News File Photo The Alpena Public Schools property on Pinecrest Street, previously the location of Alternative Choices for Educational Success Academy, is pictured in this file photo.

ALPENA — Doctors, teachers, lawyers, and other professionals nearing retirement and wanting to downsize may struggle to find a place to live locally, a local investor thinks.

Dr. David Dargis, an Alpena physician who also visits patients in northern Michigan nursing homes, said his patients sometimes leave his office en route to homes they can’t navigate because they need to use a wheelchair or have some other physical limitation.

Dargis last week got permission from Alpena Public Schools officials to purchase the former ACES Academy building on Pinecrest Street in Alpena.

He intends to use the building to create wheelchair-accessible apartments that don’t require residents to fall under an income cap.

While even the area’s income-restricted housing is in short supply, Alpena has fewer options still for people who don’t qualify for income-restricted housing and who want to stay local as they look for a smaller and safer place to live, Dargis said.

Seniors, disabled veterans, or other people already using a wheelchair or other walking aid – or who might have to do so if confronted by an unexpected health problem or surgery – need a safe place to live, he said.

His mom, at 89, does OK in her multi-storied home, but he’d like to know she has the option of a single-level place to live that would fit her needs if she chooses to move.

“We wouldn’t worry about Mom falling down the stairs because there are no stairs,” Dargis said.

Long-time residents still living in large homes in which they raised their children, no longer able to mow the lawn and shovel the driveway, may be able to secure another house or a two-story duplex, but the apartment living option many want and need is scant, he said.

The Alpena area offers some one-level rentals, “but they’re pretty much full, and they go fast,” Dargis said.

Having just received the OK to buy the ACES building, Dargis has not yet created a design for alterations to the building.

Should his hope to use the building for senior and wheelchair-accessible living not go as planned, Dargis intends to find another location to create such housing, motivated in part by the patients he sends out the door not sure how they will live in their homes.

Proposed senior-living housing projected to go into another building owned by Dargis, the former Bingham Arts Academy building, has stalled but may still happen, but that would probably be income-restricted housing, Dargis said.

The county’s overall population is decreasing, but census data says the percentage of older adults in the county is increasing, said Mary Catherine Hannah, Alpena County administrator.

Any addition of housing for older residents would be welcome, especially housing that makes it easier to meet those adults’ needs – from grocery support to walking a dog to delivering a meal – and that offers built-in companionship of nearby neighbors, Hannah said.

Current high construction costs make adding new housing of any kind a challenge, she said.

Not much of the kind of housing Dargis plans exists in Alpena County, and “certainly not enough, based on our current demand and what we project as the demand going forward for Alpena County,” Hannah said. “That I can absolutely say.”