BANGOR — Residents of a Bangor trailer park received a warm welcome home this week.
Tuesday, members of the Cedar Falls Mobile Home Park officially signed a deal to purchase the community they live in for $8 million dollars after forming their own cooperative, thanks to fundraising efforts and help from several outside parties — including lenders and the city of Bangor.
Prior to the purchase, residents may have owned their homes but not the land the homes sat on.
Longtime resident and one of the driving forces behind the effort, Ronnie Pinkham, said this left residents vulnerable to potential rent hikes and even being displaced when they were notified that the park was going up for sale and an outside buyer had made a bid.
“They don’t ever have to worry about it being sold. They can live out their lives. I remember one elderly gentleman told me ‘I want to die here. This is my home.’ I’ll always remember he said that to me. That, in itself, pushed me forward,” said Pinkham, who is also the president of the Cedar Falls Mobile Home Park Co-Op board.
The 79-acre park is primarily home to seniors and families.
“I feel jubilant. We’ve finally made it over the threshold where we’ve signed the closing, and we actually own the park right now,” said Alvin MacNevin, resident and treasurer of the Cedar Falls board of directors.
MacNevin was also heavily involved in pushing the effort to buy the park forward.
“We got notice that the park was being sold in the end of August, and then they informed us that we needed petitions put out that more than half of the park had to sign in order to go any further,” said MacNevin. “Then we had to submit offers to the owners of the park to see if they would accept the offers.”
Now that the park is in their hands, Pinkham and MacNevin said the community is teaming up with Bangor Housing to add dozens of new homes to the nearly 130-residence lot.
The state’s housing authority, Maine Housing, will provide a $3 million dollar loan to help develop the park’s 28 empty lots.
“We own it. Now we have to get the licensing, we have to notify all the residents of the changeover. So, there’s still a lot of work to do, we don’t get to rest yet,” said MacNevin.
The non-profit Cooperative Development Institute helped park residents in this process.
Nora Gosselin, director of resident acquisitions at the institute, said the nonprofit provided residents with technical advising throughout the purchase process.
“We supported them getting organized to respond to the original notice of sale, get incorporated as a cooperative, brought an attorney to the table to represent the co-op, supported them through seller negotiations, convened weekly meetings for six months to build a business plan for ownership, solicited financing for the community to decide on, worked with the city, state electees, Maine Housing, Bangor Housing, and lender teams around low-cost financing and grant availability, and helped them develop and adopt cooperative organization documents,” said Gosselin.
Gosselin said the Cooperative Development Institute will also provide ongoing technical advising as they step into resident ownership.
Owners of manufactured home communities are required to notify residents when their park goes up for sale under a new state Opportunity to Purchase law.
According to the Cooperative Development Institute, Cedar Falls is the second manufactured home community to become resident-owned since the law went into effect in October 2023.
“The aging elderly population in this park, they get to stay in their homes. They feel secure. They feel safe. They don’t have to worry about somebody coming and saying, ‘hey you have to move out, I bought this park.’ Or your lot rent’s going to go bonkers, and they can’t pay it so they either go without food or they go without something,” said Pinkham. “Now, they don’t have to worry about that.”
