Despite its acute housing shortage, Maine has been leading New England in per-capita units permitted over the last few years, census data shows.
Maine permitted 5.1 building units for every thousand residents in 2022. By comparison, that number was 3.6 in Vermont, 3.4 in New Hampshire, 2.6 in Massachusetts, 1.6 in Connecticut and 1.3 in Rhode Island that year. The state was also on top by that measure in 2023, too.
“These figures are a good indicator that some of the housing production and zoning reform efforts in Maine and New England are working,” Jeff Levine, a former Portland planner who teaches at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said. “It will be interesting to see if this is a short-term increase or if it continues over several years.”
The national housing market has recovered slowly since the 2008 recession. The latest uptick is negligible when contrasted with the nation’s last real housing booms of the early 2000s and the 1980s. During that latter period, Maine was permitting nearly 8.5 building units for every thousand residents.
Despite leading the region, Maine has far to go in addressing the housing shortage and affordability crisis here. A state report last October found that Maine needs to construct at least 76,000 homes by 2030 to accommodate all current and future residents.
Other states are feeling the same pressure. In New Hampshire, there has been a recent modest increase in the permitting of multi-family developments but a “significant gap” in the production of single-family starter homes for purchase, Grace Lessner, a spokesperson for the state’s housing department, said.
“While the increase in building permits trend is encouraging, we need to be increasing [permitting] by twice as much as we did from 2021 to 2022,” Lessner wrote in an email.
Annual building permits are not an exact measure of housing production because not all permits are built, but this census data shows that the New England region is lagging emerging areas like the Sun Belt as new U.S. home construction surges nationwide.
There are many reasons for this, including interest rate increases and supply chain issues that have stunted development nationally. The Northeast has inclement weather that shortens construction windows and is more densely developed than many other parts of the country, making it harder to build homes at scale, Ted Landsmark, a public policy professor at Northeastern University in Boston, said.
Looking ahead, Levine cautioned that it will be difficult to keep up this slight increase in production levels in housing-dense New England, as more “relatively easy sites” that may have only required a zoning change get turned into housing.
The possibility of urban sprawl will be high, so municipalities in Maine and across the region need to think proactively about where they’d like to see housing developed and what zoning changes need to happen to achieve that, Levine added.
“Doing so will both help preserve open space and agricultural lands and produce more sustainable housing to support downtowns,” he said.
To keep up current production levels, Landsmark said interest rates will have to decline first so that developers are incentivized to build more housing overall and affordable housing especially. Local resistance in suburban areas to denser developments must ease, he added.
“It’s important to emphasize that these issues are regional, and that large cities alone can’t solve housing issues without the collaboration of suburbs and communities that don’t think they’re directly impacted by the need for more affordable housing across the region,” he said.
