After raising $8 million to beat out a corporate investor and purchase their own mobile home park, a Bangor co-op will get another $3 million loan to develop some of the park’s empty lots.
The loan is coming from MaineHousing, the state housing authority, according to a news release from the Co-operative Development Institute, a Massachusetts nonprofit that helped the residents fundraise.
“We see this as a really good investment for us, for the number of homes that it’s able to create for that amount of investment. It’s a good deal,” said Scott Thistle, MaineHousing’s spokesperson.
MaineHousing already gave the Cedar Falls co-operative $1.1 million to purchase their 129-lot park in January with money appropriated from last year’s supplemental budget. Other funding sources included the city of Bangor, which provided $500,000, the Cooperative Fund of the Northeast, Four Directions Development Corporation and the Genesis Loan Fund.
The 79-acre park on Bangor’s Finson Road has 81 empty lots. This loan will allow the Cedar Falls residents, in partnership with Bangor Housing, to repair 28 of them and install new manufactured homes there, according to CDI.
It’s the first phase of a two-step plan Bangor Housing has to develop the entire park, executive director Mike Myatt said. These 28 lots are already hooked up to utilities and easier to develop; after they’re built out Myatt said his agency will work on developing the remaining lots out back along the stream.
The hope is that those 28 new homes will not only generate revenue for the resident cooperative and lower lot rents, but will be an opportunity for those renting units in Bangor’s public housing development, Capehart, to purchase their first home. That would free up affordable apartments in a city squeezed for such inventory. Despite that, CDI said the manufactured homes will be available for anyone to purchase.
“We have residents who are ready to take that next step to become homeowners but there’s nowhere to move to. There are no homes to buy,” Myatt said in the news release. “With this development project, our residents will be able to move right across the street, where they can continue to have access to our services, their kids can continue to go to the same school, and they can stay close to their network of friends.”
