LEWISTON — It took three years, multiple City Council meetings and debates and the intervention of U.S. Sen. Susan Collins’ office in Washington, D.C., but a downtown affordable housing development is underway.

Developer Phyllis St. Laurent joined city officials and financial backers Wednesday morning at the site of her 29-unit housing development on 8 acres between Pierce and Bartlett streets.

The land has been vacant since 2013 when a historic downtown fire destroyed the buildings.

“It’s been a difficult process, but it’s all done now,” St. Laurent said Wednesday, adding that the project will be complete in 14 months.

Ashley Medina, 27, said she and her children were visiting her mother when the fires broke out.

“All of a sudden I had 90 missed calls, my Facebook had blown up, I had text messages worried that my kids and I were in it,” she said. “Everything was gone.”

She’s now living on Horton Street but looks forward to coming back to St. Laurent’s project.

“I want to thank her for fighting to get this rebuilt,” Medina said. “She’s amazing, and it shows how much she cares about housing.”

Project Manager Jim Hatch, of the Maine group Developers Collaborative, paid homage to the process of getting the project to this point, saying it was difficult and long.

“And hopefully, in a year or so, we can see you all back here again in our community room for the openings,” Hatch said. “That’s when the rubber really meets the road because that’s when this project starts housing people. To me, that’s really the goal. This is just a way-point.”

St. Laurent had owned the 62-unit property since 1984. It was destroyed in a May 2013 fire, one of several that swept the downtown that spring.

Councilors approved a plan later that year that would have let building owner St. Laurent and Volunteers of America replace the project.

It combined eight lots covering about 0.91 of an acre between Bartlett and Pierce streets into three lots for the new project. She owned four of the properties, and the city owned the remaining four.

A group of landlords stepped forward, objecting to the involvement of Volunteers of America, a development group from outside Maine. St. Laurent withdrew the plan in September 2013.

She brought it back again in spring 2014, this time working with Hatch and his Maine company Developers Collaborative. Councilors narrowly approved the plan again, but the same landlords objected to the city giving the four city lots to the development. They mounted a petition drive challenging the council’s approval and forced a November 2014 vote. Voters turned down St. Laurent’s project at the polls.

Councilors put their remaining four properties up for bid in December 2014 and St. Laurent bought them for $61,000, bringing the project back in spring 2015 without city help. After a March 2105 Planning Board review, the project moved forward.

“It would have been easy on several occasions to just say forget it,” Hatch said. “She could have just kept the units that didn’t get burned down, and forgotten about it. It was too much trouble. But we overcame that.”

The site development is largely unchanged from the version voters considered. It calls for 29 units, a mix of one-, two-, three- and four-bedroom apartments in three buildings, a grassy common area and 38 parking spaces.

The project will receive federal Low Income Housing Tax Credits from the Maine Housing Authority, which will be sold to investors to privately fund the project.

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