KENNEBUNKPORT — Over the past few years, the Kennebunkport Heritage Housing Trust has established itself as a small but mighty organization that builds housing for working families. The trust, which was founded in 2018, completed its first affordable housing neighborhood, Heritage Woods, in 2021.
Now the organization is back for a second act. It has pitched a six-home neighborhood off of Beachwood Avenue in Kennebunkport to the town’s Planning Board. Three of the homes will be available to households making up to 80 percent of area median income, and three will be available toward households making up to 120 of percent area median income.
The group is calling the new project Landon Woods, after Ruth Landon, according to Larissa Crockett, the executive director of the trust.
“(Ruth Landon) was a former Board of Selectmen member and she was very active with the Kennebunkport Historical Society. The land at one point had belonged to her, so we are naming it after her,” explained Crockett.
The houses will be built with an eye toward the visual character of the town — the “Kennebunkport aesthetic” — according to Crockett, who walked the Planning Board through the project on Jan. 3.
The project will include three two-bedroom homes that will be between 800 and 1,000 square feet. Crockett said at the meeting that these two bedroom homes might be a good fit for a senior looking to downsize or a family that’s a single parent and a child. The rest of the units are three-bedroom homes, which will be between 1,100 square feet and 1,400 square feet.
The homes will be three duplexes that will be connected by external architecture, but will have separate entrances.
If all goes well, the homes will be available for sale to their would-be owners by fall of 2025, said Crockett in a follow-up interview.
The land parcel, which is just under 5 acres, was given to the trust in 2022, and the group has spent the past 17 months clearing the title on the property so they can move forward with the building process. The trust hopes to secure another plot of land in 2024 in order to get the wheels turning on the project after Landon Woods.
Crockett, who has been executive director since May 2022, is passionate about the mission to acquire land and build housing for working families. She was previously the town manager in Wells for two years and before that she was an assistant town manager in Scarborough for nearly four years.
“I wanted to … create tangible good,” Crockett told the Post in 2022. “Building homes allows a community to remain vibrant, and that feels like tangible good to me.”
And building homes is a very expensive feat these days. Housing construction costs skyrocketed in 2021 and 2022 due to the pandemic and a rise in energy costs, and while annual price growth has slowed, the price of building materials is still 36.6 percent higher than it was in 2019, according to the National Association of Home Builders.
At the Jan. 3 Planning Board meeting, Crockett estimated the homes at Landon Woods will cost between $450,000 and $490,000 per unit to build, and she added that building costs were part of the reason that these homes will be smaller than the homes at Heritage Woods.
But just like with their first neighborhood, the group will subsidize the homes to bring them to an attainable price point, Crockett explained during an interview in mid-January. Each of the homes will need to be subsidized up to a minimum of $150,000, which the group will do through a combination of grants, fundraising and state funding, she said.
The trust is also hoping the legislature will replenish the Affordable Homeownership Program through MaineHousing, which did not get money from last year’s budget, according to Crockett. “We rely on the $70,000 per unit that is provided by MaineHousing through that program,” she said.
So far, the group has received a sign-off on their sketch plan with the Kennebunkport Planning Board. The group is now working on their preliminary application, a more detailed overview of the project than the sketch plan, which they hope to submit to the Planning Board by early to mid March.
Starting this spring, the trust will begin marketing the neighborhood to potential buyers. The trust will place interested and eligible households in a lottery system, and the six lucky households will be selected via lottery in summer 2025.
Crockett wants to identify a strong candidate pool early “so that we can work with folks that may have some credit challenges, or may not be quite ready from a down payment standpoint … (and) get them into a position where if they are selected in the lottery, they are ready to go to become a homeowner.”
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