A 2021 rendering of the Adams Points affordable housing development by CHA Architecture of Portland. Courtesy Image
BIDDEFORD — The Adams Point affordable housing development is still on track, thanks to an 11th hour intervention by the Biddeford City Council and the city’s newly created affordable housing trust.
At City Council’s Oct. 17 meeting, head of the Biddeford Housing Authority Guy Gagnon requested $490,000 dollars from the city to cover a budget gap in the Adams Point project, which he has helped spearhead since 2021.
The request was granted, passing 7-2.
City Council’s vote prevented the project from almost certain derailment as it nears construction. Without filling the budget gap, the Maine State Housing Authority could have given funding earmarked for Adams Point to a different project, forcing the Biddeford Housing Authority to compete for the funding again in future, according to Gagnon. “Even if successful (in competing for future funding), a delay of at least 1.5 to 2 years would result, not to mention the added design, legal and administrative burden to Biddeford Housing Authority,” he wrote to the City Council ahead of the vote.
Adams Point is a 39-unit affordable housing development that will sit on a currently empty lot at the far end of Adams Street in Biddeford. Tenants in the building would have incomes in the range of 30 to 60 percent of area median income. Biddeford Housing Authority’s development affiliate Southern Maine Affordable Housing is the developer behind Adams Point. The Biddeford Housing Authority is a quasi-municipal organization that receives federal and state funding to construct affordable housing.
The budget gap arose due to rising construction costs while the project has wound its way through approvals, according to Gagnon. Gagnon sent a letter to City Council prior to the meeting, illustrating that the project had exhausted other funding options and thus was forced to appeal to the city. “We’re very, very close, and with the requests that we’ve made we will have all our funding in order to go to Maine Housing and say ‘Lets have the construction loan closing and start building,'” he said, emphasizing the need to move quickly.
$490,000 is a small amount when considering the full cost of the development — projected to be roughly $17 million in total. The vast majority of the project is being funded by the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit program and Maine State Housing Authority subsidies and debt.
Gagnon emphasized that the project may not need to use the full $490,000 requested from City Council. At the time, the project was waiting to hear final pricing from investors who will buy the project’s federal tax credits, preventing the Biddeford Housing Authority from giving a concrete number. Gagnon justified his ask saying, “we have to, as of today, tell Maine Housing that we have every dollar accounted for in a project, so this is why we have to go to the high end,” he said.
Gagnon expects to close the deal with Maine State Housing in late December or some time in January, at which point the true amount of the budget gap will be finalized. Any money set aside that goes unspent would eventually be returned to the city, he said.
The money to fill the funding gap will come from Biddeford’s Housing Trust Fund, an entity that was officially established only minutes before Gagnon addressed the city council. In December 2022, a task force convened by the Biddeford mayor to study how the city can address residents’ housing needs released a set of final recommendations that included the creation of an affordable housing trust — essentially a special account that would reserve money to create and retain affordable housing.
Gagnon has advocated for the creation of a housing trust fund, according to an interview he did with Saco Bay News in September 2023, though he told the Biddeford Courier that he was not formally involved in its creation.
City Council voted unanimously to give final approval for the housing trust fund on Oct. 17, prior to discussion of Adam’s Point. The trust currently has $500,000 in it, thanks to an agreement forged with a developer constructing market-rate units in Biddeford, according to Saco Bay News.
When considering the request to fund the budget gap, City Councilor Bobby Mills told Gagnon he was wary that granting it would mean almost all of the money currently in the trust fund would go towards one developer.
Gagnon responded, saying “this is what that money is for, to save (an affordable housing) project from collapsing.” He added that this seemed like a prime opportunity to show the community the utility of a trust meant to support affordable housing.
Councilor Doris Ortiz, who sat as the chair of Biddeford’s affordable housing task force, spoke in favor of granting Gagnon’s request and emphasized the stakes of voting against it. “We have no other affordable housing projects going on right now. If this falls through, we’re back at zero,” she said. “If it ends up being (the full $490,000), so be it — because that is what this fund is for.”
During discussion, City Councilors Marc Lessard and Norman Belanger expressed concern that the city was being asked to commit the $490,000 without an ironclad timeline of when the project would start construction.
Councilor Ortiz addressed these comments, saying that City Council had granted credit enhancements to a different, slow moving project — implying that the city councilors posing objections were being unfairly scrutinous of Adams Point. “This whole discussion about the timeline and how much we’re giving … is insulting. We need affordable housing,” she said. “Here we are nickel and diming and nit picking time. It’s frustrating.”
City Council discussed the request for over an hour before approving it with an amendment, which granted the funds so long as the project breaks ground before June 2024. City Council tabled a second request brought by Gagnon, an ask to reduce the project’s building permit fee.
The saga of Adams Point is playing out on the backdrop of an affordable housing crisis impacting the entire state. State agencies released a report in early October outlining the need to build somewhere between 76,400 and 84,300 homes by 2030 to counteract underproduction and meet expected population growth in Maine. The study broke the state into three regions — designating Cumberland, Hancock, Knox, Lincoln, Sagadahoc, Waldo, and York Counties as the “Coastal Region.” According to the study’s authors, the Coastal Region, where Biddeford is located, needs more than twice the amount of housing than the other two regions need in order to remedy historic underproduction. The study also found that Mainers need to make above $100,000 annually in order to afford median home prices, making acquiring a home too costly for most in the state.
The lack of housing poses an obstacle to Maine’s workforce development strategy. In 2019, the state released an economic development roadmap that lists attracting over 75,000 new workers to the state by 2029 as among its core goals. At a recent summit put on by the Roux Institute at Northeastern University, Director of Special Projects at the Maine Department of Labor Samantha Dina said that the target is important for revitalizing the state’s workforce — which skews older. As of last year, according to Dina, the state had more people over the age of 55 than it does in the 25 to 64 range, which is considered “prime working age.”
When it comes to getting more people into the workforce and attracting new workers to the state, the Maine DOL constantly hears about the need for more housing, transportation and childcare. “Without those pieces, individuals cannot get to work or keep their jobs,” said Dina.
The Adams Point development would be part of the solution to the housing pinch facing workers, particularly those with children. “If you haven’t noticed, most of the new new units that have been built — the market rate units particularly — are all small one bedroom units, or maybe two bedroom units. … There’s been nothing new built for families,” said Gagnon in an interview after the City Council meeting.
Adams Point, by contrast, has a number of two- and three-bedroom units, and even one four-bedroom unit.
“The focus of this project is families,” Gagnon said — “working families.”
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