshire’s housing finance authority didn’t give a bond to the project in 2024. Then the agency didn’t offer that same program the following year, leaving developers waiting for a door to open. But in the last eight months, the pressure has finally eased. The funding combination comes from the federal and state sources, including $750,000 from the InvestNH 2.0 program, a state-led service created to make affordable housing in New Hampshire, plus $5.8 million in federal HOME and housing trust funds. The financing also relies on bonds from the state housing finance authority and low-income housing tax credits, the bricks and mortar of affordable housing across the country. The original price tag is just shy of $32 million. Tamposi says all the funding is now “lined up,” and developers are working to formalize final agreements. More than four years after an initial fund roller-coaster, the plan can again breathe. The recent Planning Board meeting gave developers the last needed approvals, and the city staff is ready. The moment to feel that the hard part is over.
With all that finish, the board, the developers and the city have taken final steps to adjust the future of the project. Unit count the change between studio and one-bedroom to two-bedroom is underway. But one change that almost broke people’s hearts was removal of a planned playground. The developer had proposed a playground area that would have been partly on land controlled by the state of New Hampshire, and after repeated conversations, the city, the state and the project engineer could not find a way to share the land. Although the loss of a playground may seem a small thing, for children in a family-centered building, a place to swing and run is as important as a roof. Yet Lebanon’s deputy planning and development director Tim Corwin told the Planning Board he had “no concern” with letting go of the on-site playground because the development sits near the Northern Rail Trail, Eldridge Park, other children’s play structures, and the forever-used Colburn Park. The beauty of the surrounding is already playground. Board member Kathie Romano echoed the sentiment: “I think it’s an excellent location for this property and I hope you’re successful in building it.” The board voted unanimously in favor of the project’s new changes. If the site once opened as an owned garage, then the future is a home that welcomes fresh air.
There is a broader meaning to what is about to happen on Spencer Street. Leband, a town defined by its position in the Upper Valley, knows as well as any city in the new England that housing is not just a line item. Affordable housing changes a community landscape, not only for the people who live in The Muse, but also for the services and stores and schools around it. This is why the city kept the land, despite years of delays and disappointments, why it called builders again, and why the Tamposi was willing to struggle through a funding challenge. Long before the first pile is driven, the crumbling vacant space already has done something: it brought the city together around the needs of the most vulnerable. The development will offer stability to the list of residents from teachers and nurses to restaurant servers, to those whose youth might otherwise be out the community, and to families that need more than sticker says. A two-bedroom apartment is not just a bedroom count, it is a place where a child can do in the day, where a single parent can catch a breath, and where the walls are a foundation. The exact schedule is still to come, but the developers hope construction will begin within the next six months. And with enough means, funding, and approval all in one lane, the building has a real chance to rise.
As the city waits, one more began into the imagination of what for former garages, what the voices of all the politicians, planners and residents: there is a better way to make room for those who keep the city going. It is not simply a building we are watching, but the end of a fourteen year pause. As a planning denied in the room last week, the project ready is to move “full speed ahead.” These are the words Lebanon has not heard in many years. If all goes as planned, the cavern waits at the construction site as the sound of nails, and the streets near Colburn Park will be watching a once-forgotten space become a backdrop for someone’s first home, a stable rental, a peaceful place to gather. The Muse may not have become a perfect name, for it was required to bring both creativity of the city and the courage to keep planning, building, and betting on the future. In the next six months, with plain sailing and shut lands, Lebanon neighborhood can finally make good on a promise four decades in the making.