The real crisis

Maine, according to many in southern Maine, is undergoing a crisis in affordable housing. Too many people chasing too few vacant apartments has led to higher rents, strained personal finances and the urgent call for help.

This may, at first glance and under a very generous definition of the term, be a crisis. A closer look, however, reveals it to be merely the predictable and logical result of this state’s real crisis – the economic decline of the state’s northern tier and the resulting population flight that includes flight to southern Maine. The shortage of affordable housing there is, at best, a subcrisis.

According to Census 2000, Maine’s population grew a tiny 3.8 percent during the last decade, one of the lowest increases in the nation, and has a rental vacancy rate of 7 percent, which housing experts say is at the high end of the desirable range that balances choice and competition for tenants with return on investment for landlords. The 7 percent figure, however, does not adequately describe the problem, which makes some Maine communities seem crowded and others depressingly absent of people.

County-by-county data better describe the situation. Washington, Aroostook, Androscoggin, Penobscot and Piscataquis all suffered substantial population losses; all have rental vacancy rates above the desired range – above 13 percent in Piscataquis and Washington. At the other end of the state, and of the economic spectrum, are Cumberland and York, with population increases – largely of job-seeking northerners – of 9.2 and 13.5 percent respectively and with vacancy rates below the healthy range.

Ground zero for this crisis is Portland. Census 2000 says Maine’s largest city has an unhealthy vacancy rate of 3.7 percent; a recent study conducted by the city put it at an alarming 1 percent, a discrepancy that may be credited to the one-year time lag between the two surveys.

Or it may be credited to a campaign designed to cause alarm. The horror stories pouring out of southern Maine include young working singles having to take in roommates, of Portland renters being forced into becoming Westbrook buyers and, in one particularly wrenching example, of refugees from Somalia not being able to find an affordable apartment in Portland and having to suffer the hardship of settling in Lewiston instead. These, Maine is told, constitute a crisis.

The help southern Maine seeks is in the form of a housing bond that will be on the November ballot. It is unfortunate that the bond bundles true needs – money for homeless shelters and housing for low-income elderly and those with disabilities – with subsidies for developers of affordable apartments in a part of the state where the primary challenge may be diagnosed as vigorous economic growth.

Elsewhere in the state and for decades, young singles have had to move away from their withered hometowns to find work, families are uprooted for the same reason and their empty homes are left to rot in a real estate market with no buyers. Those are real horror stories in part because they are not caused by the temporary effects of economic expansion but by chronic underinvestment. Worse, they are the tragedies Maine has come to accept.

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In cutting the bond proposal from $20 million to $12 million, the Legislature sent a signal that it doesn’t quite buy into the crisis mentality, but, because of the bundling, the cut hurt the true needs as well. Still, by leaving the affordable housing grants in the bond package, lawmakers did signal a willingness to aid one specific part of the state. This care package for the thriving south stands in stark contrast to the absence of any aid specifically for the struggling north.

The list of ways in which this Legislature, and many legislatures before it, failed to invest in northern Maine is long. The most recent sad consequence of this is the decision by CommTel to locate a 200-job expansion in Portland instead of at its long-time headquarters in Winslow. CommTel is, of course, free to expand where it wishes and there is no reason to doubt the company’s explanation that Portland has the telecommunications infrastructure it needs and which Winslow cannot provide.

But telecommunications experts have been warning for years of a growing digital divide between urban and rural regions and many good ideas have been put forth on ways states can make the investments to close it. Those ideas, like all ideas for them to encourage economic equity, have been ignored, and so in November Maine voters will be asked to pay the price.

The subcrisis will abate, the real crisis will go on.