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A tiny home community in Bangor began accepting applications from prospective residents this week. The Randall Park project consists of 30 tiny homes on outer Hammond Street. It is the city’s first tiny home development.
As the name suggests, the homes are small — about 325 square feet, which is the size of an average hotel room — and the rent — $1,300 a month not including all utilities — seems a bit high.
But, at a time when Maine has a big shortage of affordable housing, this development can be an important step forward in addressing that shortfall.
The tiny homes and other developments in other parts of the state, of course, won’t solve the state’s affordable housing crisis on their own, but they are important progress that show what is possible with creative thinking and policies that encourage, rather than stymie, new types of housing.
Louie Morrison, who owns about 300 rental properties in Bangor, said he decided to create the tiny home park because he was tired of turning down potential tenants due to a lack of available rentals. Building tiny homes, he said, allowed him to bring new, reasonably priced homes to the city in a short amount of time.
“I’m a true believer that everyone deserves a roof over their head,” Morrison said. “These homes are a real solution to a real problem.”
Morrison said his goal was to make the rent for the units affordable, but that he needed to recoup the $4 million cost of the development. The $1,300 a month rent allows him to do that, he said.
The tiny house development in Bangor, which replaced a small trailer park, took longer to build than Morrison initially predicted, but the pace of construction was still rapid. He crew was able to build about three of the small structures a month.
Morrison deserves credit for stepping up with a project to help fill the housing void. So does the Bangor City Council for changing city ordinances to allow tiny home parks.
In recent years, the city council has passed a number of ordinances aimed at spurring more housing development, such as reducing minimum lot sizes for development and the number of required parking spots for multifamily homes, and allowing boarding homes to be built on major city streets.
These and other changes are slowly beginning to help fill Maine’s housing shortfall. A recent report found that Maine needs to add as many as 84,300 homes by 2030 to make up for a shortfall in housing production and to accommodate growth.
In the state’s capitol city, plans are moving forward to redevelop a long-vacant Kmart plaza into housing. Developers have proposed to turn the empty shopping area in Augusta into a mixed-use development with 60 market-rate apartments, retail and office space and a hotel.
“The bottom line is that there’s such a shortage of housing in the state,” Joseph Italiaander, a real estate broker with The Boulos Company focused on the commercial market, told the Bangor Daily News. “Getting creative with where you develop housing has kind of led to retail centers as options.”
The Augusta project has many hurdles to clear, including a needed zoning change, which may be easier after lawmakers enacted a law earlier this year to spur municipalities to allow residential use in commercial areas — including vacant retail spaces like shopping malls.
These types of redevelopment, along with Bangor’s tiny houses and other new home configurations, are the types of innovation and creative thinking that will be needed to meet the state’s housing needs.
