Thanks to Mount Desert 365, two community members are preparing to become neighbors — and homeowners — in a community where finding an affordable place to live has become increasingly difficult.
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NORTHEAST HARBOR — There was a time when Wildes Ho worried that staying on Mount Desert Island might not be possible.
She had work at the Kimball Shop, where she manages staffing, inventory, and buying. She had family and lifelong friends here. She had grown up in the village and returned after years away, wanting to make a life in the place that had made her.
But wanting to stay and being able to stay are two different things on an island where the cost of a home can sometimes put homeownership beyond the reach of the people who keep its businesses running.
Ho worried that she and her new husband might have to return to the West Coast.
Now, she is preparing to buy a home in Northeast Harbor through Mount Desert 365, the nonprofit working to make year-round homeownership possible for people who might otherwise be priced out of the community.
Next door, Steve Anastasia is preparing for a change of his own. An Acadia National Park employee, father of two sons and former owner of the Old Dog Baking Company, Anastasia is moving from a Mount Desert 365 rental into a house of his own.
He has been spending his spare time installing a walkway leading to his new front door.
A walkway is not much to look at on a housing balance sheet, but it’s the sort of thing a person puts in when he expects to be staying awhile.
That’s what the communities on Mount Desert Island have said again and again that they want: people to be staying a while in homes that they can make their own.
Ho and Anastasia are the first in the Nolan Way development, the two-home project that Mount Desert 365 began with a groundbreaking celebration in June 2025.
The public had and will have an opportunity to see the homes during an open house from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. Saturday and Sunday, Oct. 10 and 11.
The homes are at Nolan Way, near the intersection of Summit Road and Millbrook Road in Northeast Harbor.
They are possible not just because of the hard work of the nonprofit. Joelle and Jimmy Nolan allowed their drive to be used so the duplex could be built. Joelle had been the Mount Desert Town Clerk for more than two decades. Jimmy had been an electrical contractor before his death in 2025.
At the groundbreaking, the celebration was marked by champagne in plastic glasses, shovels in the earth and the kind of hugs that seemed to happen everywhere. People laughed, caught up on news and thanked one another for helping move the project from an idea toward a pair of houses.
The occasion was about more than construction. It was about the possibility that people who had a stake in the community might be able to afford to remain part of it.
Now, that possibility has names and front doors, kitchens, bathrooms, and exceptional closets.
For Eric Yachanin of Yachanin Construction there are two great parts of a job like this one: being done and then driving by and seeing families, seeing the people living in homes that are safe, secure, and their own.
The homes on Nolan Way are modular, but tweaked with some stick building and from Superior Homes. They needed work before people can move in. Mount Desert 365 Executive Director Kathleen Miller said that there had been siding that needed to put up, Yachanin had to build the porches, an overhang area that protects the doors off the walkway from rain. When the homes arrived there were boxes filling the rooms, all items that had to be finished.
Now, they are waiting on a certificate of occupancy from the Town of Mount Desert, which will hopefully come soon.
“We are thrilled to be turning these over to people who love this community and want to stay in this community and now they can,” Miller said Saturday in between greeting people coming to check out the two homes, standing in the sunny, cold October day, smiling, answering questions.
Ho and Anastasia both serve on the Mount Desert 365 board. Anastasia had represented tenants on the board; his transition to homeowner will bring a change in that role.
Ho represents the sort of resident the organization hopes to retain: someone connected to the village, invested in its businesses, and committed to a future on the island.
Their circumstances give the project a human dimension that is sometimes lost in the arguments over housing, where the conversation can become a tangle of prices, income limits, construction costs, tariffs, environmental and infrastructure worries, and the shortage of buildable land.
Those things matter. On Mount Desert Island, they matter enormously where much of the land is protected as part of Acadia National Park.
In June 2025, at the groundbreaking, Miller described year-round housing as central to the future of the town. Without people able to live affordably in the community, she said, the effects reach far beyond real estate — to schools, emergency services, hospitals, and the broader life of the villages.
The island needs people who can work here and afford to live here. A business needs employees. Schools need children. A community needs people who are still around after the summer visitors have gone home.
Mount Desert 365 was formed around that premise: that a town cannot thrive throughout the year if the people who sustain it cannot find a place to live. Brothers Mitchell and Steven Rales founded the organization meant to promote “long-term economic vitality of town of Mount Desert through expansion of sustainable year-round residential communities and economic revitalization of commercial districts.”
The Nolan Way homes are intended for year-round residents with median incomes who can qualify for bank financing. The original project plans called for a three-bedroom home of 1,564 square feet and a two-bedroom home of 1,274 square feet, both two stories with basements.
The homes also come with eligibility requirements intended to preserve their affordability for future buyers. The properties must serve as primary residences, household-size criteria apply, and future sales are subject to income restrictions and affordability covenants.
That last part matters. An affordable home is not necessarily affordable forever. Without restrictions on future sales, a home that begins within reach of a working household can eventually move beyond it.
The goal is not simply to sell two houses. It is to make them part of a longer effort to preserve a year-round community.
The need is larger than Nolan Way. Hancock County faces a substantial housing shortage, with workers in retail and food service among those particularly squeezed by the gap between local wages and home prices. Mount Desert Island’s limited supply of buildable land, high construction costs and competition for available homes compound the problem.
In a housing analysis for the town of Bar Harbor, RKG Associates referenced Maine estimates that said that Mount Desert’s population is likely to increase by 15 between 2018 and 2028. This would be an increase from 1,015 households to 1,030. The state projects the population of Mount Desert will increase by 4.9% between 2020 and 2030.
Currently, there are multiple organizations who are leading the way in the creation of affordable homes: Island Housing Trust, Mount Desert 365, and MDI Housing Solutions Initiative, which is a collaboration between the Musson Group and Island Housing Trust. Other organizations and towns—such as Friends of Acadia, Acadia National Park, and the Town of Bar Harbor—are working on ways to create homes on a parcel in Town Hill.
Two houses will not solve a housing need, but they can chip away at it.
More than that though, two houses can change the lives of the people who move into them. They can also demonstrate what a community chooses to do when the housing market alone is not producing enough homes for the people it needs.
For Ho, the move means a chance to remain near the family and friends who connect her to Northeast Harbor. For Anastasia, it means moving from renting to owning and, just next door, helping establish a new neighborhood.
There is something fitting about a walkway being built while all this is happening. A house may be the large, expensive part of homeownership, the part measured in square feet and financing. A walkway is smaller. It is a way in.
When Mount Desert 365 broke ground, the homes were still a promise in the earth. This weekend, visitors can walk through them and see what that promise looks like.
And for two people who want to remain on the island, the question of where to live now has an answer.
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Rick Osann Art.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
Friends of Acadia housing article
Heel Way Subdivision Configuration Not Being Changed
Mount Desert’s “Hornet’s Nest” Continues
Where Will All The Workers Go?
Creativity Needed To Help Make Housing More Affordable
HCPC’s Hancock County Housing Needs Assessment
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