After raising $8 million to beat out a corporate investor and purchase their own mobile home park, a Bangor co-op will get another $3 million loan to develop some of the park’s empty lots.
The loan is coming from MaineHousing, the state housing authority, according to a news release from the Co-operative Development Institute, a Massachusetts nonprofit that helped the residents fundraise.
“We see this as a really good investment for us, for the number of homes that it’s able to create for that amount of investment. It’s a good deal,” said Scott Thistle, MaineHousing’s spokesperson.
MaineHousing already gave the Cedar Falls co-operative $1.1 million to purchase their 129-lot park in January with money appropriated from last year’s supplemental budget. Other funding sources included the city of Bangor, which provided $500,000, the Cooperative Fund of the Northeast, Four Directions Development Corporation and the Genesis Loan Fund.
The 79-acre park on Bangor’s Finson Road has 81 empty lots. This loan will allow the Cedar Falls residents, in partnership with BangorHousing, to repair 28 of them and install new manufactured homes there, according to CDI.
“It can sometimes be challenging for residents in the immediate years of community ownership to take on a major development project like this one,” said Nora Gosselin, CDI’s resident acquisitions director. “To have someone with expertise who is local come to the table with a development approach that provides benefits to both the cooperative and BangorHousing residents is really unique.”
It’s the first phase of a two-step plan BangorHousing has to develop the entire park, executive director Mike Myatt said. These 28 lots are already hooked up to utilities and easier to develop. Myatt predicts they’ll be installing mobile homes there by the summer. After those lots are built out, his agency will work on developing the remaining lots out back along the stream.
The hope is that those 28 new homes will not only generate revenue for the resident cooperative and lower lot rents, but will be an opportunity for those renting units in Bangor’s public housing development, Capehart, to purchase their first home. That would free up affordable apartments in a city squeezed for such inventory. Despite that, the manufactured homes will be available for anyone to purchase.
“People want to move on from rental, and they’re in that first time homebuyer bracket, and there’s no inventory. By exploring and going into the mobile home universe, we think we can expand that inventory,” Myatt said. “It just seems like such a positive outcome for all of us.”