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I wonder if they're holding out for Westbrook and our cash-strapped MaineDOT to sell off some of the Larrabee Road right-of-way. If you look at tax maps, Larrabee Road has a 200' right-of-way. That's absurdly wide – wider than the Zakim Bridge that carries 10 lanes of Interstate 93 into...

Portland Housing Authority is poised to acquire 879 Congress Street – this gravel parking lot and the small white apartment building next to it – for a new mixed-use building, targeting about 60 apartments. MaineHealth is reportedly providing some funding to help acquire the property, in the...

I'm also baffled by the failure to consider a station above Park Ave, for all the reasons you mention. The railroad bridge over Park used to have 6 tracks, so there's plenty of room there for a station track (or even two station tracks) flanked by two new platforms, with no need for any property...

A press release from MaineHealth about the closure of the St. Joseph's Manor nursing home: https://www.mainehealth.org/news/2024/09/saint-josephs-rehabilitation-and-residence-transfer-operations-september

Wow! I hadn't realized that this had already sold, that's great news. The price seems low for a site with that much potential. I think the former owner was MaineHealth if I recall correctly – which, as the city's biggest employer, has a strong financial interest in making more middle-income...

There's another new Avesta site plan application for 30 apartments on Cedar Street, replacing 2 single-family homes that were demolished fairly recently: https://selfservice.portlandmaine.gov/EnerGov_Prod/selfservice#/plan/291e8de8-20d0-4a54-b93f-6baa4840feaa?tab=attachments Googling for more...

Demolition progress:

^ The demolition of the old buildings is almost finished. I'll try to grab a photo next time I'm going by. This also has its own project thread: https://archboston.com/community/threads/comb-block-boyd-oxford-portland.7030/

The buyer could make a good faith offer to the City of Portland (which owns the adjacent parking lot on Commercial Street) to build something that covers the entire block between Commercial and York in exchange for the preservation of some ground-level parking underneath the building. Or just...

Seems like a good sign that design work is still proceeding? Where did you find these?

GreenMars has applied for building permits for their 130-unit "Stroudwater Commons" project on outer Congress Street: https://selfservice.portlandmaine.gov/EnerGov_Prod/selfservice#/permit/8265f806-0a63-4537-a883-d400bd408a02

No details yet, but Avesta is planning something for the old Tortilla Flat restaurant site (which has a large lot and is a pretty good location for housing: next door to Hannaford, on two METRO routes, a 20 minute walk/5 minute bike ride to Talbot School and the community center, and a block...

Good lord, they're even cheaping out on the "temporary" structure. Compare the design from last fall to now:

The new Riverton Park apartment building, seen from Forest Avenue. Note the prefabricated CLT timber elevator cores – cheaper than cinder block masonry, and a lot better looking too IMHO

Market Basket is all framed out and getting its cladding: And the Intermed clinic across the street is framed out:

Brownfield cleanup site work has begun:

This site is next to Big Apple, but it's also next to the Eastern Cemetery and the upper floors are going to have incredible unobstructed views of the harbor over the cemetery. The "Hay Runner Block" proposal didn't just have underground parking, it was underground *robotic* parking – the site...

Speaking of Standish, I just was looking at property tax rates and found something pretty incredible. One of the longtime supposed advantages of places like Standish were lower property tax rates. But in a lot of those suburbs, tax burdens have been increasing fast with all the new cul-de-sacs...

Big caveats with this data: it's expressed in percentages, and it's not "new homes," it's "home sales." So towns with a relatively small number of overall home sales are going to be over-represented: if Standish goes from 10 home sales to 20, that's a 100 percent increase; if Portland goes from...

Those quadruple-triple deckers have 12 units each, and the Gorham proposal calls for "474 multifamily units in eight buildings, each four or five stories tall." So those buildings will have elevators, and probably double-loaded corridors, with an average unit count of 59 apartments per building...