A decade later, housing shortage remains unresolved in Portland

“Portland is in the midst of a housing shortage. Rents and purchase prices are escalating. Residents are struggling with housing costs and many households have been forced to move to other municipalities.”

It would be hard to find anyone in the city who could credibly disagree with these words. After all, thousands of people have lost their homes in the foreclosure crisis. Apartment-hunters need to plan weeks in advance to find a new place to live. The city’s homeless shelters are overflowing.

The good news is that the quote above comes from the city’s comprehensive plan, as an introduction to new policies designed to alleviate our housing shortage.

The bad news is that these sentences were written a full decade ago. For the past ten years, Portland’s housing shortages have gone from bad to worse — and the city’s politicians have been completely impotent to do anything about it.

One stated goal from the city’s 2002 housing plan is that half of all new housing built in Cumberland County should be built within the city limits of Portland. This would help slow down sprawl, and ensure that renters and homebuyers would have more choices (and lower prices) for housing in the city.

By that measure, the plan has been a miserable failure. During the past decade, 90 percent of residential growth in Cumberland County happened outside of the city of Portland, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

This means that region’s residents have continued their exodus to suburbs like Gorham and Scarborough, further exacerbating the problems that the new Housing Plan was intended to avoid: more commuter traffic clogging neighborhood streets, more farms and forestland lost to development in formerly rural communities, fewer customers for neighborhood small businesses, and a regional economy increasingly vulnerable to oil dependency and foreclosures.

You might think that the tide might have turned in 2008, when the beginning of the foreclosure crisis and high gas prices made living in the suburbs completely untenable for hundreds of Maine households. These factors combined to create extraordinarily high demand for affordable rental housing near jobs in places like downtown Portland.

Unfortunately, Portland’s byzantine zoning codes, parking requirements, and other regulations made it impossible for private-sector developers to respond to our housing needs. Building permit data show that the city of Portland fell even further behind in the post-bubble period: Of roughly 1,500 new homes and apartments built county-wide since the end of 2008, fewer than 100 have been built inside the city limits (and most of those required state housing subsidies, at considerable taxpayer expense).

The 2002 Housing Plan is full of good ideas and intentions. The problem is that only a scant handful of those ideas and intentions have actually been implemented or embraced in City Hall. 

To take a few examples: the 2002 Housing Plan called for the Portland Housing Authority (PHA) “to become more active in development of more housing.” The PHA owns abundant vacant land and empty parking lots in close-in neighborhoods like the West End and East Bayside, and it also possesses the ability to sell bonds to finance new development. Yet the PHA hasn’t built a single new apartment in years, and its hidebound management has zero inclination to try.

Also problematic is how the city’s housing plans — along with the city staff, planning board volunteers, and political leaders — often fail to consider the basic economics of housing. Homebuilders aren’t building new homes in Portland because it’s still cheaper and less of a bureaucratic hassle for them to build homes in the suburbs — even with all of the expenses of high gas prices and uncertain mortgage markets.

The city has made marginal efforts to make it more economical to build new homes here (reducing parking requirements, for instance) but there’s still a long way to go before a home built in Portland can be cost-competitive with a home built in Gray or Gorham.

When the city is lucky enough to get a proposal for new housing, the city’s Planning Board volunteers typically seem more interested in spitefully nitpicking through the zoning codes than they are in helping developers meet the city’s housing goals.

The Board’s recent review of an embattled MaineHousing project in the West End is a great example of this: instead of helping to reduce the project’s costs and increase the number of apartments that would be available, the Board instead forced that the nonprofit developers spend a quarter million dollars on an unnecessary underground parking garage (see “Housing Scarcity An Artificially Created Problem,” my November 16 column).

With a new mayor and new City Council committees, maybe the city will finally find the resolve to do something meaningful about its ten-year-old housing shortage. And if they can’t, I propose that the Oxford Street homeless shelter should be allowed to expand into the comfortable, voluminous City Council chambers.

(Christian MilNeil is a blogger at "The Vigorous North: A field guide to the wilderness areas of American cities," www.vigorousnorth.com.)