Lewiston’s Housing
Housing to meet our community’s needs.
The City of Lewiston, in partnership with many local, state, and federal partners and funders, is working to address housing shortages across the spectrum of housing needs. Throughout the last several years, Lewiston has worked hard to prioritize housing development by working collaboratively with developers, streamlining the planning and permitting process, and offering tax incentives and access to other funding programs for impactful projects.
As we move forward through the next five years, there will be several new units of market rate housing, including Gendron Active Living Estates which adds 110 units of senior and workforce housing, and Continental Mill developer Chinburg Properties adding 377 units of mid- to high-end apartments on our historic riverfront.
Wedgewood Development
Lewiston is the smallest city in the United States to receive federal Choice Neighborhood Implementation funding. The first Choice-funded development, Wedgewood, has one historic renovation with eight new buildings for a total of 60 affordable apartments and 22 market rate apartments. The Wedgewood development, which covers most of the Pine Bartlett-Walnut-Pierce Streets block on which it is being built, will be one of the most energy efficient city blocks in Maine.
DeWitt, named after the DeWitt Hotel once located in the same location on Pine Street, is the second Choice-funded development. It will comprise of two new buildings containing 104 apartments. The first floor of each building will be commercial space. There will be 83 affordable apartments and 21 market rate.
Renderings of Wedgewood (above) & DeWitt (below) courtesy of Kaplan Thompson.
“We want first time homebuyers to fully participate in the free market.”
- Amy Smith, Healthy Homeworks
Lewiston is home to several organizations that have created innovative approaches to addressing Maine’s housing challenges, including:
Healthy Homeworks is renovating and marketing turn of century multi-unit buildings into attractive, affordable condos for first-time homebuyers.
RaiseOp, the state’s first urban housing co-operative, was the first co-operative developer in Maine to be awarded federal low-income housing tax credits to finance an affordable housing development.
Community Credit Union, headquartered in downtown Lewiston, established the state’s first Sharia-compliant mortgage product.