What do an old courthouse, a vacant school, a foreclosed home and acres of empty land have in common?
They are all examples of the kind of state-owned property that could eventually become housing under a subtle policy change that is making its way through the Maine Legislature. Few such cases have emerged in recent years despite the state owning 600,000 acres of land with extensive campuses in major cities including Augusta and Bangor.
That is for many reasons. MaineHousing, the state housing authority, only develops subsidized projects and not those for middle-income families that are particularly struggling in the hot housing market. There is no exhaustive central database of the 600,000 acres of state-owned property, and lots of it is either hard to convert or away from populated areas.
“State-owned land comes in a lot of different forms, and a lot of times it’s not suited at all for housing either based on its location or on other characteristics of the land,” Erik Jorgensen, MaineHousing’s director of government relations, said.
Right now, surplus state-owned land is offered up to MaineHousing for conversion into affordable housing. If it passes, the state can either hold on to it or issue a request for proposal for its redevelopment. That’s what happens in most cases, but it can lead to dead ends.
In Jorgensen’s recent memory, the only example of a state-owned property to housing conversion happened last year when MaineHousing purchased three defunct York County courthouses for that purpose. Even that might not be a success story.
The Sanford Housing Authority purchased a former district court building last December for $1 with the hope to convert it into 18 units of affordable or senior housing. The project flew through the approvals process, but high construction costs and trouble repurposing windowless courtrooms, insulation and sprinkler systems have pushed the renovation cost up to $6 million, of which MaineHousing can only supply $3.5 million.
“It’s a great idea, with the housing crisis, but it’s so expensive to convert something that’s really not intended to become housing into housing,” Diane Small, the Sanford authority’s executive director, said.
Small has put in for federal funding for the remaining money. There’s no way to keep the housing affordable without subsidies, and even a market-rate project might not pencil out. Without new funding, the agency is considering selling the building back to a government agency.
The Legislature is considering a measure from Rep. Cassie Julia, D-Waterville, that would inventory land and determine how much of it is considered to be surplus. The Maine Redevelopment Land Bank, which was founded in 2022 to help local governments develop vacant properties, would take ownership of the state parcels.
It would then try to find redevelopment opportunities through the private and public sectors. The bank’s board includes people with deep housing expertise, but those properties could be made available for other uses. For example, one property the land bank is currently helping convert is a vacant Van Buren building that will be an arts center.
If Julia’s bill passes, the state won’t be the final arbiter on these properties. Their local communities will drive the solutions, Tuck O’Brien, executive director of the Maine Redevelopment Land Bank, said. Some might be well-suited for housing. But others might make sense as a new health care facility or child care center due to age, shape, location or condition.
“There’s no perfect solution. There’s no home run out there; it’s a bunch of singles,” O’Brien said of the state’s housing shortage. “Repurposing state land is one of those things. And the more viable land we have ready to be developed, the larger chance we have at getting development.”
