The Maine Housing Crunch: Small-town efforts and tiny home options
Photo / Fred Field
Corinne Watson, principal and CEO of Tiny Homes of Maine, says small dwellings could be one part of solving the housing crisis.
Rockland has been chipping away at the affordable housing crisis bit by bit, with zoning changes and efforts to make it easier for developers to build in the city.
Auburn, Bath, Belfast and Camden all have been making changes to encourage development and more housing options. A grassroots group from the midcoast is forming a regional land trust to tackle workforce housing.
“We’re still at the early stages of tackling this housing problem. We have years of work into it and while we’ve seen some progress, I don’t feel we’re that far along yet,” says Nate Davis of the Rockland City Council. “But we all need to keep chipping away at the problem.”
The passage of the affordable housing legislation will give municipalities grants and technical assistance they might not otherwise be able to afford. It also requires towns to allow accessory dwelling units and duplexes wherever single-family homes are allowed.
There’s not one answer that makes sense for every town.
“Every community has a role in the housing crisis,” says Kate Dufour, legislative advocate at the Maine Municipal Association. “There’s an opportunity for every community to ask, ‘What is the housing issue in this town and how do we address our unique housing issue?’”
Corinne Watson, principal and CEO of Tiny Homes of Maine, sees the move towards accessory dwelling units and other housing options as positive, and a boom for her Houlton-based company.
“There’s not one answer to the affordable housing crisis. Tiny Homes is a small one piece of the affordable housing solution,” Watson says. “It’s still not enough. We need to make more and do it faster. We need to ramp up. We can’t provide tiny homes fast enough to solve every need. The pandemic and the housing situation added to what was already very strong interest in tiny homes.”
There’s so much demand for Tiny Homes of Maine’s housing units that the homebuilder will be doubling its production facility size by building a new 12,000-square-foot manufacturing center in Houlton.
Before the pandemic, Tiny Homes’ primary demographic had been single women looking for an affordable option they could manage on their own. Now, there are a lot of couples and young families who can’t find a home in Maine, let alone an affordable home. There’s also a lot of older people looking at tiny homes as mother-in-law suites to be near their families but retain some independence.
“A lot of people are looking to us for a home and they didn’t even want a tiny home necessarily, but there’s a lack of homes to purchase and they’ve run out of ideas,” Watson says.
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