Bangor approved more housing units in 2024 than in the last three years, but it may take years for it to materialize due to the slow pace of development in the area.
At the end of last year, the Bangor City Council drafted a list of goals it wanted to accomplish in 2024. Ensuring residents of all ages and income levels have access to safe, affordable, quality housing was at the top of the list.
To achieve this, councilors decided to focus on expanding and improving housing in the city. Doing this, they agreed, would make 2024 “the year of housing.”
The council set this goal after the city struggled for years with not having enough housing, continuously rising rent and purchase costs, and an aging housing stock. The shortage of quality, affordable housing also overlaps with the region’s other challenges, namely chronic homelessness and a stagnant population.
In some ways, it worked. The Bangor Planning Board approved 75 new housing units in 2024, a significant jump from the 45 new units the city approved in both 2022 and 2023, according to Anne Krieg, Bangor’s economic development director. But the city was also stymied from further progress by slow development in the region, driven by high labor and supply costs.
Seventy-five isn’t the most units the city has approved in a single year in recent memory. In 2020, city leaders authorized 93 new units, Krieg said.
Roughly 100 housing units were created in the last year and 321 more are still pending completion, Krieg said.
“Everything that was on our to-do list this year, we’ve done,” Krieg said. “We always want to do more, but I feel really proud of what the staff has accomplished this year.”
Perhaps the most notable progress councilors made this year was getting a developer to agree to build up to 75 housing units on a piece of city-owned land on Grandview Avenue, councilor Rick Fournier said.
In 2024, the city council approved using roughly $2 million in pandemic recovery funding to bring utilities and road infrastructure to the land. This, the city believed, would spare a future developer from the cost of doing so later and make the land more attractive to build on.
Councilors then authorized the city manager to negotiate an agreement with Developers Collaborative, a Portland-based housing developer, to build the type of housing the city wants on the Grandview Avenue property.
Once finished, the project will bring a wave of workforce housing to the city, Fournier said, which the region desperately needs.
Also in 2024, the city began a two-year pilot project to document all of its rental housing, which was recommended by a housing work group in March 2019. While the project doesn’t add housing to the city, it will reveal what housing is available and what the community needs, which could help the city make future investments.
The city also began to see the effects of other changes it made in recent years. For example, the city council approved raising the fees on vacant homes in 2023, hoping that continuously rising costs would push the owners to sell or improve the properties rather than letting them sit empty.
The city’s list of vacant properties shrank from 68 to 60 in 2024, and 48 of the 60 properties are registered with the city, meaning the owners pay increasingly higher fees the longer the homes remain unused.
The city also approved giving $200,000 in federal funding to Penquis CAP last year to buy the former Pine Tree Inn in Bangor and convert it into 41 units of permanent supportive housing for people experiencing homelessness. While the money was given last year, much of the progress happened this year, and the project is expected to be finished in early 2025.
But the major barrier developers face in building housing in Bangor is the rising cost of materials and labor, which the city has little control over, Krieg said.
“It has been a year of communication about what’s happening in development and what’s holding people back and we heard from landlords and developers about what their needs are,” Krieg said. “We can’t control everything, but can we at least reduce some other costs.”
It could take months or years to see the effects of decisions the council made this year.
“There’s always more work to be done, but I think we’ve made great strides in the last few years,” Fournier said. “This stuff doesn’t happen overnight because you need contractors, developers and different pieces need to come together.”
