BANGOR, Maine — The city’s downtown facade improvement program is credited with playing a key role in luring businesses to the burgeoning downtown area.
“Definitely it helped us make the decision to buy, because we knew how much work we had to do inside the building,” said Heather Furth, who owns Verve Burritos.
With a $30,000 grant for facade improvements at their Main Street locale — which they matched with their own investment — they replaced windows, removed suspected lead paint, repointed brickface and repainted exterior surfaces.
The savings helped them add three new loft apartments to the building built in 1852 that already contained three existing apartments.
“I feel like there’s a really good energy to growth and business,” Furth said about downtown.
Now, when the city opens its annual facade improvement program late this week, those vying for the federal dollars won’t be limited to just downtown building owners.
The City Council last week has approved an order expanding eligibility for the grant program to any commercial or mixed-use building located in areas where the U.S. Census Bureau reports at least 51 percent of the population is low- or moderate-income.
Mixed-use buildings may contain both commercial and residential space.
The facade program is part of the city’s annual Community Development Block Grant, a program of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development designed to fight blight and poverty.
Each year the federal government grants the city a varying amount of CDBG money — about $782,864 this fiscal year — to use at its discretion for community development activities such as infrastructure improvements and low-cost housing.
For more than a decade, the city has set aside part of that money — up to $75,000 this year — to fund grants that improve the appearance to downtown buildings. It expanded the program for the first time two years ago to include the West Side Village.
According to Economic Development Officer Jason Bird, the expansion to all low- and moderate-income area significantly increases the program’s geographic footprint.
“We’re still seeing requests from just outside of downtown, so we want to be able to meet those needs and be more flexible with the areas that we hit,” he said.
According to Bird, the grants are not free money. In fact, each building owner must match each dollar granted by the city with a matching dollar, putting “their own skin in the game” in a 50-50 match, Bird said.
In addition to fighting blight, the city uses the program as an incentive for businesses to locate in aging local buildings.
“What I hear every time is ‘Thank you so much for the funding, because we certainly could not have made this investment without that extra kick-in,” Bird said.
In the past three years, the program has funded 24 facade improvement grants in downtown Bangor and the West Side Village. That compares to more than 50 projects that have been funded in more than a decade since the program started, according to Bird.
“It’s certainly picked up in popularity, and I think that’s probably evidence of the economic turnaround,” he said.
Last year, the city funded a total of seven facade improvement projects. Past grants have funded building improvements that helped bring businesses like 11 Central, Verve Burritos and Harvest Moon Deli to Bangor.
They also funded graffiti clean-up as well as exterior refurbishment and painting at the Maine Discovery Museum in the building that was once home to Freese’s department store.
In the spring, museum Executive Director Niles Parker said, the grant money will also help with minor roof repairs and purchase new banners for the museum.
He said the grants have helped transform the burgeoning downtown, giving museum visitors a reason to stay in the area to shop or grab a meal.
“Right on our block of downtown, we had vacant storefronts all around us until the last couple years,” he said.
Follow Evan Belanger on Twitter at @evanbelanger.