KENNEBUNKPORT – A local nonprofit is gearing up for a new project in Kennebunkport that will build six new homes to be sold as workforce housing.

The Neighborhood Housing Trust is planning a groundbreaking this week on Landon Woods, off of Beechwood Avenue. The project, slated to be finished in December, will create six new two and three-bedroom homes for sale to people making less than $110,240 a year.

“We build housing for normal people,” said Larissa Crockett, the trust’s executive director. “They are just normal people that could not afford a home in a housing market that has kind of lost its mind.”

Often assigned to rental properties, the term “workforce housing” usually refers to property that is available at a price that people making at or below the local median income can afford. Usually, those rates are much lower than what market rates are in the same community. 

The concept of workforce housing and the need for it, especially in affluent communities, made statewide headlines in the summer of 2021 when a nursing home in Deer Isle had to close. At the time, the home’s operators said they were closing not because they couldn’t find enough workers, but because they couldn’t find enough workers who could afford to live near enough to their workplace.

Landon Woods, according to Crockett, is technically going to be workforce housing, but not rental property – they will be homes available for purchase via mortgage, like any other home. The homes, she said, will be duplexes designed to visually resemble 19th-century family homes, thus blending in with the surrounding area well.

But they will be less expensive. Crockett said they will cost $448,000 per home to build, and will not be sold for more than $378,000. That’s a stark contrast to the $700,000 median home price in Arundel, or $800,000 in Kennebunk, or $1.4 million in Kennebunkport, costs that leave out many middle-income or working-class families.

“So when we look at the affordability of housing, for anyone who is accessing employment here in the Kennebunks and Arundel, it’s simply not affordable to anyone who is earning under $200,000, $250,000 a year, and we know that that is not your average household in any way, shape or form,” she said. 

And it’s having an impact on the community itself. According to the Kennebunkport Assessor’s office, the number of homestead exemptions is dropping. A homestead tax exemption, Crockett said, typically indicates a year-round resident, as opposed to a seasonal property owner. 

Right now, Crockett said, only 53% of homes in Kennebunkport have the exemption, and that number has been dropping in recent years. The result, she fears, is that eventually the town won’t have enough full-time residents left to actually run it.

“All of those people need to live within close enough range of the jobs that they hold to keep those jobs,” she said. “If people want to live in communities where they benefit from having people at the coffee shop, people at the bank, little stores that pop up and are fun to go and visit, they need to make sure that they’re having adequate housing to hold the people that make those places work.”

The Neighborhood Housing Trust, which now covers Kennebunkport, Kennebunk and Arundel, began in 2018, after a study in Kennebunkport identified the need for more affordable housing in town. The trust got to work on another neighborhood project, Heritage Woods, that finished in 2022, around the time it purchased the property where it will build Landon Woods.  

MaineHousing, the nonprofit that functions as the state housing authority, is partly subsidizing the construction and is setting the owner income limit based on regional and statewide income data. 

This week, Crockett said the Landon Woods site is still being cleared, but work will begin on a proper access road soon, and the trust anticipates the homes will be finished and ready to move in to by December of this year. Already, she said, the trust is looking to another similar neighborhood project and other ways to create housing for the Kennebunkport workforce.

“People love Kennebunkport because of the community that is here,” she said. “They love to go downtown. They love to go the library. Well, those librarians, they need a place to live.”