Housing
This section of the BDN aims to help readers understand Maine’s housing crisis, the volatile real estate market and the public policy behind them. Read more Housing coverage here.
A Carmel construction company hopes to break ground this spring on 16 new apartments in the small Bangor suburb of Levant.
The project will add more units to an existing, 22-unit apartment complex at the end of Dominick Drive off of Lake Road, Scott Pelletier, owner of Carmel-based builder Reese Co, said. The rental units will have two bedrooms and be offered at market rate, Pelletier said. The typical rent for a 2-bedroom apartment in Levant this year is $1,155, according to federal data.
Sharp rent increases have been tough to swallow across Maine but particularly in more rural regions where both incomes and housing supply are lower. Pelletier’s hope is that these 16 added units will provide Levant, a town of just under 3,000 people, with more “nice, modern homes families will want to live in.”
The added units won local approval a few months ago and is now moving through the state’s environmental permitting process, which looks like it will be fairly straightforward, Pelletier said. He hopes to break ground in the spring and have people moving into his new units by the fall.
Local builders including Pelletier have been steadily adding rental units in Levant within the last five or six years, Milton Knowles Jr., chair of the town’s planning board, said. Knowles hasn’t felt there’s such a desperate need for more housing in Levant, nor did he feel fast-growing rents in Bangor might be pushing people to the suburbs.
“I don’t know who’s going into them, but I know they’re all pretty much full when they get done,” Knowles said.
Housing needs are not just local but regional, said Jennifer King, the planning director for the Eastern Maine Development Commission contends. Each community has a role to play in meeting greater Bangor’s needs and must contribute to meet state and regional housing goals.
“The addition of this development is just the beginning of what’s to come,” she said.
