Bangor wants to spend $2.6M to prep land for housing

Bangor will allocate its remaining $2.6 million in pandemic recovery funding to prepare two pieces of undeveloped land for housing to be built in the future.

Most of the money will likely be used to bring utilities and road infrastructure to a 10-acre city-owned parcel on Grandview Avenue . The rest will be used to do the same to another undeveloped site off Stillwater Avenue, said Debbie Laurie, Bangor city manager.

Bangor city councilors agreed on Monday to devote remaining pandemic recovery funds to the potential housing projects and will likely formally approve the designation in a meeting next month.

Though the money won’t be used to build housing itself, Laurie said it will still advance the city’s mission of prioritizing the creation and improvement of housing of all kinds at a time when the city and state desperately need it. The City Council set this goal shortly after a study found the state needs roughly 38,500 homes to make up for historic underproduction.

The city wants to bring water and sewer pipes, electricity lines and internet conduits to the Grandview Avenue site — which could cost about $2 million — to spare a future developer from the cost of doing so later, according to Laurie. This, the city hopes, will make the land more attractive to a developer interested in building more housing in Bangor, as the property could hold up to 100 housing units.

In exchange for preparing the land on Grandview Avenue, the city hopes to require a future developer to make the housing affordable to people who make 80 to 120 percent of the area median income, which the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development sets annually. That income bracket, often called “the missing middle,” makes too much money to qualify for most housing subsidies but not enough to buy or rent market-rate housing.

The city will likely use the rest of the remaining $2.6 million to improve infrastructure around land near where Stillwater Avenue and Hogan Road meet. Existing infrastructure lines run very close to that area, but don’t quite reach it, Laurie said.

Additionally, a rash of new housing units could overwhelm the capacity of utilities down the line, creating a hurdle for future development unless some improvements are made, Laurie said.

One developer was interested in building housing on land near the intersection of Chase Road and Stillwater Avenue but backed out when those problems were discovered and the developer found the per-unit cost of building housing would be too high.

Another developer now wants to bring housing to roughly the same area but knows those infrastructure limitations exist, Laurie said.

The city expects to receive the results of an engineering study soon, Laurie said, which would tell staff what the site needs to support housing in the future.

The $2.6 million is all that remains of the original $20.5 million lump sum Bangor received from the American Rescue Plan Act, which Congress passed in 2021. The money was intended to help communities across the country financially bounce back from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The city must allocate all of its pandemic recovery funding by the end of this year, and all the money must be spent by Dec. 31, 2026.

The federal government allows communities to use up to $10 million of their pandemic recovery funding on internal services, according to Laurie. So far, Bangor has used $1.5 million of its $20.5 million on city services, including public bathrooms, a sidewalk plow and new municipal positions.