From Bath to Bar Harbor, Maine communities share struggle with affordable housing — and optimism about solutions

Harpswell is not the only place in Maine wanting to figure out how to make housing affordable for its residents. As it gets harder for Mainers to find a place to live, governments, nonprofits and residents across the state are trying out a host of solutions.

“What I’m seeing now is an energy around housing I haven’t seen in my 25 years in Maine,” says Debora Keller, executive director of Bath Housing. Keller and others say there is no single solution or even set of solutions for housing problems. But they also agree that there are more tools available now — some from the state, others conceived locally — than in the past. A look at what other places have tried could help Harpswell as it charts its own course.

Collaboration and creativity on MDI

The communities of Mount Desert Island share with Harpswell many of the characteristics that make them attractive places to live — and hard places to find a home. The island is home to Acadia National Park, which attracted almost 4 million visitors last year. The island’s four towns draw short-term renters and seasonal homeowners. Long-term residents and those who work on boats and the waterfront, or in hospitals, schools and local businesses, find it increasingly hard to afford housing. Many now commute from off-island towns such as Ellsworth, Lamoine and Trenton.

Mount Desert Island has been addressing these issues for longer than many other coastal communities. “We’ve been talking about this since the 1980s,” said Michele Gagnon, the planning director for Bar Harbor since 2019 and Ellsworth’s town planner for 17 years before that.

An ecosystem of organizations has developed through the decades, each with a different niche. Those organizations and others are increasingly working together, says Gagnon, with a more holistic view of the region’s needs.

The Mount Desert Island and Ellsworth Housing Authorities serve people at the lowest income levels in Ellsworth and the four towns on the island: Bar Harbor, Mount Desert, Southwest Harbor, and Tremont.

The organization builds public housing and manages eight apartment buildings across the five towns. It also administers Section 8 housing vouchers, a federal renters assistance program, for much of Hancock County. And it provides other services, such as aides for older people who live alone.

The housing authority is, for the most part, meeting the needs of the people it serves, says Executive Director Duane Bartlett. “Our waitlists are not that long,” he says.

Bartlett, who is set to retire this year after 24 years at the agency, says the bigger need in the area is workforce housing. Case in point: The person replacing him as executive director couldn’t find a home to buy. The best he can get for now is a rental until next May.

Some employers are looking for creative solutions. The Jackson Laboratory, a biomedical research organization in Bar Harbor, built 24 apartments for its employees, which it opened in 2022. It hired Bartlett’s agency to manage the property.

Other organizations on the island also are attempting to fill the gap in affordable housing for workers. The Island Housing Trust, started in the early 2000s, has acquired homes by purchase and donation, then renovated them to resell below market value. It also has built its own neighborhoods of new homes. Buyers can make no more than 160% of the state median income, although Executive Director Marla O’Byrne says most of its buyers fall around 120%.

A similar group, Mount Desert 365, works only in the town of Mount Desert. In October, it received final approval from the town for plans to build five additional homes on a lot that currently has one single-family home. But a lawyer for a neighboring seasonal enclave has announced plans to appeal the decision.

O’Byrne says permitting is complex for these kinds of projects. She calls groups like hers “unicorns” in the home-building world, where zoning rules and planning processes have been designed around for-profit developers. But she also says towns are trying to work with them.

Gagnon and the voters of Bar Harbor have amended zoning ordinances in the last three years to allow more kinds of shared housing and higher building density, among other things. She says the result is an increase in 108 bedrooms in town.

The Bar Harbor Planning Board also has made new efforts to engage residents in dialogue about housing issues. Gagnon says lunchtime events and a gathering at a brewery have brought out people who hadn’t engaged with her office before.

Also important, she says, has been the recent forming of a regional group with the four island towns and Ellsworth, Lamoine and Trenton, to address both affordable housing and related issues, such as transportation and labor. “If we can’t do this together, it’s not happening,” she says. Their efforts could include developing shared goals for housing, and Gagnon says they are planting the seeds for a regional housing trust.

‘Not only really rich or really poor’

Closer to Harpswell, Bath Housing is pursuing the same mission as the Mount Desert Island and Ellsworth Housing Authorities. It owns and manages 175 apartments in Bath and administers about 300 housing vouchers.

This fall, Bath Housing announced plans to build its first new development since 1984, a four-story building on Centre Street that will include 18 two-bedroom apartments. The apartments will be for people and families making less than 80% of area median income, a group that Executive Director Keller sees as a crucial segment of the population. “It’s important as we go forward that it’s not only really rich or really poor who can afford to live in Maine,” says Keller.

Her organization is developing the apartments with a $5.4 million grant from MaineHousing. It is part of the state agency’s Rural Affordable Housing Rental Program, a $20 million effort announced in 2022.

Those funds are not available to larger cities, like Portland or Lewiston. Mark Weisendanger, director of development at MaineHousing, says the program is designed for smaller projects meant for low-income renters, which can be difficult for towns and developers to get loans for. “It fills a need our other programs don’t,” he says.

Keller says the program also has an advantage in its simplicity compared to financing a program using a tax credit or other mechanism. MaineHousing has very few requirements of its applicants. Other grants in the program are going to projects in Madison, Waterville and elsewhere.

MaineHousing has another, $10 million program for building subdivisions of single-family homes for sale to people making 120% of area median income, called the Affordable Homeownership Program.

In Augusta, a recent project used loans, along with state and federal tax credits, to build new senior apartments in an unusual place: a former middle school. Augusta Housing Authority Executive Director Norman Maze says the city is working one project at a time to build affordable housing. According to Maze, a study from several years ago found the city needs nearly 900 additional units of family and senior housing.

The Augusta Housing Authority converted the Hodgkins Middle School, which closed in 2009, into 47 apartments for people 55 and older. The project cost about $8.7 million. Maze says those apartments have waiting lists of hopeful renters, and the housing authority is now looking at building an additional 39 units on the same property.

Maze says affordable housing projects must thread a narrow financial path, considering the high costs of building materials and labor, as well as insurance rates that are rising because of climate change and natural disasters elsewhere. One key to making them work, he says, is a city government that recognizes the need for affordable housing and is willing to work with developers like his agency on zoning or the sale price of a property like the middle school.

More attention fuels optimism

Many of the people working on affordable housing in Maine say they are seeing efforts around the issue they never have before. “For years we were raising our hand, saying, ‘Housing’s important,’ and (now) we have acknowledgement at the state level and the local level,” says Keller, from Bath Housing.

She is especially enthusiastic about a new law, passed in 2022, that allows homeowners to build accessory dwelling units on property that is otherwise zoned for only one unit. An accessory dwelling can be a small, free-standing house or an apartment. Keller hopes that could be one tool for adding more affordable housing across Maine.

She also thinks the new law should spur towns to address short-term rentals, lest accessory dwelling units all become Airbnb-type properties.

Keller sees an expanding number of tools available to address the lack of affordable housing. She encourages municipalities and groups to talk with others in their region. Bath Housing and Harpswell Aging at Home worked together as they got their home repair programs going, and HAH has helped groups in Georgetown and elsewhere get off the ground.

O’Byrne agrees that no one model or approach can address the individual needs of every place. But she says she’s been answering questions from groups up and down the coast, groups that each look a little different based on where they are and what their needs are.

With access to new and old tools to make housing affordable and more people paying attention to the need, Keller is feeling excited: “It’s so neat to see, for the first time in 25 years, more communities saying, ‘What should we be doing?'”

Sam Lemonick is a freelance reporter. He lives in Cundy’s Harbor.