Housing is expensive to build in Maine in part because of processes the state and municipalities have created — processes that can be changed, Laura Mitchell, the executive director of the Maine Affordable Housing Coalition, said during a talk at the Belfast Free Library on Thursday evening.
She was speaking as part of a panel, moderated by The Maine Monitor’s housing reporter Caitlin Andrews, that looked at the state’s housing goals and current obstacles to development as part of the newsroom’s ongoing series of Monitor Talks.
In addition to Mitchell, the panel featured state Sen. Glenn “Chip” Curry, D-Belfast, who co-chairs the Legislature’s Committee on Housing and Economic Development, and Benjamin Hooper, a local developer and owner of the Little River Homes subdivision in Belfast.
The discussion examined what new building permit data released this summer says about where the state is at in meeting its goal of building 84,000 new housing units by 2030, as well as efforts to address the regulatory barriers that can make it challenging to build new housing.
For Hooper, a big takeaway from the permit data was that most of the new construction in Maine consists of single-family homes or subsidized multi-family buildings, but not market-rate multi-family units. He has seen firsthand how costs contribute to this imbalance in his own work.
He said code requirements and the Department of Environmental Protection’s site law rules can disincentivize developers from building large projects. Because Maine Uniform Building and Energy Code (MUBEC) rules are required in municipalities with more than 4,000 people but not in small towns, developers also often find it cheaper to build outside cities.
Some of the headwinds obstructing new development, such as rising material and workforce costs, as well as high interest rates, are outside the state’s purview. But what is in state and local officials’ control, Mitchell said, is the length of time it takes to permit and approve projects. She cited a project in Cape Elizabeth that went through 33 public hearings as an example of excessive bureaucracy.
“Housing is expensive to build because of processes that we’ve created and are abiding by, and are changeable,” she said.
She mentioned a bill that passed this year, L.D. 128, that should allow developers to save time when creating small multi-family developments. But she said there is still much to be done, and said things that would help include creating expedited permitting processes and establishing a new level of building code for smaller multi-family buildings.
Part of the state’s goal in collecting building permit data was to understand where the gaps in new development are.
“The only way we can manage this is if we can actually know what we’re building. You can’t manage it if you can’t measure it,” Sen. Curry said, adding that the data will become more valuable in several years once it’s possible to see trends.
He also said that as the state looks at various policy solutions, local communities need to do their share: “We need counties and municipalities accepting their part of it.”
Waldo County issued the second-lowest number of building permits of any county in Maine last year, with Belfast issuing just 16.
Mitchell emphasized that a shortage in affordable housing means young people cannot move to communities, which makes it challenging to find workers and maintain essential services. She noted that Waldo County recently saw its maternity unit close, and said that should be a “rallying cry” for local communities to think about where they can build more housing and how they can make it easier for developers to come in and do so quickly, such as by pre-approving sites for certain densities.
“We need people here,” she said. “So these services that we care about are here.”
Watch the full conversation:
