With construction of a seasonal apartment building under way next to a Bar Harbor golf course, Acadia National Park is close to meeting its housing goals for summer employees.
The availability of housing for its year-round employees, however, is getting worse, according to the park’s top administrator.
“The cost of real estate is only going up here, faster than our wages,” Kevin Schneider, Acadia’s superintendent, told the park’s advisory commission this week.
While the park provides housing for seasonal employees, who are critical for managing the 3.7 million visits Acadia typically gets each year from May through October, it does not have any housing for year-round employees except on a short-term basis for new hires who have started work but have yet to find a place to live.
The park, along with other local employers, has made a concerted effort to address the seasonal housing crunch for workers in the local tourism industry. Toward that end, Acadia is now constructing a 28-unit apartment building next to Kebo Valley Golf Course in Bar Harbor, where it already has seasonal apartments for eight employees that were built in the 1960s.
And construction of a second building at the same site, which also will house 28 employees, should begin soon, with the park planning to issue a request-for-proposals on that project within the next week, Schneider said. Including other housing options that the park has secured in the past few years, the Harden Farm development next to the golf course will provide living quarters for nearly 100 seasonal employees.
This does not include housing that the park intends to develop, but has not yet developed specific plans for, at a 50-acre property in the Bar Harbor village of Town Hill that Congress has set aside for seasonal workers. This site, which will include seasonal workforce housing that Island Housing Trust will build separately, will help Acadia reach its goal of providing housing for 125 to 150 seasonal employees.
The park technically has 175 seasonal positions but, because of the severe seasonal housing crunch in the area, has only been able to fill around 115 of them in each of the past few summers.
“It is critical to have [housing] for the staff that we need,” Schneider said.
Friends of Acadia, which provides support and advocacy for the park, has played a significant role in developing or purchasing housing for use by seasonal park employees.
Last summer, the nonprofit group purchased a former condominium building in Trenton to use as housing for seasonal Island Explorer bus drivers, who are critical to managing the surge of visitors to the park every summer. Then last fall, it completed construction of two small apartment buildings totaling eight bedrooms at a site in Seal Harbor, near the Jordan Pond House, that it has since donated to the park.
In 2023, Friends of Acadia purchased the Kingsleigh Inn in Southwest Harbor to lease it to Acadia as housing for up to 10 park employees.
For years, the park also has provided recreational-vehicle camping sites for seasonal employees and volunteers at its headquarters near Eagle Lake, but those sites have been displaced by construction of a new central maintenance building.
To replace them, the park has developed 13 RV hook-up sites at the former White Birches Campground site on Seal Cove Road in Southwest Harbor, which Acadia now owns. Eleven of these new sites are currently being used for the summer by seasonal employees, and two remain vacant, Schneider said.
“We’re trying to hire as many seasonal workers as we can,” he said.
