After raising $8 million to outbid a corporate investor, residents of a Bangor mobile home park unanimously voted to purchase their park on Saturday.
The residents of Cedar Falls Mobile Home Park on Bangor’s Finson Road are the second in Maine to purchase their own community since a state law passed last year requires park owners to give residents first refusal when they intend to sell.
Corporate investors have been buying up parks in recent years. In parts of Maine, large rent increases have followed. The new law allowed the residents of the Bangor park to buy it over a Canadian company after it went up for sale last summer. They had 90 days to raise the money.
The final piece of funding came just ahead of their Jan. 14 deadline — another $100,000 from MaineHousing, the state housing authority. That money came from a budget passed last year that set aside $5 million to help parks with purchases. In all, MaineHousing donated $1.1 million to the residents’ effort, while the city of Bangor donated $500,000.
“While this extra funding was only a small amount of the overall financing, it made the sale possible, and now these residents will remain in stable housing, which is always our agency’s top goal,” Erik Jorgensen, MaineHousing’s senior director of communications and government relations, said.
The principal lender for the park purchase is Bangor Savings Bank, who partnered with the Cooperative Fund of the Northeast and Four Directions Development Corporation to fund the sale, said Nora Gosselin, who works at the Corporate Development Institute, a Massachusetts nonprofit helping residents fundraise. The Genesis Loan Fund also supplied a big chunk.
“It was a lot of moving parts,” she said. “They’ve got a good lender team that came together.”
Lot rents will increase from $450 to $550 a month for residents at Cedar Falls once the sale goes through. But residents weighed their options and thought that a $100 increase that is unlikely to go up sharply after that was preferable to a corporate investor who might raise rents more, said Ronnie Pinkham, president of the resident cooperative that owns the park.
One concern of the outbid investor was that the 79-acre park’s 81 empty lots would go undeveloped without an infusion of capital from an investor such as himself. But Gosselin said the co-op is in conversation with Bangor’s housing authority about bringing it on as a development partner to build out lots and bring in more affordable housing in a city strapped for it.
“It’s wonderful. The whole thing’s been very stressful, but it’s come together, and I’m so impressed,” Pinkham said. “I’m impressed with my community.”
