For over 50 years, Construct has offered Southern Berkshire County residents looking for housing with support and resources. This week, the organization named University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate and Iraq War veteran Joey Lindstrom as its new leader.
“I also coordinated an overflow shelter at the Salvation Army of Dane County, and I spent some time as a tenants’ rights counselor, working with both tenants and landlords to make sure they understood tenant landlord law and how it applied to their own lives," he told WAMC. "I was also very involved in advocacy for more resources to address affordability and homelessness, and did a lot of work with the local continuum of care and the local homeless service providers to make sure that they were raising their voices in budget decisions happening at the county and at the state, and learning more tools that they could use to address homelessness and housing affordability.”
After that, Lindstrom moved to the National Low Income Housing Coalition in Washington, D.C., where he led their field engagement efforts and worked with housing developers, homeless service providers, tenants’ associations and others throughout the country to “be sure that they were aware of the best data and most effective talking points to make the argument in DC with their elected officials on why the [Department of Housing and Urban Development] budget needed support.”
In 2022, his career brought him to New England.
“I worked in Rhode Island at their nascent department of housing, which really just got off the ground over the last couple of years, and I was really pleased to work with the first two housing secretaries that they had there," said Lindstrom. "And now I'm making the next step in my career and working in the Berkshires, which is a lovely, charming, very livable and enjoyable community.”
Lindstrom frames housing as a crucial piece of regional infrastructure — particularly in the Berkshires, where a limited housing supply, low wages, and high demand have sent prices skyrocketing.
“I really appreciate Constructs’ focus on what we term as essential workers, because so much of what we do when we're working on affordability is not what people assume, with the stereotypes of who is in affordable housing," he said. "Very often we're talking about people who are essential workers in our community, the people who are working in the hotels and in the shops and in the stores, and in some cases, with housing costs being so high, I'm not just talking about, for example, the cashier at the grocery store, but that person's manager as well, because the rents around here are, in fact, so exorbitant.”
He's resistant to making broad comparisons between states when it comes to addressing housing insecurity and need.
“The reality is, I can never point to a particular state or a particular community that's getting it right, that has addressed all of their housing affordability challenges," said Lindstrom. "I can point to certain places that are doing better or worse in generating revenue or passing bond initiatives and so forth. There are certain places that are doing better or worse in combating, for example, the criminalization of homelessness, or expanding housing affordability through ADUs and fighting back on restrictive zoning barriers and so forth. So, what I look at when I see Massachusetts is a state with really significant housing affordability challenges, as is true of many states on the East Coast. More significant than what you would compare to most places in the middle of the country.”
While it’s early days for the Lindstrom era at Construct, he already has at least one clear objective.
“The ongoing work to redevelop the Cassilis [Farm] project in New Marlborough, which, as you know, is a gilded age, very large, very large home mansion that is being converted into 11 affordable rental apartments that will be solutions for 11 households in the in the South County region," said Lindstrom. "So that is a very cumbersome and very complex development that we are really going to have to spend a lot of time focusing on in order to get it to the finish line.”
Despite years of Berkshire County’s housing struggles painting a grim portrait of the region, Lindstrom says it’s important to remember that the situation is not intractable, and that better days can lie ahead.
“I've learned through studying the history of the housing movement the United States that as recently as the early 1970s, we had a surplus of affordable and available rental housing for low-income people throughout America, and we now exist in a place where various estimates say the shortage is around 7 million to 10 million homes, depending on where you're setting the income eligibility and so forth," he told WAMC. "But it really wasn't that long ago when we had not only enough, but more than we needed.”
