Scarborough, the beach-lined Maine town just south of Portland, is permitting more new buildings than any other municipality in the state.
Between 2017 and 2022, the town issued 1,717 building permits, according to data from the United States Housing and Urban Development Department. That is 83 more units than were permitted in Portland, a city with about three times the population of Scarborough. Bangor, the state’s third-largest city, permitted only 315 units in those five years, according to HUD data.
While a part of what drives development in Scarborough is its proximity to job opportunities, transportation options and Portland, that could be said for other nearby communities such as Westbrook and South Portland. But unlike Scarborough, Town Manager Tom Hall said, those towns are already pretty built out and urbanized. From 2017 to 22, Westbrook only permitted 578 buildings, and South Portland 619.
“There’s just more development opportunities here,” Hall said. “Couple that with permissive land use policies that encourage building to a higher density.”
Though Scarborough has historically been a suburban community of single-family homes, in the past 10 years, the town has made an effort to encourage high-density developments with a particular focus on multi-family units and affordable housing, Hall said. That growth is to be concentrated within three specific areas in town, laid out in Scarborough’s 2021 comprehensive plan.
The strategy has led to a boom in development. Of those 1,717 permits issued from 2017 to 2022, Hall estimated about 300 were for affordable housing units, and about 500 were related to the Downs development.
“Our experience in Scarborough has been great, it’s clearly a pro-growth community,” said Patrick Hess, the director of real estate development at Avesta Housing, a Portland-based affordable housing developer. “The general attitude to development is more accepting or at minimum neutral.”
Avesta is finishing construction of a 31-unit senior living project within the Downs development called the Village Commons. Residents will begin to live there from early next year, Hess said.
Building a housing development in Scarborough was a good idea for many reasons, Hess said. Its proximity to job hubs, reliable utilities, social services and public transit is not only convenient for residents, but those factors help affordable housing developers score better when applying for MaineHousing’s competitive financing, Hess said.
What’s unique about Scarborough, though, Hess said, was the people who pushed the development forward. Not only strong municipal partners like Hall and the town’s planning board, but the community, too.
“We’ve definitely seen some NIMBY activity more in other communities,” Hess said, referring to “not-in-my-backyard” activists who oppose new developments in their neighborhoods. “We’ve seen less of that in Scarborough.”
Hess also agreed with Hall that the greater land availability in Scarborough than in municipalities such as Portland or South Portland can make development easier.
Though Hess said that the community has rallied behind affordable housing projects in town, Karen Martin, the president of Scarborough’s economic development corporation, cautioned that many residents are uncomfortable with the pace of that growth.
In recent years, Scarborough officials have made some exceptions to the town’s growth management ordinance that limits large developments to “growth centers,” and Martin stressed that going forward, close attention should be paid to the rate of permitting.
“We need to do it in a way that is manageable with respect to traffic and with respect to protecting our natural resources,” Martin said.
