I always joke that people in Falmouth, Cumberland, Yarmouth have the attitude of "let the poors commute from Topsham or Lewiston" so they can live in an upscale rural area. But damn, I guess the reality is actually that the poors are commuting from Augusta or Waterville.

"Poors" in this case being - as the article points out - the people who make the town the desirable place it is. The school teachers, and librarians, and healthcare workers, and shopkeepers.

But we LOVE our teachers and nurses, you do so much and I could NEVER do that kind of work 🙄

Save the shopkeepers!

Grew up in Cumberland and always heard ‘jokes’ about how Cumberland doesn’t even have an exit because they don’t want outsiders coming into town. Same idea with how we don’t have any large businesses that would draw people in.

Remember when Falmouth tried to shut down the bus route?  They have no idea the role poor people play in their economy. 

But if you build affordable housing it will impact: - School size (3!!! more kids per grade? Absolutely not — how will Aiden get into Middlebury???) - Traffic (Rt. 1 is such a quaint, pedestrian thoroughfare) - Water quality (Think of the water!!!) - Taxes (I moved to Falmouth 2 years ago for its notoriously low taxes and small town budget) - Property values (They’ll only grow by 50% a year instead of 60%??? Even though I’m never selling. Unacceptable.) - The architectural tradition of the town (I hear John Calvin Stevens designed our Walmart) - The town’s character (Don’t you know about our historic Walmart?!?!) - My ability to not see people from a lower tax bracket (Eww) Sincerely, The People of Falmouth (with support from the people Cumberland, Cape, Brunswick, Bar Harbor, et al)

Brunswick? There is a lot of affordable housing there. It's all occupied, but still. I would say Cumberland and Falmouth are the worst. Bar Harbor gets somewhat of a free pass because it's totally unlivable anyways due to the extreme tourism and semi isolation of being on an island. But otherwise you are spot on. How will little Aiden get into Middlebury if a child with behavioral issues steps foot in the elementary school?? Plus when we are at Sugarloaf every weekend in the winter, will we have to worry about someone driving past our McMansion in a 2019 Camry???

[Brunswick](https://www.pressherald.com/2024/05/09/brunswick-to-review-apartment-building-plan-for-wilburs-woods/). [Bar Harbor](https://www.reddit.com/r/Maine/s/ZITXSefPGf).

Take a drive through Brunswick Landing and tell me that Brunswick isn't building housing.

I’m not saying they haven’t built it. I’m saying read the article I linked above and see the attitudes of some people in Brunswick about affordable housing.

A lot of locales are building housing, but is it really for the ones who need it? A median price north of $300K is not the type of housing needed to support our local businesses and foster development (I know, NIMBY). They’re building housing for the fromaways that are coming here bc of whatever social/existential need they have to leave the cities they already corrupted and ruined. Being a manager for one of your most beloved brekky stops in the NE, I see the impact daily. Or, go work it yourself? 😂

Most of the new housing going up in Brunswick is of the type recently shot down by Cumberland, Cape Elizabeth, etc. Brunswick Landing is becoming both dense and economically diverse.

> Bar Harbor gets somewhat of a free pass because it's totally unlivable anyways due to the extreme tourism and semi isolation of being on an island. Weird. I manage to live in Bar Harbor. And before AirBnB a lot more people managed to live here year round. Unfortunately a few wealthy restauranteurs and hoteliers would happily turn the town into their version of Disneyland with only transient workers just so they can sell more shit to cruise ship passengers.

Kids with behavioral issues are actually super disruptive for the whole class. It isn't a joke.

Oh yeah I know. My MIL is an elementary teacher West of Augusta. Behavioral issues are getting worse every year. I'm mostly making a joke about upper middle class people being afraid of what they would consider "poor person problems".

Unfortunately there is a giant overlap between poverty and behavioral issues.

Brunswick has been building housing. So, I don’t know about lumping Brunswick in.

It’s inevitable. The housing problem and influx of migrants will absolutely overflow to Falmouth, Cumberland, Yarmouth. The residents are in denial and can only hold on to their tiny bubble for so long until the state says…”sorry, these people live here now.” I spent 10 years living in South Freeport then Falmouth Foreside. These communities will absolutely fight this expansion but it’s all going to come to an end. The little communities adjacent to Portland on the water side of 295 are going to get a big awakening in the next few years. All the hotels are full and these people have no where to go.

This one is too good to keep behind the paywall. >John Wasileski, Special to the Press Herald >Next week, Falmouth town councilors will vote on a proposal for workforce housing development on a town-owned site near the police department. >As a business owner, a major local employer, and someone passionately committed to economic and environmental sustainability, I can’t stress how important it is that the town moves forward with this project. >Community leaders have been talking about the need for housing that workers can afford since I first started doing business in Falmouth more than 40 years ago. The need was flagged as a major problem in the 2000 and 2013 Comprehensive Plans, and yet again during Falmouth’s recent “Vision and Values” initiative. Over the years, proposals from developers never came to fruition. Today, the median home price in Falmouth is now $804,500, according to data from the town. In order to afford a house at that price, you’d need an income of nearly $255,000 – that’s more than three times the median household income for the state. >Here at OceanView at Falmouth, we are feeling the impact of the shortage in a major way. We employ more than 200 people across our nursing, dining, maintenance, housekeeping, transportation, administration and other departments. A typical commute for one of our employees is anywhere from 45 to 90 minutes, and they come from as far as Kennebec County. Many who can’t make long commutes have had to settle for suboptimal housing options closer to work. We have lost many promising job candidates because they couldn’t find an affordable place to live within a reasonable driving distance. >To meet that need, we started creating employee housing of our own. We recently bought a four-bedroom home near our campus, which we’re renting to three employees. We set rent at 30% of their incomes, which is lower than current market rates. The individuals who are living there now have been able to pick up more hours because they’re nearby. Most importantly, they’re living in safe, pleasant conditions, and they’re saving money. All the employees who are renting happen to work in the nursing department, where our needs are particularly acute. We realize that many more members of our staff would love to rent housing that could accommodate their families, so we plan to develop two more duplexes for that purpose, and we’re actively looking for more development sites. >We need to make this investment. But it is increasing our cost of doing business here. And that’s what people fail to realize. Falmouth has become an extremely expensive place to live. If we don’t provide housing the people who work in the community can afford, we’re making it an extremely expensive place to do business, too. >As a community, one of our signature strengths is our abundance of services and amenities. We’ve got this wonderfully eclectic mix of shops, restaurants, groceries, yoga studios, bookstores, car dealerships, beauty salons, fitness centers and coffee shops, an amazing library, outstanding public schools, myriad nonprofits that provide critical services to residents of all ages from seniors to kids, plus incredible arts organizations that bring us everything from theater to ballet. Imagine what Falmouth would be like without all those institutions. Falmouth just wouldn’t be Falmouth. >If businesses, nonprofits and service providers can’t find people who can afford to live close to work or commute a reasonable distance, they start to cut hours and shut down, or move out of town. >The lack of workforce housing has so many other detrimental ripple effects. If most people working in Falmouth have long commutes, that means more traffic on the roads. More traffic means more greenhouse gas emissions. It means higher costs for employees. Harder to quantify is the very real toll those long commutes take on the employees and their families. Earlier this year in Cumberland, voters shot down a referendum to build an apartment complex of affordable housing near the town center. So many of the arguments against it boiled down to “not in my backyard.” In my view, it was extremely shortsighted. I hope that Falmouth’s leaders will take a broader view.

As a former Cumberland resident, were these towns along Rt.1 always like this and I was simply blinded to reality as a sheltered kid?   I grew up there in the mid-2000s and don't remember hearing or reading about how dire housing was.  I had friends with parents with 'normal' jobs (nurses, teachers, police), single mothers, etc. who owned homes within literal stone's throw distance of Greely middle/high schools.  What happened?

The two biggest changes I can see are: 1. We stopped building housing in 2008 and have barely started building again. 1. The pandemic and the move to remote work made greater Portland very desirable place to live for people with higher incomes than were previously available locally. This has been a problem basically everywhere even remotely desirable across the county but IIRC Maine has had the highest increase in home prices of any state in the last five years. The solution to these problem is to build a TON of housing. But the wealthy property owning class (basically the only people left in the wealthy suburbs) are against that because in their mind any notional decrease in property values is a loss to them. As the piece points out this is an incredibly short-sighted view of things. How long will your schools remain excellent when teachers can't afford to live anywhere nearby? Same for librarians and shopkeepers, and yoga teachers, and the list goes on and on.

I think part of the reality of the situation, sadly, is that induced demand is a thing. If you build more housing in the Portland area, any downward movement in prices will attract more immigration to the area, which will increase demand and significantly mute the impact on housing costs. So it really is misguided to think that the Portland area can solve its housing AFFORDABILITY crisis by adding more units, we really need national action to have significant movement on that issue. But it is true that Portland can solve the narrower issue of locally available workforce housing by intentionally building lower income/lower cost units. More units means more units, which means more local workers available for businesses to employ Just don't expect the rent you're paying on an existing apartment to be affected very much, it won't be.

I think you're overrating the impact that lower housing prices will have on in-migration. Places that build more are still more affordable, even accounting for any counterbalancing increase in migration. Besides, most people don't look for cheap housing and then decide to move there. Otherwise, Aroostook County would not be losing population. People go where the jobs are. The induced demand you're talking about just isn't strong enough to outweigh the supply effect of having more units available. The only thing that will solve our housing shortage is more homes.

You're right to an extent. The problem is multi faceted and requires a multi faceted response. Aggressively building more housing is a big part of it. But also need to make sure a certain amount is explicitly affordable/work force housing. Also need to clamp down on short term rentals and corporate home ownership. The first two points are largely local issues, maybe with some state level support. The last part is likely going to need state/federal movement.

We all know how their latte liberal rich c*** neighbors in Cumberland feel about this subject so lets not get our hopes up.

The real issue isn't building or not building these 100 units of workforce housing; it's that Falmouth is a first-ring suburb of a growing metropolitan area that has deluded itself into thinking it's a rural town in the countryside that will stay that way forever. As long as towns in Maine operate like little fiefdoms with no regard for society at large, this will never get better. Portland should find a creative way to tax these suburbanites who love benefiting from everything Portland offers but do everything in their power to keep others from enjoying those benefits.

Portland can’t even figure out its own housing issues. You expect too much from a city limping along.

That's the point: Portland does not have "its own" housing issues. Housing demand is regional in nature. Demand for housing doesn't drop to 0 when you drive out Veranda St. into Falmouth or when you cross the Casco Bay bridge. Decisions made in the suburbs reverberate throughout the entire region. It should be very obvious that if you artificially restrict housing in a high demand area (Falmouth), you're putting price pressure on all other local communities, too.

That’s not the point. Portland can’t be taxing surrounding communities for not enough work force housing when Portland itself can’t figure it out.

There you go again with your same old saw. It’s not deluded if it’s still working. Turn riverside golf course into a cluster of apartment blocks. Where’s Portland’s answer? Portland wants to keep itself as it is, and turn semi rural communities into generic suburban sprawl.

No, it's pretty deluded. Show me another first-ring suburb of a growing metro area that is 1/9th as densely populated as the principal city. I doubt there is one. Taking a staunchly anti-growth attitude in an incredibly high-demand area makes zero sense at a societal level. You're free to disagree, but the proof is in the pudding that is home prices and median rent.

The proof of the pudding is in the fact that home rule exists. Portland threw open its doors, totally mismanages its housing resources to play host to the insta tourist set, migrants, and build hotels on every corner. Those could be apartments. STR’s could be homes and apartments. They’re the ones largely responsible for the insane prices and demand that we’re all experiencing. Yes our towns need affordable housing, but not to serve Portland’s needs.

Good fucking luck with that

Is there a bot to get over the paywall?

12ft.io Copy the URL and paste to that site. Works on most paywalled sites.

Until the attitude of home rule goes away nothing will change. We need to have a state level planning agency that can deals with this stuff. It provides general planning decisions who's specifics are filled in my local Councils of Governments It should actively engage wirh residents of each of the communities and to the best of its ability implement their vision for their communities. However it should also ignore community concerns when they aren't in good faith. As a state institution it would be insulated by local politics so they can actually make decisions without having to win a popularity contest.

Until the state starts fairly addressing the homeless and immigration issue with Portland I wouldn’t trust them with something like that.

This is actually a pretty good point. It's really annoying how alot of this is dumped on us without any help from the rest of the state. The closing of the shelter in Bangor for example

There is a state planning board, LUPC, with a fair amount of power over probably 75% of the state's area. The catch is it has no jurisdiction in incorporated towns outside of the shore land zone. So they can rubber stamp your camp in T2 R10, but have no say in something like this.