About one-third of all of the affordable housing stock in Melrose, 324 units altogether, is owned by the Congregational Retirement Homes, and is found in their three buildings: the Levi Gould House at 200 W. Foster Street, the Fuller House next door at 101 Cottage Street, and the Jonathan Cochrane House at 80 Grove Street.
These hundreds of apartments are the direct result of a conversation that started in First Congregational Church’s Social Service Committee in 1961. Concerns about the fate of the elderly people of Melrose led the committee to conduct a study on how best to serve them. With the full support of their congregation, and the leadership of their energetic pastor, Clarence W. Fuller, the committee decided to take on what may have been the most ambitious mission project in the long history of Melrose’s houses of worship.
Their timing could not have been better. The Federal Housing Act of 1959 had established under Section 202 a program whereby private non-profits could apply for federally funded, long-term, low-interest rate loans that would cover up to 99.5% of construction costs for low and moderate-income senior housing. In 1965, the housing non-profit established by the church with Reverend Fuller as president was among the first in Massachusetts to apply successfully under the program.
At first, the Zoning Board rejected a proposed eight-story plan for the Gould House; the church resubmitted a six-story proposal with the same number of units a month later, and won the variances it needed. Ground was broken the next year, and the Gould House opened in 1967. The first building was such a success that the church applied for a second Section 202 grant in 1972 to expand their campus with the Fuller House. In 1977 the church won a third Section 202 grant to construct the Cochrane House, which the Zoning Board quickly approved, citing their “great confidence in the moral force of the First Congregational Church.” It opened in 1979.
Starting in the 1980s, Congress began to defund Section 202. Although the law is still on the books, no funds for new Section 202 projects have been available since 2011.
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