The nonprofit Stepping Stone Housing Inc. has scaled back its plans to establish temporary housing for Lincoln County’s homeless in Damariscotta, but its leaders remain determined to fulfill their goal.
Stepping Stone Housing Inc. Chairman Bill Howlett and Secretary Carolyn Neighoff discussed recent changes to the nonprofit’s plans in an interview May 15.
The basics of the plan remain the same: Stepping Stone plans to establish temporary or “transitional” housing at the Blue Haven property on the corner of Hodgdon and Pleasant streets. A large house and five mobile homes or small houses sit on the property, all low-income rentals.
The most dramatic change to the nonprofit’s plans affects the blueprints for the main house. The original plan was to dismantle the house and replace it with a two-story, six-unit apartment building with a food pantry in the basement.
Now, the nonprofit plans to replace the house with a duplex and has dropped the pantry from the project as a result of parking and traffic concerns. The pantry “is totally out of our vocabulary,” Howlett said.
The streets around Blue Haven “are inadequate for normal traffic” and “the influx we were forecasting was not going to work, and we weren’t thinking about that,” Howlett said.
A construction crew continues to dismantle the big house piece by piece. The choice to remove the house has been a source of some dismay in the neighborhood, but Howlett and Neighoff say the house was in a state of disrepair.
“If it were salvageable as a building, we would have salvaged it,” Howlett said.
Stepping Stone wants to start construction of the duplex as soon as the house comes down.
The plans for the building are not yet final. Howlett would prefer to build the duplex on-site, instead of buying a modular home, although Stepping Stone will consider both options, he said. The nonprofit will make energy efficiency a high priority.
The duplex could house as few as two adults, or two families with children, depending on the need.
Stepping Stone plans to replace or upgrade the five other buildings at Blue Haven for use as transitional housing. “There’s really only one house over there that is in satisfactory condition,” Howlett said.
Stepping Stone plans to replace one of the buildings with a 240-square-foot “tiny house.”
The goal is to partner with the Bowdoinham nonprofit The Long Branch Community Inc., which seeks to train veterans in construction and the trades, to build the house and further the mission of both groups.
Stepping Stone will also complete a “needs assessment” to determine the need in Lincoln County for the housing the project would provide.
“We want to be able to come out with factual numbers and descriptions of the services available in Lincoln County now and say ‘there – these are the needs we have,'” Howlett said.
Stepping Stone will focus on the needs of Lincoln County residents, but Howlett would also like to “think beyond Lincoln County.”
“We don’t want to say, ‘Slam the door, Lincoln County is the only place we can deal with people,'” Howlett said.
Stepping Stone does not plan to have a 24/7 on-site presence, despite the requests of some neighbors. “The economics don’t work to have somebody on-site,” Howlett said.
Neighoff describes a typical tenant as a single mother with a minimum-wage job who lacks the savings to pay a deposit and first month’s rent on an apartment. The goal is to provide a place for someone to live for a few months to as long as two years.
The name Stepping Stone reflects this goal – to give people “a step up,” Neighoff said. “It’s a stepping stone to success.”
Howlett and Neighoff predict fewer issues with problem tenants, not more. Longtime Blue Haven owner John Andrews “was a very trusting person,” Howlett said. “He just said, ‘You need a place to live? I’ll rent it to you for a ridiculously low price.'”
Stepping Stone will institute a thorough application process that will “weed out most of the potential problems,” Howlett said.
The project still needs to raise a substantial amount of money, possibly in the range of $750,000 to $850,000.
Stepping Stone hopes to raise the money through a combination of assistance from local churches, community fundraisers, and hopefully a major patron or two, “somebody who has a heart for helping people and a big checkbook balance,” Neighoff said.
As the project progresses, Howlett and Neighoff hope the improvements at the site will start to ease the concerns of the neighbors and opponents of the project.
“We hope by enhancing the beauty of the property it will show who we are and that we really want to be good neighbors and we want to make the property better than it was,” Neighoff said.
“It will take us some years to complete the vision, but I think when we’re done, people will see that it’s really a good thing for the neighborhood and for Damariscotta and for Lincoln County,” she said.
