In a combined vote by the members of both boards, the Select Board and Needham Housing Authority Board of Commissioners on June 10 selected Amanda Berman, an urban planner with a specialty in affordable housing, to fill the open seat on the NHA board created by the resignation last month of Penny Kirk.
Berman has worked the past two years as a housing policy and advocacy liaison at Metro West Collaborative Development, a regional community development corporation. She had previously spent more than six years working on housing issues for the city of Newton, the last five as its director of housing and community development.
She was among seven applicants to fill the position which became open May 15 when Kirk submitted her letter of resignation from the five-member board, citing personal reasons.
The seven applicants were vetted during a search process run jointly by Select Board member Cathy Dowd and NHA Commissioner Jim Flanagan. After interviewing all seven candidates, Dowd and Flanagan put forward Berman and a second applicant, Felix Zemel, as their top choices for the position.
The recommendation was nonbinding, leaving the other Select Board and NHA members free to vote for any of the seven applicants at their joint meeting on June 10.
“I would ask that we all be mindful of two major factors,” Dowd said prior to the vote on the opening.
“First, there will be an election for this seat in 10 months, so less than a year,” she said.
“And second, that the next 10 months are critical to the Needham Housing Authority in moving forward on Linden Chambers and Seabeds in terms of dealing with the state and competing for much-needed state and federal dollars.”
Dowd was referring to two projects for which the NHA is currently seeking more than $80 million in funding via competitive grant programs and for which it has received separate commitments totaling around $10 million in town Community Preservation Act funding.
Referring to her and Flanagan’s preference for Berman and Zemel, she said, “We wanted to stick to an objective set of factors, such as knowledge and experience.
“We thought it was important to put a person on the board with the knowledge and experience in affordable housing to contribute from day one with no learning curve. Therefore, our major criterion was knowledge and professional experience — in affordable housing, specifically.”
Interviewed the day after the vote, Berman said her work in Newton involved “frequent, almost daily interactions with the Newton Housing Authority.”
“And it was during a time when they were undertaking their biggest development project in the history of the housing authority with the Haywood House project,” she said, referring to a 55-unit affordable senior housing development completed in 2023.
Berman has lived in Needham since 2016 and was elected to Town Meeting in April’s election. She said she feels ready to contribute from day one on the board and understands the position requires a focus on both the NHA’s long-term ambitions and its day-to-day responsibilities.
“It’s like any affordable housing developer who continues to own and manage their properties,” she said.
“It’s a constant balance between those multiple priorities of ensuring the buildings and the programs that are already there are being taken care of at the level that they can while also pushing forward really lofty and important goals for greater development.”
Berman was nominated and selected by a 7-1 vote that came after some 20 minutes of discussion. Select Board member Josh Levy voted to oppose Berman, having signaled his intent prior to the roll call to vote for Zemel.
Kirk’s resignation came five weeks after the April town elections and with nearly three years remaining on her five-year term. Berman’s appointment will allow her to serve until next year’s town election. At that time, the position will again be on the April 2026 ballot to fill the seat for the final two years of Kirk’s term, with Berman eligible to run if she chooses.
The field of seven applicants included two people, Ross Donald and Barbara McDonald, who had previously run unsuccessfully for the NHA. Donald has run and lost twice, while McDonald fell short this past April.
Levy cited their electoral aspirations as factors that he felt should have been more heavily weighed in the vetting process. Similarly, he felt Zemel’s past electoral interest (an unsuccessful run for the Board of Health in 2018) was an overlooked positive. He asked Dowd why she and Flanagan had not taken prior electoral interest into consideration.
Noting that “all elections are different,” Dowd said she and Flanagan didn’t want to assume how voters would have chosen among this group of applicants. “We really weren’t trying to say, well, this is how an election might turn out.
“We just felt more comfortable with objective criteria rather than imagine what might happen.”
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