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.
It was heartbreaking, said Morey, who was then its human resources director. She described the facility as a “safety net” for islanders.
In the following years, its board met for hours each week, first trying to reopen in some form 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.
“Honestly, I was [like], ‘This is not gonna work. I mean, this is never gonna happen,’” she said.
But it did, and what’s now known as HomePort is accepting applications for 23 units available to seniors and essential workers, who are set to start moving in this December.
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 local 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 help address complicated housing-related challenges that face coastal communities across Maine.
Leaders also hope it could be a model for other communities to provide housing at a lower cost.
“The thing of it is to be smart and clever to see what you can do with [a vacant building], and we probably did one of the smartest and cleverest things you can do with it,” said Kathleen Billings, a board member and Stonington’s town manager.
The Island Nursing Home opened in 1983 with 50 beds and expanded to 70 in the late 1990s. It closed in October 2021 because it couldn’t find enough qualified staff in a remote location with a worsening housing shortage, leaders said at the time.
Board members tried to find ways to reopen, floating ideas like offering less skilled care.
“They did I don’t even know how many budgets of trying to make it work,” Morey said, also noting low state reimbursements as a challenge. “But the money’s just not there.”
Providing housing instead would still benefit seniors, Morey said.
HomePort considered hiring a firm to convert the building, but that proved too costly. State funding requires providing services that the original nursing home struggled to staff. Subsidized housing also has income limits, and going without it provides a more flexible option for people who may be working or have some assets but still need a place to live, Billings said.
They settled on doing it themselves at a low enough cost to keep rents relatively affordable.
Enter project manager Dave Witham, who Morey described as a “magician.”
A Deer Isle general contractor with extensive experience in large buildings and architecture, he coordinated mostly local contractors and did significant hands-on work himself.
With the building and much of the infrastructure in place, plus creative planning and the experience of board members, units were completed around $75,000 each, less than half of most quotes per unit or for new construction.
HomePort is on track to finish before its projected two-year timeline and just under budget at about $2 million, according to Witham. Enough donations have come in that they might not need to secure a separate $2 million loan to get started.
A development of its size for this cost is “almost unheard of,” Billings said.
The project also targets the “missing middle,” or people who make too much money for subsidized housing but not enough for market housing costs, she said. Older people can move in for a lower-maintenance option, potentially freeing up other housing, and younger people can save for a home while escaping the cycle of moving between hard-to-find winter rentals and summer housing.
Applications opened in September and seven have been approved, spanning people from their 20s to 80s, Morey said, mostly seniors. Rooms average $1,400 per month including utilities, with smaller apartments listed at $1,300 and two-bedrooms at $1,700. That’s in line with or less than many local rental listings.
The flood of applications officials expected hasn’t come yet, but Morey thinks people have already secured winter housing and momentum will pick up in the spring, along with word-of-mouth interest.
The facility also features two common rooms, a pavilion, outdoor garden areas, a commercial kitchen and office rentals. Morey, who will become its executive director when the building opens, hopes to offer senior center activities in the future and envisions HomePort as an intergenerational neighborhood.
HomePort needs about 15 tenants to cover costs and anticipates annual fundraising to maintain the 43-year-old building. The board started with funds left over from the nursing facility and a $1.5 million capital campaign is ongoing, but numbers weren’t available before press time.
While considering reopening, the board met with some pushback around its decisions and concerns about its due diligence toward finding ways to stay open.
In 2023, for example, the Bangor Daily News reported it might be challenging for a future project to gain support after the board made a quick change in plans and sold its bed licenses. A plan asking towns to contribute to reopening costs shortly after was met with local skepticism.
Morey said it’s taken this long for people to support the change, and some still view the facility as a nursing home.
“It’s hard to change people’s minds after it was such a longstanding institution, you know, and very much loved and supported,” she said. “But at least this way, we’re doing something for seniors.”
To Billings, negative sentiments seem “long gone” now, and the island’s desperate need for housing is very clear.
More than 40% of homes in Deer Isle and Stonington are occupied only seasonally, a local housing study found last December. The island is short more than 100 units of affordable housing, and home prices make it among the least affordable communities in the state.
Donations for the HomePort were generous and often immediate, Billings said, many of them from people who had supported the nursing home financially.
She feels good about the project and broader efforts underway to address housing needs on the island, but is still “very worried” about the future.
The island is attractive and social media has spotlighted it even more, according to Billings. Homes sell fast, often to out-of-state buyers, she said. She doesn’t blame buyers for that, but local residents get priced out as property values rise.
Deer Isle-Stonington needs year-round residents to help its businesses stay open through winter, its schools staffed and its economy functioning. One of Billings’ biggest worries is balancing economic dependence on tourism with those needs, she said, which is one reason she worked to provide rooms for essential workers.
Billings, Morey and Witham all said local commitment and skill among employees and board members made the HomePort project possible, saving money and navigating obstacles to turn the building into an asset.
“I think it’s possible for any community to do this, if they have the right people,” Witham said.
