When Ángel Saavedra Cisneros committed to a dream professor job at Bowdoin College, there was no guarantee his family of six would find a place to live.
“What we were going to get from our sale was not going to be enough to put an offer on the type of home we need,” said the 40-year-old government professor. “Those we found were five or six times my yearly income.”
Saavedra is one of many in Maine’s workforce who cannot easily afford to live where they work. It is leading employers to take major steps. Bowdoin has a supply of rental units available in Brunswick and a new home loan program that offers employees up to $50,000 to buy a home, as one of many “workforce housing” initiatives active during Maine’s affordability crisis.
The term could also describe what the Jackson Laboratory, the biomedical research giant with a Bar Harbor campus, did by building 24 apartments for its employees to live in. The Saddleback Mountain ski resort near Rangeley did something similar last year, opening a dormitory for its seasonal employees. Bath Iron Works recently won federal funding to pay for 85 units.
All of those interventions into the housing market are different. However, they have a long history in Maine and the region, whose histories are full of examples of large employers building up towns after finding accommodations lacking for their employees. Some say the use of the term “workforce housing” also clouds an overall need for more affordable units in Maine.
“I think people use ‘workforce’ in different ways,” said Scott Thistle, a spokesperson for MaineHousing, the state housing authority. “Almost everything MaineHousing does is workforce, but workforce isn’t a category of housing that’s tracked in our data or tracked by [the federal government].”
When housing policy experts invoke workforce units, they are often talking about something between subsidized units and regular homes. Assistant Senate Majority Leader Mattie Daughtry, D-Brunswick, set the definition at those earning between 60 and 120 percent of the area median income in a bill being considered now to establish a fund to promote workforce housing.
Nearly every midcoast Maine town lacks affordable housing. The Brunswick area is short around 2,000 homes, a recent study found. Most of the housing needed in Brunswick is for those who make between $50,000 to $75,000, according to that study. For a family of Saavedra’s size, that’s around 60 to 80 percent of the area median income — or AMI.
That is one of the reasons that MaineHousing takes issue with an income-based definition of workforce housing. Thistle called it “a kind of coded language meant to suggest those who are making less than 60 percent of AMI are not pulling their own weight.”
“Most all subsidized housing these days has a range of income levels and a range of tenant types; overall, most of them, if not working full-time, are in the workforce at some level,” he said.
Whatever the definition of ‘workforce housing,’ it’s a hot term in Maine right now. Many developments coming online right now tout their units as ‘workforce,’ though the definition of which seems to shift depending on which developer is constructing the units.
For David Folsom, a Skowhegan-area housing provider renting out ‘workforce’ units on Water Street, it is very different from what Daughtry envisions: providing short-term places for people working temporarily in the area to stay, like traveling nurses, construction workers and linemen.
As more employer-owned housing units crop up, discussions are starting about what it means to have your housing bundled with your employment. Saavedra, drawing on his study of political history, said that the practice calls to mind the system of peonage. Outlawed in the U.S. in the late 1900s, it was when an employer forces a worker to pay off their debt with work.
Though it’s “weird” for Saavedra to have his rent deducted from his paycheck, he said he enjoys the arrangement.
“I love that my world is the campus. I see my students when I walk to school, when I walk home, when I walk to the athletic facilities,” he said. “My colleagues are my friends.”
The new movement calls to mind the housing mill companies built for their workers in the early 20th century, MaineHousing Chairman Frank O’Hara, a longtime public policy analyst, said. But he also noted the stark differences.
For example, Rumford nearly doubled in population after Hugh Chisholm, founder of the Rumford Falls Paper Company, employed 3,000 men and women there by 1906, O’Hara wrote in a 1999 paper. To give them a place to live and attract new people, Chisholm built a mixed-use development for workers. He also built community centers and amenities, O’Hara said.
“In Rumford, they were building community and not just housing,” O’Hara said. “The company felt responsible for creating a quality of life and a quality of community.”
Policymakers are also cognizant of another factor: If a company is to have some responsibility for an employee’s housing, strong protections for those workers need to be in place so abrupt layoffs or employment disputes do not unfairly affect their families.
Saavedra would be given a years’ notice to find a new place to live should his contract at Bowdoin not be renewed, he said. Seasonal workers or those in non-academic settings could have less-generous policies. At Jackson Labs, an employee would be given “a reasonable amount of time” to vacate, the company said.
Having a third party involved in employer-owned housing, like the state or a local housing authority, could make that arrangement easier and potentially provide more protections to tenants, Daughtry said. The Bar Harbor Housing Authority manages the Jackson Labs’ supply of employee apartments.
“The employer can’t be just the one-stop housing, right?” Daughtry said. “I know there are some laws on the books already,” she added.
