The Rockland City Council unanimously authorized the city manager to establish a housing working group and hire a housing consultant at its Wednesday meeting as its next step in addressing the housing crisis.
In the last several years, the city has made changes to its zoning code to encourage the development of housing, including eliminating the minimum lot sizes per unit in some residential neighborhoods this June, and at Wednesday’s meeting, reducing permitting fees by 50 percent for affordable housing developments. Some of those measures haven’t passed, like an effort to stop giving permits for short-term rentals owned by people who do not live on the property.
But Councilor Adam Lachman, who is sponsoring the order, said in an interview that the city is running out of changes it can make to its code to encourage more housing development, and it needs new ideas.
“You can only get so far with changes to code and zoning,” Lachman said. “This effort is really primarily focused on … building some capacity that goes beyond what the city can do on its own. So hiring some expertise to provide and help a citizen task force develop a plan for housing as part of that.”
The working group, consisting of a “broad range” of members including local housing nonprofit Homeworthy, will work alongside the consultant to update the city’s housing stock and come up with plans on how to encourage more development.
Another midcoast city has done the same. In 2021, Bath published a document to inform its policymaking that includes a housing summary, a housing vision for the city and a summary of best practices in housing policy and planning. The city currently has 180 housing units that have either been recently completed, are in construction or are in the pipeline, according to state data.
Lachman said data on the city’s housing stock haven’t been updated since 2011. Besides that, the working group and consultant will determine the city’s goals for housing development and ways it can meet those goals. And, this working group comes alongside a Rockland ballot question that asks citizens if the city should pursue a housing bond.
The question, Lachman said, does not authorize the city to take out a bond, but is an advisory question to gauge interest in such a thing. He said if the city could help developers with predevelopment costs, it could add stipulations to housing projects to ensure its units are more affordable.
“If we can’t measure something, then how do we know we’re making progress?” Lachman said.
