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While most of Maine’s major housing projects involve new construction or redeveloping old, institutional buildings, repurposing vacant single-family homes will also be an important facet of increasing housing availability in Maine. But it is harder to do that at scale.
Maine has the highest share of vacant homes in the nation, according to census data. Most of those vacant units — 72 percent — are unoccupied year-round because they are seasonal, recreational or occasional use residences. But the state’s share of homes sitting vacant because of age, disrepair or foreclosure has increased by 5,000 since 2011, according to a landmark state-sponsored housing report published in October.
The report found that Maine can’t rely on only new construction to produce the 76,400 to 84,300 homes needed to accommodate the state’s existing and future residents by 2030. It will also need to renovate vacant homes that have fallen into disrepair or been foreclosed on.
But it’s often costlier and more time-consuming for developers to refurbish existing single-family homes than it is to build new, which means for-profit developers and house flippers don’t tend to reinvest in vacant homes. When they do, those homes often don’t become affordable housing.
“It’s a long, hard road to go one house at a time, and it can be chaotic. It would be a difficult way to make a living, doing one small home at a time. Even KVCAP doesn’t do that,” said Dave Pelton, the director of real estate development at the Kennebec Valley Community Action Program. The nonprofit is redeveloping three single-family homes in Waterville’s south end while it pursues new construction projects, too.
The Bangor-area CAP agency, Penquis, is also rolling out a program to redevelop vacant homes around Penobscot County as affordable housing. Penquis, which has redeveloped one single-family home into affordable housing so far, hopes to cap the cost of each project at $150,000. But when looking at potential projects in the past, the price of redevelopment has pushed that figure up to $200,000, or has priced the agency out altogether, said Jennifer Giosia, Penquis’ director of housing and energy services.
“We have to keep it at a certain cost that’s cost effective for someone to be able to purchase this home, and the cost of materials seems to have risen so much in the past few years,” Giosia said.
In addition to the cost of purchasing a vacant home, if the home is older, a developer will often need to rewire it, add new insulation, remove lead and have its doors and windows retrofitted if they’re incompatible with modern construction standards, Giosia said. Pelton added that with a larger project, you save on costs by buying appliances and materials in bulk and save on labor costs by building multiple units at a time with one crew.
But though it’s costlier, Pelton said redeveloping single-family homes instead can often be more straightforward than building new.
“It can sometimes be quicker to go in, and you put new floors and you put a new heating and cooling system, and you put a new roof on, a new kitchen or bathroom in, and then you can turn that around and have a nice home,” he said.
The city of Bangor has been successful so far in turning vacant or condemned homes into housing. There are currently 35 vacant or condemned properties remaining in Bangor, code enforcement officer Jeff Wallace said this week. In early 2020, there were 208 vacant properties in the city.
In addition to partnering with agencies like Penquis to redevelop vacant and condemned housing, the city has taken aggressive action against these homes. The city updates its list of Bangor’s vacant or placarded properties every week, the City Council doubled permit fees on properties that were sitting unused this year and the code enforcement department often works with property owners to address the issues that resulted in a place being condemned in the first place.
Generally, efforts to ramp up new housing construction come down to local planning and municipal control. Tackling the redevelopment of vacant housing stock is no exception. But some cities, like Portland — Maine’s largest — don’t even track vacancy data, a city spokesperson said.
A Waterville city councilor said last year there were as many as 100 vacant housing units in the city, which has adopted an ordinance aimed at reoccupying those properties. In Lewiston, there’s a nearly 0 percent vacancy rate in available housing, according to the Lewiston Housing Authority. A nonprofit is redeveloping downtown Lewiston apartments into condos to increase homeownership in that area.
Redeveloping vacant units in each of those cities will add needed homes back into the market, and some of them at affordable prices. But developers say that this effort is only part of the picture, particularly because redeveloping vacant homes one at a time doesn’t keep pace with the number of people who need affordable homes.
“This is just one aspect that we are looking at,” Giosia said. “It’s a small amount we’re able to do right now, but everything we can do helps.”
