As places to live continue to be hard to find in Hancock County, and elsewhere throughout Maine, towns east of Ellsworth are hoping to encourage development of more affordable housing.
With that goal in mind, the Hancock County Planning Commission is looking to have two properties — one in Gouldsboro and the other in Sullivan — assessed to see if they might be suitable for multi-unit housing development.
A pair of studies done in the past year indicate that housing pressure is mounting on the Schoodic Peninsula, where local towns have few employers and relatively small year-round populations. Fishing remains the dominant industry in the area, with a smattering of retail businesses, but most of the area’s employment opportunities are either located in Ellsworth or on Mount Desert Island, which respectively are roughly a half-hour and an hour away.
But as housing pressure has increased substantially on MDI and in the Ellsworth area, there’s been a ripple effect to the east, where the rugged coastline, the Schoodic portion of Acadia National Park and stunning views of the mountains on MDI lure people who want to visit or move to Maine and have had difficulty finding a place to stay in more historically popular areas along the coast.
“They see how freaking beautiful it is,” Josh McIntyre, Gouldsboro’s town manager, said of visitors to Schoodic Point and its nearby waterfront villages.
As more people discover the Schoodic Peninsula — where the portion of Acadia at the peninsula’s tip is having its busiest summer on record — local residents with limited income who don’t want to move away are getting squeezed, McIntyre said. Often, when a house does come on the market, it is purchased as a summer residence for people with more money, or is bought as an investment vacation rental property, or both, he said.
“The inventory [of housing] is really low,” the town manager said. When a house is listed for sale, he added, the price usually is “really out of reach” for most people who grew up in Gouldsboro and neighboring towns, he said.
In 2023, most Gouldsboro residents were making only enough to afford a house that cost less than $200,000, but the median local home price was more than twice that much, according to a county-wide study.
“What stuck out was the affordability gap,” McIntyre said. “And it’s only gotten worse.”
One housing needs assessment that was conducted last summer just for Gouldsboro and Winter Harbor, which have small fishing fleets and neighbor the Schoodic portion of Acadia, indicated that most people who have jobs in these two towns cannot afford to live in either one. If the towns want to maintain their current level of working-age households, nearly 40 new affordable units will have to be created between the two, the study said.
“Many workers outside the local area would likely prefer to live locally but cannot due to the availability of quality housing at affordable prices,” researchers wrote.
The parcels being considered for affordable housing development in Sullivan and Gouldsboro — which are roughly 35 and 100 acres in size, respectively — are located in more rural parts of each town. The Gouldsboro parcel, which is owned by a subsidiary of Maine Coast Heritage Trust, is located on West Bay Road about 1.5 miles from the village of Prospect Harbor. The Sullivan parcel, next to the town transfer station, is on Tunk Lake Road about the same distance from Route 1.
The county planning commission has solicited requests for proposals to see if either site is suitable for possible housing development. The site studies are being funded by state Department of Economic and Community Development grants, according to commission staff.
If the sites prove to be good candidates for housing, neither town is likely to take an active role in developing either one, McIntyre said. He said he potentially could see the creation of a Schoodic-area nonprofit housing authority that would seek funding and spearhead the effort, but any serious discussions along those lines will have to wait until a suitable site is identified.
“We’ll definitely be taking a look at that, but we haven’t gotten that far,” he said.