A disturbing trend has taken shape in New Bedford, Massachusetts — one that the city’s mayor, Scott Lang, and a team of retired military men and women who started Welcome Home Veterans Housing (WHVH) are working to change.
The majority of homeless people in New Bedford are military veterans. And for the last nine years, WHVH has been building safe, affordable and permanent housing specifically for those homeless military veterans. The group’s latest project? The Sean Brooke House: a 19-apartment, fully-furnished housing complex in New Bedford, which is now powered by a 38-kilowatt (kW) photovoltaic (PV) solar energy system.
The $4 million housing project was completed last month and is named after Sean Brooke, a former U.S. military serviceman who served a 14-month tour in Iraq as an Army medic. Brooke returned to his military base safely after service, but was killed by a drunk driver on the island of Oahu, Hawaii in 2005.
The house — that sits on a site that was once a vacant mill — has been in the making for the last six years. Its solar energy system is capable of generating 50,400 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity each year and reduce the yearly electricity costs of the housing structure by over $10,000 compared to what the bill would have been without the solar energy system.
