Negaunee’s Newest Neighborhood: Maple Ridge helps ease housing crunch

Editor’s note: This story is made possible thanks to support from Lake Superior Community Partnership.

The development of a former brownfield site in Negaunee will make a dent in the shortage of available homes in growing Marquette County.

Construction is underway on more than half of the 27 homes planned for the western half of a 37-acre site in Negaunee; 15 homes are being framed in and nine have been sold. 

“You know, there’s been a lack of new construction for some time,”  says David Nelson, who is Negaunee’s planning and zoning  administrator. “Having someone develop even 27 parcels, every little bit helps.”

What’s happening: The wooded Maple Ridge Subdivision  is being developed by Wildflower Development Group, a Wisconsin-based company with strong ties to the U.P. The company, headed by Mitch Nordahl and his wife, Emily, took over construction at the site after the initial housing project, approved in 2022, failed. 

Maple Ridge offers prospective buyers three floor plans with different sizes and elevations. They include the two-story Tulip, the smallest design, and two styles of ranch homes, the Coneflower and the Foxglove. A fourth option, the Trillium, can include a three-car garage. All 27 homes are expected to be completed by spring 2027. The designs range in size from 1,300 to 1,500 square feet.

Nordahl partnered with part owner and project manager Wilbur Jennings of Wilbur Design and Construct, a local contractor, for the project. The goal has been to keep the work as local as possible; Nordahl has brought in crews from his home state of Wisconsin as needed to meet production deadlines.

“In order to try to keep as much variety in the development as possible, we offer a myriad of siding colors, as well as some accent pieces like stone, or different gable textures,” says Dawn Florio, an associate broker at RE/MAX 1st Realty who has been hired as the listing agent.

She says Nordahl decided to take a stab at bringing high-production builds to Marquette County, which is when he acquired the Maple Ridge project from Iron Ore. Florio began marketing in January 2025 with plans to break ground in May 2025. Even though no homes had yet been built, Florio used virtual reality technology to make the homes built in Wisconsin accessible here in Michigan.

Prices vary based on the buyers’ individual selections, but range from $400,000 to just over  $500,000.

Housing needs: Negaunee, a city of about 4,600, is experiencing slow but steady growth. However, the city and the surrounding area do not have enough housing stock to meet demand for affordable housing. That problem is exacerbated by tourists’ demand for short-term vacation rentals.

The back story: To help address that need, Cory Howes and Elliot Rouleau of Iron Ore Holdings, LLC, purchased 27 acres in Negaunee and started developing the property in 2022.  They used Tax Increment Funding programs and installed infrastructure along Sunset Drive, offering the lots to buyers to build with the builder of their choice. But soaring costs for materials, and the overall socio-economic impact of the pandemic caused the development to falter. “Building became extremely expensive,” Florio says. A modest 1,500-square-foot home ended up costing between $600,000 and $750,000 to build.

About the site: A brownfield site is an abandoned or underutilized industrial or commercial property with potential contamination. The Maple Ridge site was wooded and  owned by a mining company.

Funding: The project was supported by an $8,000 grant from the Marquette County Brownfield Authority EPA Assessment program for environmental due diligence and brownfield plan preparation. Beyond that, the project was supported by a Brownfield plan which uses tax increment financing, a way to temporarily earmark taxes for a particular project,  to help fund the development.

In Michigan, brownfield site eligibility is quite broad. Recent changes in the brownfield statute include the creation of housing as a criterion for site eligibility, and tax increment financing is being used across the state to incentivize housing development on eligible sites.

Continuing obstacles: Even so, obstacles loom large in Michigan mining towns like Negaunee, Nelson says. “You know, a lot of the vacant land that is within the city limits, it’s old abandoned mine land. Prior to the 1970s, mining companies were allowed to walk away from such properties with only minimal obligation, such as fencing, Nelson says.

“So we’re kind of left with this landscape that has been extremely altered by man-made events, and they were not responsible for making those lands reusable again,” he adds. “So the real issue at hand is that these are old, abandoned mine lands that are not easily developed and any developer has to tread very carefully and do their due diligence on any of those properties.”

Unlike coal mining, where federal funds are available to help reclaim such properties, there’s not really that much funding available for reclaiming hard rock mine land, Nelson says

 What’s next: As of this month, eight homes in the Maple Ridge development  have been sold and occupied by buyers, one spec home is finished, and six more builds are underway. “We’ve been able to build for the lowest price per square foot that this region has seen in years,” Florio says. An average total price per finished square foot of $282.29. 

“So even with prices at their current levels, it is truly helping to alleviate some of the pressure across the entire spectrum of home prices,” Florio says.