NORTHEAST HARBOR – A group of Mount Desert Island residents gathered Tuesday night to voice concerns that spiraling real estate values were shutting them out of the communities they call home.

Hosted by the Mount Desert Community Trust and MDI Tomorrow, the 35 people at Northeast Harbor’s Neighborhood House were not a group undone by factory layoffs. They included business owners, teachers and tradespeople, some who had lived on the island for decades, others, their entire lives. Most rented, some were shopping for their own homes.

They shared stories of substandard housing and of continually shifting lives they say result from the island’s roiling real estate scene and its seesawing on-season, off-season rental markets. All agreed the cost of living in their communities rapidly was soaring out of reach.

“I feel I’ve missed the boat,” said Tasha Higgins, owner of Mother’s Kitchen restaurant in Bar Harbor, who said she was born, raised and wished to stay on the island. “I’m in my early 30s, and I’ve started a family and I just feel hopeless.”

Anne Durand, a midwife who also runs a catering business and owns Morning Glory Bakery in Bar Harbor, said she was forced to move seven times in the year after her first son was born. Brian Dionne accepted a teaching position at Conners Emerson Elementary in Bar Harbor and found the only housing he could afford was a leftover hunting cabin with an outhouse and no insulation.

“I thought, ‘Maybe I could make this work,'” the teacher said. “But it was discouraging.”

The meeting was a follow-up to the affordable housing forum hosted in September by MDI Tomorrow, the advocacy group responsible for the initial work that led to services including the Island Explorer shuttle, the Bar Harbor Day Care Center and Island Connections, a services program for homebound seniors.

The previous meeting, attended largely by builders and property owners, included a presentation by John Abrams, a Massachusetts home builder who has headed up a successful effort on Martha’s Vineyard to connect working-class families with homes they could afford.

Marla Major, one of about a dozen MDI Tomorrow steering committee members, said the group was in the process of negotiating a purchase agreement between a local land trust and a land owner, aiming to build on the example of the West Eden Meadows community housing project managed by the Bar Harbor Housing Authority.

The examples of West Eden and the efforts on Martha’s Vineyard, in concert with programs such as tax increment financing being developed by the state of Maine, offer some encouragement that communities can resist what Major said otherwise might seem overwhelming odds.

“While it’s a big issue, there are tools out there and they are starting to hit their stride in making it possible to work out solutions,” Major said. “It just takes time and effort and focus.”

Major said the group also was looking for summer residents to pitch in to provide a program for people who make too much to qualify for housing assistance, but who make too little to afford the rising property costs for even a modest home.

Those people include Ellen Stanley, a counselor, and her husband, Christopher, a groundskeeper on the Rockefeller Estate for 13 years. The couple said they have rented while scanning the island market for affordable home opportunities for nine years. The birth four weeks ago of their daughter, Emma, increased their desire to own a home.

They agreed the prospects for home assistance on the island sounded promising, but doubted anything would take shape in time to help them avoid buying property where the cost of living placed less pressure on family life.

“There is a reason why more people aren’t here,” Ellen Stanley said. “It’s because they are busy working three jobs to afford their rent.”