If you’ve been up in Northport lately, you probably noticed the signs calling for the community to help “Save Buster Dame,” a popular 3.14-acre park with a baseball field, pickleball courts, a dog park, and more. Those signs are a response to joint efforts by the Village of Northport and Leelanau Township to bring more affordable housing to the tip of Leelanau Peninsula. But while public officials have identified Buster Dame as a high-potential spot for housing development, loud backlash from area residents seems likely to stymy that possibility.

“Back in 2023, some of the leadership from the township and the village had a housing workshop at the Northport Creek Golf Course,” says Northport Village Council President Chris McCann. “The idea was to set the table on why we need more housing [in Northport] and what we’re going to do about it. One of the people who spoke at the meeting was Josh Mills, superintendent of the city of Frankfort. Frankfort has had a lot of success in addressing this attainable housing issue, and one of the points Josh made was that municipal property is the ‘low-hanging fruit’ when you are looking at these types of projects. It can be sold at little to no cost, which can help with affordability of housing, and there are tools like Payment In Lieu Of Taxes (PILOT) and Tax Incremental Financing (TIF) available to municipalities like ours.”

Conversations with Mills ultimately led Northport and Leelanau Township to take a look at their respective land assets, in search of public parcels that could be offered up for attainable housing development. That search led to Buster Dame.

Located at 721 Ransom Street in Northport, Buster Dame Recreational Field is a public park owned by Leelanau Township. However, because the Michigan Department of Natural Resources provided grant funding to the township in the 1990s, to fund improvements to the baseball field, the property can’t easily be converted to a non-park use like housing.

“There is a recreational designation on that property, which means it can only be used for recreation,” McCann says. “In exploring what we could do if we wanted to use that property for housing, we found out that we could take that DNR designation and apply it to a different piece of property. The other property would just have to be of equal value, not necessarily equal size.”

According to McCann, the Village of Northport owns a property that would fit the bill: a parcel “down on Seventh Street” that the village has previously looked at selling for development purposes.

“Local feedback from the community suggested that we not pursue [selling that land], and it’s also just an environmentally sensitive area, so it’s not ideal for development,” McCann says. “So, it seemed like a good idea to transfer the DNR recreational designation from Buster Dame to the Seventh Street property, and then pursue housing at Buster Dame.”

While McCann stresses that no formal decisions have been made on how to proceed or whether to target Buster Dame for development, the talks alone alarmed some local residents – particularly Eric Potes, who has been leading the charge for the “Save Buster Dame” campaign.

“The public, our impression, was that the land swap of Buster Dame for Seventh Street was the only option on the table [for housing],” Potes tells the Leelanau Ticker. “That's how it was first presented at a township meeting, and that's when things really hit the fan.”

Potes lives across the street from Buster Dame and says he is “extremely passionate about the ballpark, and about all the parks in Northport.” Potes graduated from Northport Public School and now sends his three kids there, in addition to coaching several of the school's sports teams. He credits all those factors and more for his desire to see Buster Dame preserved.

“It's a cherished local park,” Potes says. “It’s got clean lines of sight for children; you can fly kites there; it's open; it's fenced; it’s safe. Probably, all the reasons that they want to take it are the reasons we love it as a park.”

“It certainly offers a really great opportunity,” McCann says of Buster Dame’s housing potential. “It’s in a residential neighborhood; it's a flat piece of land; it's got roads on all sides; utilities would be easily accessible. Some of the other properties the village or township own would require a lot more site work – tree removal, soil remediation, things of that nature. So, if you were to rank the properties based solely on suitability to build housing, Buster Dame would be at the top of the list.”

While McCann says the township and the village will aim to “balance between the head and the heart” in deciding whether to keep Buster Dame in consideration for housing, he promises that he and other public officials have heard the community’s concerns and will look seriously at alternative options.

That consideration process had a kickoff of sorts on Wednesday evening, with an open-to-the-public housing workshop held at Northport Public School. Other similar meetings will follow, McCann says, and the public will have ample opportunity to share feedback about any housing concepts long before the the village and the township formally decide to pursue them.

“That meeting was about bringing in local housing organizations, like Housing North, Homestretch, and Peninsula Housing, and trying to get everyone up to speed,” McCann says. “Ultimately, we know the data says we need more housing in our community, just for our sustainability. I graduated from high school in Northport in 1998, and the population of the school has gone from about 330 then to 127 now. We’ve seen essential services – like our doctor’s office, our dentist, our auto mechanic – leave Northport because of our limited year-round population. And we’ve had something like 200 building permits pulled in 15 years. So, we have a demographic issue, and housing is a big part of that. The cheapest house for sale right now in Leelanau Township is $399,000, and meanwhile, I’d say over 70 percent of the kids in the local school district qualify for the free or reduced lunch program. That's why we’re talking about attainable housing.”