PORTLAND, Maine — Plans for an affordable housing development that would bring dozens of new rental units to Portland’s Woodfords Corner neighborhood will move forward after the City Council voted on key funding for the plan Monday night.
$942,000 in affordable housing trust funds will go towards two phases of a proposal by the organization Community Housing of Maine to build 84 units for lower income renters and seniors at the site of the Woodfords Congregational Church.
The council also agreed to designate the property as a Tax Increment Financing District, allowing a portion of revenue created from future property tax (the site is currently part of a tax-exempt church) to go back into the project.
“This is critical,” Cullen Ryan, executive director of Community Housing of Maine, said just minutes before Monday’s vote. “We need the housing. We need it in Portland, we need it across the state.”
While the funds given through loans and tax financing are far from enough to fund the entire project, city leaders hope they will attract competitive state funding, where TIF Districts, for example, can boost an application.
“What the city is able to do by way of contributing to the capital stack of these deals financially is leverage more investment from other sources,” Greg Watson, Portland’s director of economic and community development, said Monday.
While the Woodfords Corner project received the council’s greenlight, another even more expansive proposal was stalled.
Councilor Kate Sykes insisted on a second reading for a proposal by the Portland Housing Authority to replace a current housing development in East Bayside with a new 110-unit project. Her concern lay in the the process of eventually turning over the public housing into private hands without diligent study of the impacts.
“I feel like its too complicated an issue to pass through the council in one read. And I’d like more opportunity to talk to my council members—my colleagues—about this,” Sykes expressed.
With the vote on the East Bayside project now delayed until the council next meets August, Watson said his staff will only have one day to do key work on the proposal before deadlines for state affordable housing come, a fact Sykes acknowledges.
“’I’d rather give them less time and have more time for the elected representatives of the city to figure out if this is the right decision,” she said.