Carrabassett Valley will gain up to 14 new housing units after Western Maine Mountain Housing received a $1 million grant from the Northern Border Regional Commission’s catalyst program last month.

The 18.6-acre development will be on Bigelow Hill off Route 27, about a mile north of Access Road (the route to Sugarloaf Mountain), on land deeded to the developers by the Weyerhaeuser Corp.

Rental units will be developed first, said John Beaupre, board president of Western Maine Mountain Housing, but they also intend to add home ownership duplexes to the property in the future. The funds are specifically meant to go toward the first 14 rental units, which will cost around $2 million total. Western Maine Mountain Housing will need to raise the balance. The goal is a total of 55 to 60 units when the project is completed.

“We also want to be portrayed as a regional effort, not just Sugarloaf,” Beaupre said. “This is Eustis, Carabassett Valley, Kingfield and the surrounding communities.”

Rental units will be priced as workforce housing, meaning it is aimed at staying within the price margins of middle-income earners.

“We wanted to earmark for hardworking young people who can’t afford housing, like say bank tellers, managers on the mountain, hardworking service people; that’s our target,” he said, “(people) who 15 years ago could afford housing and today are priced out.”

Beaupre said he has seen the lack of affordable housing in the area firsthand, having served on the town’s Select Board for 24 years. He said that unaffordable housing is a problem that seeps into every aspect of a town.

“You can’t be fully committed because you can’t find housing,” he said. “It trickles down into the economic vibrancy of communities, Rangeley, Carabassett Valley, you know, even Portland and Augusta. It’s the whole state.”

In 2024, Western Maine Mountain Housing received $1.5 million in federal funds through the Transportation, Housing and Urban Development appropriations bill to go toward its efforts in the region. At the time, they were seeking a development in Kingfield that voters turned down.

The group received around $25,000 in 2021 from Carrabassett Valley, Coplin Plantation and Eustis. Mark Green, executive director of Western Maine Mountain Housing, said the local towns’ contributions as well as $307,000 that Franklin County granted the group were vital to getting the project going.

Garrett Corbin, Carrabassett Valley’s town manager, said the town is excited to see the project, which has been years in the making, near fruition.

“New residential housing has been built continuously in Carrabassett Valley since the 1980s,” Corbin said. “Our housing crunch is not the result of a lack of dedicated effort to enable new residential construction, but is rather due to our growth in popularity outpacing the steady construction of new units.”

In 2020, Carrabassett Valley commissioned a study of workforce housing needs and the results found that the town needed 100–300 year-round workforce units available and 200–300 seasonal units.

The new housing project is set to break ground in the spring of 2027. Beaupre said the project will likely take three to five years to complete.