Peninsula Housing Kicks Into High Gear With Development Projects In Suttons Bay

Peninsula Housing is ready to speed things up.

According to founder Larry Mawby, the nonprofit is looking to kick off construction on a 40-home development in Suttons Bay next spring, with another potential 80-home development right across the street. Those plans mark an ambitious uptick in the pace of work for Peninsula Housing, which has mostly housed tenants on a one-by-one basis since it launched four years ago. The Leelanau Ticker sat down with Mawby to find out what’s behind the acceleration – and why Suttons Bay is at the epicenter of Peninsula Housing’s biggest projects.

Known for his namesake winery near Suttons Bay, Mawby started Peninsula Housing in 2021 after retiring from the day-to-day work of running the winery. Since then, most of the organization’s success stories have been relatively small. Last January, the nonprofit landed its first homebuyers for a house it had acquired in Northport. Peninsula Housing has also bought, renovated, and sold a three-bedroom single-family home in Suttons Bay; and purchased and rented out a duplex in Lake Leelanau.

Now Mawby is ready to take Peninsula Housing to the next level. The organization has multiple big-picture projects in the works to bring dozens of affordable housing options to Leelanau County in the near future.

The first has been in the works for years. It was late 2022 when Peninsula Housing acquired 10 acres of land off Herman Road in Suttons Bay, and the nonprofit has been eyeing the land for housing development ever since. 

“We’re working with the township on that property right now, and hope to begin construction next spring,” Mawby says of Herman Road. “Our goal would be to complete that development over the next two and a half years, and our plan is for 40 residences.”

Speaking to the Leelanau Ticker last spring, Mawby outlined two possibilities for the property. The first was for 75 rental units in a relatively high-density layout, while the second would have built 40 rental units and 15 single-family for-sale homes on the land. The 40-unit plan Peninsula Housing has settled on means fewer units than either of those concepts – a compromise Mawby says was difficult to avoid, given the limiting factor of water and sewer access in Suttons Bay.

“This density seems to work well in the community, and it also works within our ability to provide on-site water and on-site septic,” Mawby says of the development. “We’re not going to be able to connect to village water and septic, so there's some space required for those systems.”

Mawby adds that Peninsula Housing hasn’t yet settled on the mix of rental apartments and homes.

“The first phase that we want to start next year will be eight apartments and eight homes,” Mawby tells The Ticker. “From there, we'd like to do 24 somethings the next year, but we haven’t decided what that will look like yet.”

If all goes well, Peninsula Housing will also have a second development to kick off as soon as the Herman Road effort finishes. Earlier this month, the nonprofit finalized a deal to buy 9.5 acres from Suttons Bay Public Schools (SBPS). The land serves as the athletic fields for SBPS and amounts to roughly a quarter of the school district’s property. Selling that land is part of a broader bond-funded effort at SBPS to “right-size” the school district, given its substantial decline in student enrollment.

Mawby says he first got in touch with SBPS years ago.  “That discussion led to the understanding that they were planning, in the long term, to move their athletic fields from south along Herman Road up closer to the school buildings,” he notes. “We made it clear that we’d be interested in acquiring that land when the time came.”

It wasn’t until SBPS went out of formula for state funding last winter that talks heated up. (Read the Leelanau Ticker’s full breakdown of the funding shift here.) “My understanding is that [being out of formula] is great for the school district in the long run, but messes up their flow of tax money for the first couple of years,” Mawby says. “So, they approached us this winter and said, ‘The property that we were thinking about selling to you three from years now when we no longer need it; would you think about buying it now and leasing it back to us for three years?’”

Peninsula Housing obliged, partnering with the Leelanau County Land Bank Authority and “borrowing money from individuals” to make the purchase quickly. In April, the SBPS Board of Education voted to sell the 9.5 acres to Peninsula Housing for $800,000. Under the deal, the district will pay $30,000 a year for the next three years to lease the land, meaning any development likely won’t happen until 2028.

“That three-year timeline gives us the time we need to fundraise and pay back the loans, and to work with the village, the township, and the county to come up with development plans for affordable housing,” Mawby says. “The land is currently zoned for school use, so one of the things we’ll have to do is work with the village to get it rezoned. We did talk to the village before acquiring the property, and the expectation with zoning they’re looking at is that we could get maybe 80 homes there, likely consisting of single-family homes and duplexes. We would really like to look at doing some multi-family apartments as well, but we’re just not sure yet what zoning the community is going to be okay with.”

While Mawby says Peninsula Housing has a few irons in the fire for other projects, including in Northport and Empire, it’s not lost on him that his hometown of Suttons Bay has quickly become the nonprofit’s focus.

“We think it would be beneficial if the county were able to access some federal tax credit funding for affordable housing, and it’s worth noting that, at this point, the only community in the county that can qualify for that is the village of Suttons Bay."