The Bollard Bulletin for March 25, 2025
Cartoon Tuesday: "We're doomed and I'm drunk."
Cartoon Tuesday
Here we go again…
Efforts to build colossal housing projects on two abandoned scrapyards in Portland’s Bayside neighborhood have been ongoing since this century began. The first yard eyed for redevelopment was New England Metal Recycling, between Somerset Street and Marginal Way. Over a decade ago, a Florida-based developer pitched a project there dubbed “midtown” — four 165-foot towers containing 800 market-rate apartments, plus lots of retail space and a parking garage. Years went by with no progress, and lawsuits between the city and the developer have dragged on since 2018 with no resolution in sight.
Now comes Redfern Properties, which recently built The Casco, now Maine’s tallest building, containing over 260 apartments, across from Portland House of Music, and Nightingale, an apartment building on Mercy Hospital’s former West End property with 165 units. Redfern wants to construct “at least two” 12-story-plus apartment buildings with over 500 units on the other scrapyard, E. Perry Iron and Metal, directly west of the Whole Foods parking lot. They bought the large dirt lot last spring for $6.8 million, the Portland Press Herald reported.
The daily paper’s article today says Redfern can’t afford to build this project — or its recently approved apartment building on Washington Ave., called Tavata, with 325 units — unless the federal interest rate is “significantly” dropped or the city significantly drops its requirement that 25 percent of the units be affordable for most working locals. Redfern and its investors would prefer to make only 10 percent of the apartments affordable.
Jonathan Culley, Redfern’s managing partner, told the Herald he hasn’t asked city officials to reduce the requirement, but “he has heard it’s been discussed.” Of course it has. Private developers hate Portland’s affordable-housing ordinance and have been trying to weaken or eliminate it for years. Redfern’s plan for the Perry yard, and the article describing it, are essentially an effort to pressure city councilors to drop the requirement, because the Federal Reserve Board sure as shit doesn’t care what Culley wants.
In our November 2023 story “Stabbing Bayside in the Backside,” we pointed out that the city’s push to revive this blighted post-industrial neighborhood by promoting massive redevelopment projects that need big tax breaks, public subsidies and the waiving of rules written to protect neighbors’ quality of life is foolish and has clearly failed. Small-scale, parcel-by-parcel housing and commercial development — the type that created Bayside in the first place — has the advantages of being both possible and preferable for those who live and work there.
But as this latest plan demonstrates, the city doesn’t have that choice when a developer buys a block-long property like the Perry yard. We can’t force Culley & Co. to pursue more modest plans, because the investors who ponied up almost seven mil for this contaminated patch of junkie wasteland can’t profit from anything smaller. Hell, they say they can’t even afford to build any parking for tenants there or at the proposed Washington Ave. apartment building.
So either city councilors cave and scrap the requirement that big developers build apartments locals can afford, or this scrapyard also remains an eyesore for another decade or more. I guess I’m looking forward to the latter.
Here’s a fun comic from our July 2008 issue about the public process these mega-projects go through once approved for construction. It’s by Pat Corrigan, who runs The Apohadion Theater a couple blocks from the scrapyards, and the building it refers to is next to the Miss Portland Diner on Marginal Way. It’s now called The Linden and owned by mega-developer Port Property. A 445-square-foot, one-bedroom apartment there was recently listed for $1,878 per month. No parking included.
Music
Andy’s Old Port Pub
Russ Kaback
8 p.m., free (all ages)
Blue Portland Maine
Open mic
7 p.m., free (21+)
Byrnes Irish Pub (Brunswick)
Irish Session (open jam)
6 p.m., free (all ages)
Flask Lounge
Open DJ night
8 p.m., free (21+)
Gritty McDuff’s
Travis James Humphrey (country, rock, pop)
6 p.m., no cover (all ages)
Olin Arts Center (75 Russell St., Lewiston)
The Portland Symphony Orchestra with guest clarinetist David Krakauer (chamber music)
7 p.m., $20
Oxbow Blending & Bottling
Damn B (space jazz)
7 p.m., free (all ages)
SPACE
Jeremy Bradley Earl, Daniel Higgs, Matt LaJoie (psych folk)
8 p.m., $18-$20 (all ages)
venue directory
Performing Arts
Comedy Open Mic at Blue Portland Maine (650 Congress St.) at 9:30 p.m. No cover (21+). 774-4111. blueportlandmaine.org.