Courtesy / Machias Savings Bank
Construction of affordable rental development Belfast Acres Estates is expected to be complete this September.
Updated: March 8, 2021
Q&A: Affordable housing developer sees growing need but new tech opportunities
Courtesy / Realty Resources
Joe and Linda Cloutier, owners of Realty Resources in Rockport, have worked in the field of affordable housing for decades.
The owners of Realty Resources, a development and property management firm headquartered in Rockport, have worked in the field of affordable housing for decades.
Joe and Linda Cloutier, who live in Camden, developed their first affordable housing project in 1976. Since then, they’ve developed numerous low-income housing communities. Today, the company manages over 80 affordable, market-rate, assisted living and workforce properties in Maine, New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Vermont.
Currently in development is Belfast Acres Estates, a $6.1 million, 25-unit building featuring primarily one-bedroom apartments and gas-fired heat pumps. (See sidebar.)
Designed by TAC Architectural Group in Bangor, construction by Rockport-based Penobscot Co. is expected to be complete by mid-September. All units are eligible for federal rental assistance. Machias Savings Bank funded $1,978,052 of the project. MaineHousing also provided subsidy and financing, and the remainder is being financed by government loans and Realty Resources.
Joe Cloutier also founded Re-Gen, an energy company specializing in cogeneration and gas-fired heat pumps. His interests include applying those concepts to existing and future affordable housing projects.
Mainebiz asked Cloutier how he and his wife got into the field and how it’s evolved over the years.
Here’s an edited transcript.
Mainebiz: What’s your background? How did you get into affordable housing?
Joe Cloutier: I’m a native Mainer. As a kid, I started out at 8 years old digging clams and lobstering. We were very, very poor — no running water, no bathroom.
I went to the University of Maine and then law school [at Boston College]. When I graduated from law school, I started making some money and built my first housing project in Warren in 1976. I still own it. I started sporadically building projects but I was also practicing law full-time.
The second project was in Belfast, which we still own. People who moved into that project came from housing that had no indoor plumbing. Several tenants were very poor.
I liked providing affordable housing, so I kept doing it. We currently manage and own over 80 projects, but I’ve probably done 90 or 100.
MB: How has the field changed?
JC: The process has become much more difficult. Permitting and land costs are very big hurdles for affordable housing. Typically our apartments use low-income housing tax credits, and the competition for those, especially by nonprofits, is severe. So it’s become harder to do this work. But we’re pretty successful at it. We’re good at structuring the financing.
MB: How many units have you built over the years?
JC: Thousands. I stopped practicing law around 1999 because I got so busy. I’ve stuck with this business and I’m happy with it. My wife was our only property manager for a while. Now we’ve got offices in Maine, Vermont and Massachusetts, and several hundred employees.
MB: How do you identify a new project?
JC: There’s competition for the credits we use. You have to look at the criteria established by the Maine State Housing Authority to identify a town that scores competitively [for projects to qualify for the credit]. Then you have to find and design the site. Often you’ve spent maybe $100,000 or more out-of-pocket, and you don’t even have the credits yet. So to some extent it’s kind of scary. But we’ve been doing it a long time.
MB: How do you identify a site?
JC: The challenge for affordable housing are land costs. Density is another big bugaboo, because affordable housing needs high density to make the numbers work. So you have to find a site that works from the density point of view. Then you sometimes have NIMBY.
We built a housing project on Cape Cod [Mass.] and the NIMBYs said, ‘We don’t want family housing.’ So I went to all of the restaurants and hotels, because it’s their workers who need that housing, and they showed up at the planning board and said, ‘We have to have this housing.’
MB: Are there any new construction advances that are helpful for affordable housing?
JC: There are standards for building affordable housing that are established by the federal and state government, and by the towns in terms of zoning and approvals. But right now I’m looking at a 3D-printed concrete home that was just built in New York. I’m excited about it because it was built for half the cost of conventional wood-framed housing and 10 times faster. I really want to vet this technology [by Patchogue, N.Y., firm SQ4D, which is using robotic 3D printing technology to build foundations, walls and more, according to its website]. The key to affordable housing is getting the costs down. It’s going to be an exercise to convince the government to approve this. But I’d like to do this.
MB: How many projects do you have in the pipeline at any given time?
JC: We’ve got probably 25 projects in the pipeline now — most in Maine, but in Massachusetts and Vermont as well. The need has become much more urgent. So many people are moving here and it’s driven the cost of housing right through the roof. In my town, Camden, there’s no new affordable housing for workers. Working families can’t live in Camden. So it’s a big, big problem.
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