Bangor city councilors have agreed to kick in $500,000 towards a group of mobile home residents looking to buy their park and stave off investors from purchasing it instead.
The move has drawn mixed reactions from those behind the $8 million effort. The nonprofit backing the residents of Cedar Falls — a 129-lot mobile home park on Bangor’s Finson Road — is excited by the council’s decision. But the president of the residents’ co-operative is disappointed the city didn’t allocate more and fears it could set them back from meeting their January fundraising deadline.
“I was hoping that Bangor, because it is the third largest city in the state, would help a little more,” said the co-op president, Ronnie Pinkham.
The stakes are high for Cedar Falls residents, who would only be the second co-op in the state to buy its own mobile home park if successful. Corporate investors have been buying parks in recent years nationally, and large rent increases can follow. Under a new Maine law, residents of Bangor park are able to buy it over a Canadian corporate bidder after it went up for sale over the summer. They were given 90 days to cobble together the funds.
Keeping the Bangor park — where Pinkham said lot rents are currently around $450 a month — affordable is not only in the interest of preserving existing housing stock for low-income homeowners, it’s also a chance to build tens more units of housing in a city strapped for options. The 79 acre-park includes 80 empty, developable lots.
Nora Gosselin, who works at the Corporate Development Institute, the Massachusetts nonprofit helping residents fundraise, said they should celebrate the fact that the city committed the $500,000 to the effort. “It’s an investment for the city,” she said.
After declaring this last year “the year of housing” and permitting more new units in 2024 than in the last three years, Bangor city councilors unanimously decided in a Monday evening committee workshop to award Cedar Falls $500,000 in forgivable grant money appropriated from a community development block grant and ARPA funds.
“I think it’s a good use of the funds,” councilor Dan Tremble said during the workshop. “It’ll be a co-operative. It’ll be locally owned in perpetuity.”
That decision will be formalized with a vote at the next council meeting, but there was no talk of increasing the amount of funds awarded. City officials and councilors were not available to comment Tuesday on how they landed on $500,000.
Residents were hoping for up to $1 million from the city of Bangor, since the town of Brunswick was able to kick in $800,000 towards a similar, but pricier, deal earlier this year in its community, Pinkham said. Now, co-op residents are pounding the pavement, hoping to drum up private donations from individuals and local businesses to plug that gap and meet their target next month.
Gosselin feels on track for that deadline, but said she’s more focused on formal avenues like the Maine state housing authority, The Genesis Fund and local lenders to contribute those remaining funds.
“We are throwing our emphasis on the other components of the financing stack at this time, that’s where we think we’ll get the best bang for the buck,” she said.
