Today, we are 83 pages richer in reporting on the inadequate and dysfunctional Maine housing market than we were last week. The latest housing report, state-sponsored and setting the stage for the upcoming legislative session, is reportedly “granular” in nature. 

Access to granularity and detail, however, amounts to just half the battle.

Take the major housing report that preceded this one, released last September, which “included a long list of suggestions — including infrastructure improvements, increased state and federal funding for affordable housing development, and simplified building and land-use regulations at the state and municipal levels — but did not require any changes or include direct money to any particular solutions.”

Without express requirements for change, specific direction or, indeed, a viable funding plan, Maine risks being stuck publishing reports about its housing crisis forever. Mercifully, the latest report sets itself apart from others, as far as we’re concerned, by placing the responsibility for reform of codes and laws squarely on the Maine State Legislature. It points at some 40 valuable amendments to state law.

If we’re serious about changing this bleak picture, and we have to be, these can’t be regarded as urgings or “recommendations” by our lawmakers in Augusta. They have to be seen as mandates. There are, as the state’s senior housing adviser Greg Payne put it, a number of “levers” and in 2025 they all need to be pulled.

Among the most significant of these levers include the reform of codes to reduce the cost of residential development; the establishment of a mixed-income housing fund; increased local and state support for mobile, modular and 3D-printed housing (do you remember that UMaine prototype?); enthusiastic approval of the sale of state-owned property for residential purposes; more targeted subsidies for Maine’s renters and homeowners; more funding for private-sector construction trades.

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Underpinning support for these advances has to be broad support for changes to our immediate surroundings. Our cities and towns of the future are simply going to look different. Arguments against construction cannot be based on romantic considerations. Arguments against density they cannot be grounded in the self-serving protection of the value of existing properties. Both reason and concern for the common good have to prevail.

How? Constituents the length and breadth of Maine need to be vocal about their support of compromise that will pave the way for construction. Your legislator needs to know that they have your blessing. The municipalities that are the most organized and proactive about creating the conditions to construct homes should be rewarded in state incentives for support of schools and other infrastructure, as the report suggests.

The municipalities that continue to stubbornly query or push back against the critical need for the creation of new and appropriate housing should be left alone. The hard reality of a stagnant housing market — where the necessary flow of upsizing, downsizing, departures and arrivals slows to a halt due to persistently unaffordable or deficient housing stock — will bite soon enough.

Somehow, our state’s previous Legislature worked its way through more than 2,000 legislative bills (2,300, to be precise). There’s nothing to suggest that the 132nd Legislature will have it any different. The likelihood of critical and far-reaching proposals being drowned out by relatively meaningless, time-wasting proposals — the recent introduction of a bill that would make the peeper the “state reptile” leaps energetically to mind — is therefore high.

Annual housing production needs to double. Unapologetic support for every step required for that doubling must double, too.

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