Aggressive housing benchmarks laid out for Maine in a landmark report released Wednesday will be hard to meet, but we have been near that mark in the past.
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 near 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 2004 and 2005, including nearly 8,100 single-family homes in that first year, according to federal data. The new report focuses on single-family homes.
Of course, this 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.
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During the economic recovery that followed, the state went back up on a mostly steady ascent to just over 7,100 total units approved last year. Single-family homes made up 4,900 of those in 2022. There has been a major shift toward multi-family construction in the last five years, with nearly 2,200 units permitted in those developments.
That figure was the highest since the mid-1980s, which saw Maine’s largest housing boom in the modern era. Nearly 9,200 total units were permitted annually on average 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.
Michael Shepherd joined the Bangor Daily News in 2015 after time at the Kennebec Journal. He lives in Augusta, graduated from the University of Maine in 2012 and has a master's degree from the University... More by Michael Shepherd