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Maine island turns shuttered nursing home into apartments at ‘almost unheard of’ cost

Lori Morey stands in a finished apartment at HomePort, the former Island Nursing Home in Deer Isle. Once the facility’s human resources manager, she stayed on after it closed in October 2021 to help its board find a new use for the building. “They have really put a lot of thought into making sure that this is something that’s going to be around for a long, long time,” she said. Credit: Elizabeth Walztoni / BDN

Five years ago, Lori Morey was watching as residents left the Island Nursing Home, the Deer Isle facility where she had worked since graduating high school.

The nursing home, among the last skilled nursing facilities in Hancock County, couldn’t find enough staff to stay open.

In the following years, its board met for hours each week, first trying to reopen and then attempting to reuse the building. Their final plan seemed improbable to Morey at first: convert it into housing by themselves, with private funding, bit by bit, using local labor.

The roughly $2 million project is at the intersection of major, intertwined challenges facing the island and its towns of Deer Isle and Stonington. At the root are an acute housing shortage and rising property values that make it increasingly difficult for seniors and working people to stay, raising serious concerns about the year-round community’s future.

HomePort is the second of two recent privately funded developments on the island trying to address complicated housing-related challenges that face coastal communities across Maine.

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