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The small towns of Waldo and Alna are the only two in midcoast Maine with enough affordable housing for their residents, a recent study found.
The study discovered that median home prices in the midcoast region were generally unaffordable to the median household in 2021, a stark contrast to 2016, when the median household could afford a home in most midcoast municipalities.
“It’s across-the-board unaffordable. It’s pretty wild. The median income has stayed the same, but the median house price has skyrocketed,” said Charlotte Nutt, an analyst with the Midcoast Council of Governments, an economic development organization that put together the study in late November using data from MaineHousing, the state housing authority.
The analysis is the first to localize Maine’s stark housing gaps since the state released a landmark report on the topic in October. The new one shows that housing unaffordability is not just limited to municipalities near Maine’s coastline, its tourist meccas or the towns nearer to the state’s larger metropolitan centers.
Rural and inland parts of the region including Whitefield and Jefferson and bigger towns including Waldoboro and Warren were generally affordable to the average resident in 2016. But now prices there are pushing many households out of homeownership and rental housing.
The biggest need for more housing is in the “missing middle” of renters and homeowners. Those households make between $50,000 and $75,000 per year, enough to push them out of assistance programs but not enough to compete in the inflated market.
“People are being forced to live in houses that are too expensive for them,” Nutt said. “If we can provide houses for that population, it frees up so many houses or other people.”
The most homes are needed in the Brunswick area, the study found. That area is short around 2,000 homes, 25 percent rented and 75 percent owned, with the most housing needed for that “missing middle” population.
The landmark state-sponsored housing study found that Maine’s coastal region needed at least 45,000 more homes by 2030 to accommodate its existing and future residents, and noted that that region in particular had a low rate of housing production relative to area job growth. The state report defined that coastal region to include Cumberland, Hancock, Knox, Lincoln, Sagadahoc, Waldo, and York Counties; the Midcoast Council of Governments’ analysis looked only at the midcoast region’s key labor market areas: Brunswick, Boothbay Harbor, Waldoboro, Rockland-Camden and Belfast.
As such, the midcoast group’s study found that the homes needed in the region to accommodate its existing and future residents was around 6,000. Those results, Nutt said, are a low-end estimate of the number of housing units the region needs to maintain a “healthy housing market.”
The state’s accounting of future units, the regional group’s study reads, shows a huge influx of new residents to York and Cumberland counties that greatly increased the overall number of needed homes.
Though the numbers in the reports differed slightly, the purpose of Midcoast Council of Governments’ study was similar to the state’s: to quantify the housing needs of the region in order to better understand how unaffordable housing is there, where efforts to ramp up production should be focused and what kinds of housing need to be built, Nutt said.
“The qualitative piece is the next step,” she said. “We’re going into communities and hosting regional conversations.”
