Photo / Maureen Milliken
There are a variety of vacant buildings on Penobscot Avenue in Millinocket.
March 20, 2019
Northern Forest Center adds commercial real estate initiative in Millinocket
Photo / Maureen Milliken
A Northern Forest Center initiative will partner with businesses to buy and renovate vacant commercial buildings in downtown Millinocket.
By Maureen Milliken
The success of a Millinocket housing initiative started by the Northern Forest Center in 2017 has prompted a similar program that will focus on redevelopment of commercial real estate in town.
The housing program, through a $1 million fund it has raised, buys vacant houses near downtown, rehabilitates them and rents them out.
Investors are paid interest and will be repaid as the houses are sold in five to 10 years.
The fund has allowed the center to fill a critical need in Millinocket, “but we’re nowhere near done,” Northern Forest Center President Rob Rile said when he announced the commercial phase this week.
The downtown commercial program will be similar to the residential one, with one big difference — the center is looking for business partners to come on board before property is targeted, Riley told Mainebiz.
“It’s less about us acquiring a building, and more about us partnering [with businesses],” he said.
The goal of the Millinocket Housing Initiative Fund was to create quality housing near downtown for potential new residents, including employees at Millinocket Regional Hospital, which is a few blocks from downtown and the town’s biggest employer, with a staff of 250.
The commercial phase will aim for mixed-use development, with a retail business or restaurant on the ground floor, and offices plus residential upstairs.
The point, Riley said, is to get people out and about on Penobscot Avenue, Millinocket’s main downtown street.
One of the first questions the center gets from potential Millinocket residents is about what downtown is like.
“What we’re seeing is an opportunity, and we need to address it,” he said.
Drawing from an N.H. model
The program has a model, aside from the successful residential one in Millinocket.
Northern Forest Center, which is based in Concord, N.H., already has a similar one underway in Lancaster, N.H.
While the former mill and resort town of 3,500 residents at the foot of the White Mountains doesn’t have the same housing stock issues that Millinocket does, it has a small downtown with some vacant storefronts.
The center has partnered with a developer and food hub owner on buying and renovating a 11,000-square-foot building at 101 Main St. in Lancaster.
Parker J. Noyes Redevelopment, a partnership between the center and businessman Greg Cloutier, bought the building in October.
As with the Millinocket programs, the center is paying interest to investors in the funds and will repay the capital at the end of the investment term.
Root Seller Marketplace, which represents dozens of local food producers and will provide access to healthy food for area residents, is moving from smaller space downtown. The food hub, operated by nonprofit Taproot Farm & Environmental Education Center, will be able to add a commercial kitchen, with room to expand in the future.
Melissa Grella, executive director of Taproot , said the project has many positive aspects.
“This move will bring a vacant building back to life, continue the revitalization of Lancaster's downtown, support the local economy, and increase awareness of and access to our local food system,” she said on the center’s website.
Riley said the Millinocket commercial program follows on the Lancaster experience.
“It’s helping inform the Millinocket program,” he said.
The program will complement what is already going on — for instance, the nonprofit group Our Katahdin’s renovation of the former Miller’s department store into coworking space and retail.
There are a variety of opportunities in downtown Millinocket, Riley said. For instance, he said, there’s a small one-story brick building at one end of Penobscot Avenue, and a large three-story building at the other end.
“They’re two different size buildings, but both would have a lot of good uses,” he said.
Biggest challenge tackled
Photo / Maureen Milliken
The multi-family building at 100 Katahdin Ave. is being renovated under Northern Forest Center's housing program.
The Millinocket Housing Initiative Fund was created by the Northern Forest Center in 2017, and recently reached its initial goal of raising $1 million in investments.
Five of the six single- and multi-family houses the center bought since fall of 2017 have been renovated and are rented out.
Renovations started last month on the sixth, a large former five-unit apartment building at 100 Katahdin Ave.
While three of the completed renovations were extensive, reconfiguring the living spaces, replacing all windows and insulation and replacing a roof, 100 Katahdin is the program’s biggest challenge, Ailish Keating, the Millinocket residential program’s project manager, told Mainebiz last summer.
Described in a news release Tuesday as “a grand but long-abandoned home,” the 3,400-square-foot, three-story building was bought for $5,500 from the town, which had seized it because of non-payment of taxes.
During a Mainebiz walk-through in July, the deterioration of the building was clear. Some of the rooms inside are stripped to the studs. Others are worse — old, mildewed carpeting and ripped linoleum covers the floors, paint is peeling and cabinets hang of kitchen walls. Most of the windows are broken.
Built in 1901 on the street that leads to the gates of the now-gone mill, the house is one of the first groups of housing to be built in the town. The apartment house is on Veteran’s Park within an easy walk to downtown stores, the elementary school and the library.
The renovation will reconfigure the building from five apartments to three.
McLaughlin Builders, of Medway, is the contractor, and work is expected to be done by August.
Impact of investments
Photo / Maureen Milliken
Zeus, belonging to Millinocket contractor Mike Brown, helps with a housing initiative renovation last summer.
“We owe our success to the generous investors who stand with us in supporting the future of Millinocket,” Riley said in Tuesday’s news release about reaching the $1 million investment goal. “We’re seeing great enthusiasm by individuals and foundations who want to make impact investments to advance the revitalization of our rural communities.”
Those involved in the program stress the money from the rents, and ultimately the sale of the houses, goes directly back into the community, something that will also be the case with the commercial program.
Housing is one piece of the center’s broader strategy to support a strong and diversified economic future, the organization said in the news release.
The Northern Forest Center “weaves together philanthropy, impact investments, and tax credits to complete community revitalization projects,” said Celina Adams of Kittery, vice president of the center’s board of directors. “As someone who works in philanthropy, I know working with a broad range of capital is unusual and quite powerful.”
In Millinocket, the center has combined philanthropy and impact capital not only for its housing initiative, but will bring its tax credit expertise to the Memorial Library renovation and Our Katahdin's mill site redevelopment effort, officials said.
“It’s amazing what a unified capital approach can accomplish, and it provides so many more entry points for supporters to get involved," said Adams.
The library is undergoing a $1.5 million renovation, sparked by a $500,000 Next Generation Foundation grant last year.
The nonprofit Our Katahdin bought the 1,400-acre mill site and other former mill property for $1, taking on a $1.4 million federal tax bill and $160,000 in back real estate taxes owed to the town. The site is under development as a business, industry and innovation park.
In addition to the financial resources, the center is supporting development and improvement of recreational trails, managing building renovations, and helping convert buildings to wood pellet heat, all supported by donations and grants.
The impact of the project so far has been felt, those in town said.
“It’s almost impossible to overstate the impact of what the Northern Forest Center has done,” Cody McEwen, chair of the Town Council, said in Tuesday’s news release. “The sheer investment in house purchases and subsequent payroll for local labor is huge to a town like Millinocket. Seeing a new roof go on or new siding go up on a building that was an eyesore is a great boost for everyone who passes by it.”
New residents, too, have good things to say about the program.
“Living in Millinocket has been a wonderful move for me both personally and professionally,” said Mike Smith, program director and COO of Caribou-based Outdoor Sport Institute, who lives in one of the center’s renovated homes. “It’s incredible to be part of a community working so hard to reinvent itself and think creatively about the future.”
Most Recent
Most Recent
0 Comments