A year after residents bought their Bangor mobile home park, they say they’ve improved conditions while dodging steep rent increases that could have come if a large corporation took it over.
In the year since residents of the 129-lot Cedar Falls Mobile Home Park on Finson Road bought the park, several new features have appeared throughout the neighborhood, such as a community garden and a bulletin board where residents can pin fliers and announcements.
Other residents joined forces to build a small shelter near one of the park’s entrances where students can wait for the school bus, said Mary Bushey, president of the cooperative that owns the park and a resident of 19 years. Another neighbor asked the city for a crosswalk on Finson Road where school buses pick up and drop off students.
While relatively small, Bushey said those additions show residents are invested in the community they now own and want to make it better, both for themselves and their neighbors, Bushey said.
It also illustrates that lower-priced options can succeed in a state with rising housing costs, while supporting residents’ needs. The group aims to welcome more housing in the coming years, which will chip away at Maine’s housing shortage and keep rents affordable for lower income residents.
“It’s exciting, but there has also been a learning curve, too,” said Rebecca Bragdon, a park resident of 20 years and interim treasurer of the cooperative. “We’re volunteers and using the skills we’ve learned through different experiences. We never had to think about city ordinances before or how this all works.”
The 79-acre park was the second mobile home park in the state to be bought by resident co-ops. A state law signed in July 2023 made the purchase possible, as it requires park owners to give residents the right of first refusal when they want to sell.
Cedar Falls residents managed to raise $8 million to fend off a corporate investor and purchase their own mobile home park early last year.
Of that, $1.1 million came from MaineHousing, the state housing authority, and the city of Bangor chipped in another $500,000. Cooperative Fund of the Northeast, Four Directions Development Corporation and the Genesis Loan Fund added to the funding pot.
Residents worried their home would become the latest park to be snatched up by corporate investors — a growing nationwide trend in recent years that’s usually followed by large rent increases.
The co-op did need to raise monthly rents $100 to reach $550, which was expected when the group purchased the development. But residents largely believe rent is still more affordable than most options and more stable than they could have been if another company bought the park, Bushey said.
Median monthly rent in Bangor now sits at nearly $1,600, according to data compiled by Zillow. That’s a sharp increase from 2020, when the median monthly rent for a unit in Bangor was $820, the Bangor Housing Study, released last year, found.
The community still operates like most mobile home parks, where residents own the home they live in, but pay rent on the land it sits on. Residents are also responsible for paying their own utilities and maintaining their lot.
Resident Mike Poulin moved into Cedar Falls roughly six months before residents bought it. The purchase, he said, has fostered a greater sense of community than he expected to find.
Now, Poulin is also planning a bottle drive in the spring, the proceeds of which will go towards installing directional signs in the park that show what roads contain which house numbers, as the park doesn’t have street signs.
This often leads confused visitors to flag down residents for help finding a certain address and could be dangerous if emergency services can’t find someone who needs help, Bragdon said.
Looking to the future, the cooperative has a five-year plan that involves developing a portion of the 80 empty but buildable lots in the community. To begin, Bushey said BangorHousing will add new mobile homes to 28 lots that people can purchase and achieve homeownership.
This expansion is expected to both add housing to a city that desperately needs it and benefit the mobile home park by generating additional revenue and potentially lowering rents, Bushey said.
“The city needs more low and moderate income housing and that’s what we are, that’s our purpose,” Bushey said. “As we grow, our rents can go down a bit and we’ll have things taken care of and feel good about passing this on to the next generation.”
Bushey and Bragdon agreed the last year has been an exciting whirlwind of learning what it takes to maintain the park’s infrastructure, such as filling potholes or replacing streetlights, while following city rules.
“I can visualize the potential and it’s a nice feeling to be a part of this,” Bragdon said. “We own this and we have a say in what goes on here.”