Northern Forest Center housing project proceeding

GREENVILLE — By the end of the year, the first two homes of an $11.5 million Northern Forest Center housing project are expected to be ready on a 5-acre parcel in downtown Greenville off Spruce Street.

“Our target is to get all the infrastructure in and have two model homes in by this fall so people can see it, see what we are talking about, and in 2026 we would be in full-scale development,” Northern Forest Center Senior Program Director Mike Wilson told the Greenville Select Board during a Jan. 15 meeting.

The Northern Forest Center purchased the land several years ago to build housing to serve the local workforce. The housing project plan seeks to develop 29 units of new housing that incorporate a mix of multi-family buildings, duplexes, and single-family homes to be built over three years. The Northern Forest Center hopes to use the project to demonstrate the environmental and economic benefits of utilizing mass timber construction. 

“They’re not big homes, but they’re not tiny homes,” Wilson said about the single-story dwellings. “Generally they’re two or three bedrooms.”

The dwellings would be built with a mass timber construction design. 

“That’s something from an organization mission standpoint we’re really interested in, actually using this project as a pilot where we think there’s the potential to impact the housing market,” Wilson said.

He explained with mass timber, “you’re, taking pieces of wood, gluing them together to build big strong structural panels.”

Homes come in panel kits with as few pieces as possible to easily build on site, Northern Forest Center Director of Community Investment Maura Adams said. 

“It requires as little labor as possible because we know construction trades and labor are in really short supply in rural places in general,” she said.

The organization would like to have mass timber harvested in the Northeast, but for now the Northern Forest Center is working with a company in the Chicago area.

“So they would be coming, for now, from over there, but over time this is very much something that could take root in this area,” Adams said.

She said people will be looking at the Greenville project to see if it can be replicated elsewhere to help meet rural housing challenges. 

Mass timber is used in large projects, such as 30-story condos, in big cities, Adams said. 

“Getting it to be affordable on a small scale is what people haven’t figured out yet because it usually comes in big heavy panels,” she said.

One planned house would be 1,300 square feet with a 500-square-foot porch, Wilson said.

“Just like we’ve talked about all along, our interest in this project is to build affordable middle market housing,” he said, adding that the dwellings would be for people who live in Greenville year-round and work at places like the school or hospital.

Housing affordability guidelines would be based on 30 percent of the median income for the area, Adams said.

Haley Ward is currently doing site engineering work, Wilson said. Once National Environmental Policy Act approval has been granted, he and Town Manager Mike Roy will compile requests for proposals. One of these will be from the town for road construction and installation work and the other will be from the Northern Forest Center for site development and construction.

“We would be very interested in folks who are interested in bidding on both,” Wilson said. He said the project does need to go through a subdivision review with the Greenville Planning Board.

The property road would be given to the municipality, an act needing to be approved via a special town meeting vote. After these steps are taken then the land can be cleared and construction can begin with two homes targeted for the end of the year.

“Based on some of the histories of some of the work you folks have done, as you presented those and we’ve done our research, I think it’s incredible what you folks have done,” Select Chair Geno Murray said.

When asked, Adams said some homes would be presold and other houses would be leased for a time before being sold. Wilso said a homeowners association is being considered.

The Spruce Street development will be the Northern Forest Center’s sixth housing project and the first to be built from the ground up. The project will focus on providing housing for the middle-income, year-round workforce and building the sustainability of the Moosehead Lake region’s year-round economy. Greenville’s high rate of second homes and absentee homeowners has left few options for locals or people trying to move to the community, raising concerns about maintaining school enrollment, civic participation and vital services. 

The Northern Forest Center uses a mix of funding sources to achieve its goal of creating high quality housing that can be rented or sold at rates that median-income earners can afford. That includes the Northern Forest Fund, which integrates private impact investments, donations, and grants from public sources.

The Northern Forest Center is an innovation and investment partner serving northern Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and New York. In 2017, programming expanded to include redeveloping underused properties to enable young professionals and families to find homes and contribute to rural communities.

The Northern Forest Center previously completed two major property initiatives: In Lancaster, New Hampshire, the $3.8-million redevelopment of the Parker J. Noyes building, which created six middle-market apartments and commercial space for a local nonprofit and food marketplace; and the Millinocket Housing Initiative, which invested more than $1 million to renovate six homes, creating 11 quality rental units from properties that had been severely neglected.

Other projects in the works include redevelopment of the historic Gehring House in Bethel; a 15,000-square-foot property in downtown St. Johnsbury, Vermont; and in a multi-unit apartment building in Tupper Lake, New York.