Aggressive housing benchmarks laid out for Maine in a landmark report released Wednesday will be hard to meet, but they are far from unprecedented in state history.
The state needs to raise new homes from the 4,800 that it has permitted on average annually over the past five years to between 8,500 and 9,300 by 2030 to account for historic underproduction and the expected increase in population, according to the report from the administration of Gov. Janet Mills and MaineHousing, the state’s housing authority.
It has been about 20 years since housing production here fell within that range. The sector largely tracks with the health of the U.S. economy. Typically, it takes a few years for the good and bad times to ripple into the market. That is especially true in places like Maine that are a bit more insulated from national trends.
The last housing boom came in the mid-2000s. There were more than 8,500 new permitted housing units here in both 2005 and 2006, according to federal data. That was on the good side of the housing “bubble” that burst during the Great Recession a few years later. Notably, it was driven by deep trouble in the subprime mortgage market, which fueled the boom.
By 2011, Maine was down to just 2,744 permitted housing units. During the economic recovery that followed, the state went back up on a mostly steady ascent to just over 7,100 units approved last year. Single-family homes made up 4,900 of those in 2022. Those properties are the ones that the state report focuses on.
Before that, the last major housing boom was in the era of former President Ronald Reagan. Nearly 9,200 units were permitted here between 1985 and 1988, once cresting above 10,000. The beneficiaries were products of the Baby Boomer generation born during the post-World War II population and housing boom.