EASTON, Maine — With home sales and prices rising across the state, including in Aroostook County, the town of Easton is doubling down on efforts to grow its housing stock and population.
This year, Easton is working on setting up what will be the third residential subdivision spearheaded by the town, said Easton Manager Jim Gardner.
“It’s all in concert with being the community we want to be and inviting people to the community,” Gardner said.
In 2010, Easton purchased former farmland on Perry Road and subdivided it into 18 lots, each about an acre in size, and sold the lots for homes. The town did surveying, roadwork and set up electrical poles, while homeowners paid for power connections, water and septic systems.
Easton’s Prestile Stream park offers a scenic, peaceful spot in the town’s village center on May 27.
(Anthony Brino)
Gardner said the town watched those lots sell quickly and realized it could be an opportunity to attract new residents around the town’s village center.
In the last two years, the town jumped in to buy other parcels of land, including off, Duncan Drive and Station Road.
The subdivision along Duncan Drive, called Moose Meadows, has now sold all but a few of its roughly one acre lots at the price of $12,000 an acre, Gardner said. The town paid $28,000 for the 11 acre Duncan Drive parcel and $56,000 for the 26 acre Station Road parcel, he said.
With the Moose Meadows subdivision filling up, the town is now working on a subdivision on Station Road, where 18 parcels each a little more than an acre in size will be available for building likely starting in 2019, Gardner said.
Quality affordable housing to rent and buy is in short supply across the state of Maine. In Aroostook County, while concerns remain about a shrinking population, home sales are increasing, according to the Maine Association of Realtors.
Between the first quarter of 2017 and first quarter of 2018, home sales increased by 3 percent statewide, with the median sales price increasing 10 percent, according the group’s quarterly real estate report.
In Aroostook, the number of homes sold jumped 26 percent, while the median sales price increased by 34 percent, to $91,000 — the largest sales price increase of any county in the state.
Gardner said that Easton has been marketing itself as an affordable, small community with good schools, parks and athletic facilities, jobs at two large factories and close proximity to the region’s service center community of Presque Isle.
“Our school system is one of our big drivers. We’re tuitioning some 70 students into our school now, coming from everywhere — Washburn, Mapleton, E. Plantation,” Gardner said.
Under Maine law, families can request to have their children go to schools in districts other than their own, with their tuition dollars following them. Families from around central Aroostook County have been drawn to the Easton School System’s small class sizes and record of having most graduates go on to higher education.
“That was one of the big pushes on the subdivisions,” Gardner said. “We’re getting all these kids coming to our schools, so maybe we ought to start another subdivision.”
