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Northern Forest Center Focuses on Rural Middle-Income Housing Needs [1]

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Date: 2024-10-23

Dan Rogan was moving from Minnesota to Maine, and was worried about finding a place to live.

“The Northern Forest Center is the reason I was able to find a place to live in this region,” the Millinocket, Maine, resident said in a press statement. “Moving from Minnesota to Maine was daunting, especially with the housing shortage. But my employer, the Outdoor Sports Institute, rents a house that the Northern Forest Center owns and renovated.”

Rogan wrote in the statement that he was unsure about making the move to Millinocket until he learned that the house was available for him.

“Once I heard that, I thought ‘OK, I’m going to jump right into Maine then.’ It changed everything,” he said. “It wasn’t just about work—it allowed me to start building my life here.”

Established in 1997, the Northern Forest Center encompasses an area stretching 26 million acres across Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York, said Rob Riley, president of the center. The region is home to 2.3 million people living in nearly 1,000 communities.

“The region is defined by the forest type, but also by the economy that has gone along with it, and primarily from a historic perspective, being pulp and paper and basically a large regional timber economy,” Riley told the Daily Yonder in a phone interview.

The center learned that housing was a concern for those living in the area, because a lack of housing resources made it difficult to recruit critical workers in health care, education and other fields.

“There were jobs available, but recruiting people to a rural place where there had been a decline in investment in the existing housing stock” was a challenge, Riley said. The first community

where the program tackled housing development to address that need was in Millinocket, Maine, in 2017.

The center is focusing on middle-income earners, and the goal is to create 100 homes in 10 of the region’s communities over 10 years. Current projects range in cost from roughly $2 million to $6 million, with larger projects in the concept and planning stages for future development.

The center funds its work using a “capital stack” approach, which includes gifts and grants from individuals and both private and public institutions; low interest loans from states; tax credits; and investments from institutions and individuals.

Investors in the program can earn fixed rates of return — from 1% to 5% — over a period of up to nine years, according to the organization.

Before the Center began this new level of community investment work, we decided on a strategy that would concentrate our efforts in a small number of focal communities to maximize the impact of our work,” Kelly Short, communications director, said in a statement.

“We considered several criteria, including whether the community had essential amenities such as a hospital, an established main street, and access to recreational opportunities, and whether it was a hub for other communities in the region. We built on existing relationships in communities with shared priorities – those working to build vibrancy and a level of readiness – where the Center’s added capacity would make a significant contribution toward the town’s goals.

The Northern Forest Center is working in a rural community where disinvestment has been the norm from commercial banks, said Jen Astone, principal at Integrated Capital Investing. Her firm has twice named the Northern Forest Center one of its Transformative 25.

“Few local banks and investors have found opportunities for investment due to disinvestment,” she wrote in response to email questions. “The Northern Forest (Center) has developed a fund, which is attracting investment from those who wish to see a vital rural community that is not driven by extractive finance and gentrification.”

In addition, she added, they are revitalizing the local economy through eco-tourism, which will help attract more commercial capital for other projects.

“Governments [are] often slow and not as nimble in terms of creating the kinds of networks and ecosystems necessary to build this kind of infrastructure,” she wrote. “Northern Forest Center has demonstrated their unique additive value to the ecosystem in bringing together diverse actors to build the infrastructure and community driven economic development.”

The Northern Forest Center redeveloped the historic Parker J. Noyes building on Lancaster, NH’s Main Street. The building was badly dilapidated but now provides six high-quality apartments and a vibrant commercial space for a local food nonprofit and market. (Photo courtesy of Northern Forest Center)

In Lancaster, New Hampshire, the center redeveloped the historic Parker J. Noyes building downtown.

“The transformation of the Parker J. Noyes building is a remarkable testament to the power of community-focused investment thanks to the efforts of the Northern Forest Center,” Leon Rideout, chair of the Lancaster Select Board, wrote in a statement. “Through a combination of historic preservation and modern development, the Northern Forest Center has not only breathed new life into a once-dilapidated building but has also catalyzed broader revitalization efforts in Lancaster’s downtown. This project demonstrates the impact that thoughtful redevelopment can have, creating both beautiful spaces and opportunities for community growth.”

Current rents range from about $700 per month for a one-bedroom in Millinocket,

Maine, to $1,300 per month for a 2-bedroom in Lancaster, New Hampshire.

Chris Estes, co-executive director of Community Strategies Group at the Aspen Institute, said the Northern Forest Center’s approach to developing affordable middle-class housing could be replicated in other parts of the country.

“They’ve created this community fund that people can buy, and then using the stories of folks saying, essentially, the message that we were trying to convey for 20 years in affordable housing work was, ‘We need the people who need affordable housing,’” he said in a Zoom interview.

“It was not that these are the poorest of the poor and they have nowhere else to go, as much as it was these are people who work and we want to come to our community, particularly in rural areas: families with children, which are the kind of missing component. And so they both made it a participatory thing, so that the community’s kind of owning it,” Estes explained.

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[1] Url: https://dailyyonder.com/northern-forest-center-focuses-on-rural-middle-income-housing-needs/2024/10/23/

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