BEAVER ISLAND, MI – The houses were first fully built – appliances in, light fixtures up, blinds hung – in Illinois. Then they were transported to northern Michigan, where they were put on a barge, shipped across Lake Michigan and installed on a far-flung island.
In total, it was a 550-mile journey.
This is what it took to build new rental housing on Beaver Island, the most remote inhabited island in the Great Lakes. Housing is a unique challenge for the island’s 600 permanent residents because it’s covered with vacation homes and struggles with steep housing costs and barriers to new construction.
But one developer found a unique solution that could become a model for other rural Michigan communities.
Vince Ebersoldt and his wife, who have been island homeowners for 16 years, led an effort to build a $1.8 million housing project called The Juniper. It includes 12 one-bedroom rentals for people who work on the island, like teachers, construction workers and restaurant staff, but struggle to afford housing.
The development, which created much-needed housing for the island, landed state support in exchange for keeping rent low.
Ebersoldt, who owns a St. Louis architectural firm that’s designed 45,000 units across the country, says the Beaver Island project is not intended to be a “money maker.”
“This is something that we wanted to do because we had expertise and experience that other folks didn’t have with multifamily housing, and we wanted to do something on behalf of the community,” he said.
Related: This remote Michigan island is being eaten up by too many hungry deer
Island housing issues
Beaver Island, a 13-mile-long and 6-mile-wide island that sits at the north end of Lake Michigan, can only be reached by a two-hour ferry trip or 15-minute flight. Its remoteness has made it popular for summertime visitors: dark skies, quiet beaches and thick forests.
But like other northern Michigan tourism draws, Beaver Island has struggled with its housing stock being eaten up by short-term rentals and vacation homes.
Nearly 70% of the homes on Beaver Island are seasonal, a 2023 housing market study found. Put another way, only 30% of the houses are lived in year-round by islanders. As a result, some residents are left without permanent housing, bouncing around seasonal homes as they’re vacated.
“With the large number of short-term rentals, we’ve lost a lot of the transitional housing stock that our tourist industry relied on,” said Bobbi Welke, St. James Township supervisor.
On top of that, Beaver Island housing is expensive.
The median home price on the island is $600,000 – more than double the $286,000 median price in Michigan. It ranges from luxury vacation homes, like a five-bedroom recently listed for $2.7 million, to hunting shacks.
This has left the island’s middle-income residents with a “simple lack of choices,” the market report said, noting that “even the smallest introduction of housing units” would have a big impact on alleviating the shortage.
About 60% of the island’s households earn less than $105,000 with the median income being $69,680.
“Costs go up and maybe people’s wages don’t go up,” Welke said.
Related: Lake Michigan island takes step toward faster internet with fiber installation
A modular solution
The problem is clear: Beaver Island needs more housing.
But a solution is more complicated because Ebersoldt says construction costs are “crazy high” on the remote island where materials, equipment and contractors need to be shipped across Lake Michigan.
“The other thing that keeps them high is that there’s a shortage of labor,” he said. “And the prime reason that there’s a shortage of labor in the construction industry, and any other industry as well, is that there is no housing for folks to live on the island.”
An idea sprouted in Ebersoldt’s brain two years ago as a way to do it affordably: build modular houses on the mainland and have them brought to the island.
“Once we realized that not only could get done faster but could get done less expensively for just as much quality, we had no choice but to go that way,” he said.
The 560-square-foot, one-bedroom units were each built as one piece at a factory in northern Illinois. Fully constructed (“99.9% complete,” according to Ebersoldt), they were then transported Charlevoix and carried on a barge roughly 30 miles across Lake Michigan.
Once landing on the island, the modular homes were installed on piers instead of full foundations to keep concrete usage low. Ebersoldt says getting a concrete truck is another costly challenge to constructing houses on the island.
These efforts cut the development price by an estimated 45%, according to Ebersoldt, and turned what would have been a three-year project into 18 months, from first sketch to occupancy.
“Any line item that we could have done on the mainland at a fraction of the cost helped to offset our transportation and barge costs,” he said.
Rents kept low
The Michigan State Housing Development Authority backed the project with a $676,000 grant from a $60 million program called MI Neighborhood, which aims to address regional housing issues.
Amy Hovey, executive director of the state housing agency, said the program provided “critical financing” that made The Juniper feasible. The rest of the project was financed privately.
MI Neighborhood is part of Michigan’s broader effort to address widespread housing shortages by building or rehabilitating 115,000 units by September 2026.
“It has given local leaders the tools to create housing that meets their community’s specific needs,” Hovey said in a statement to MLive. “For Beaver Island, that means long-term, attainable rental homes that strengthen the local economy while respecting the unique character of the island.”
Related: Did you know there are dozens of Great Lakes islands with year-round residents?
Under the grant, Michigan required rents at The Juniper to be affordable for those earning between 60% and 120% of the area median income, or between $41,880 and $83,760 for a single-person household in Charlevoix County.
That put rents from $1,047 to $2,094 – about twice what Ebersoldt felt comfortable charging.
Because of that, he decided to price nine of the units for $1,100 and three for $960, including everything but electricity.
“We felt like we couldn’t comfortably go above $1,100 a month and still meet the island’s needs,” he said.
Ebersoldt says constructing modular homes offsite, where materials and labor are more accessible, solved some of the challenges associated with rural development. He believes this could become a model for other remote communities in Michigan that struggle with housing.
“I think a good portion of extremely rural northern Michigan and Upper Peninsula could probably benefit from it as well,” he said.
The first round of residents moved into The Juniper in late September and Ebersoldt expects all units will be occupied by November.
MLive journalist Sheri McWhirter contributed this reporting.
If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.