The Bangor Housing Authority is closing its public housing waitlist because the list has gotten so long that it may take years for some families to get into housing.
The waitlists for all of the agency’s public housing properties will close at 5 p.m. Jan. 30, it announced Thursday.
“It was a hard decision for us,” Mike Myatt, the agency’s executive director, said. But “we have way more demand than the supply allows,” he added.
The closing of the waitlists is another symptom of the affordable housing crisis plaguing Bangor and other U.S. cities, as housing costs rise and many residents struggle to find available housing in their price range.
There are more than 3,000 people on the public housing waitlist, according to Myatt. His agency manages 833 units of public housing in the city.
For the agency’s multi-bedroom units, families who are now getting off the waitlist applied in 2023. For one-bedroom units, the people next on the list applied in January 2019, Myatt said — nearly seven years ago.
This year, only 1% of households on the waitlist were actually able to move into a public housing unit, he added.
“We just almost felt like we were delivering false hope to folks” by keeping the waitlist open, Myatt said.
Part of the reason why it’s taking so long to get off the waitlist is that turnover has gotten lower in Bangor’s public housing units, according to Myatt.
Twenty-two families moved into units at Bangor Housing’s Capehart development this year, compared with 45 families in 2022, he said.
Myatt attributed this lower turnover to broader economic uncertainty, lack of housing availability and how difficult it is to buy a house.
It’s good when a family moves out of public housing, he said, because it means they’re reaching their goals and improving their financial situations. But “we don’t have enough places for folks to go,” he said, so more of them are staying in public housing.
Wait times are even longer at the agency’s senior housing developments because those residents typically stay for longer, according to Myatt.
While the waitlists are closed, Bangor Housing will “focus our efforts on trying to build more stuff,” Myatt said.
“We’ll open up as soon as we can,” he said, adding that the agency will likely plan to open the application for a specific period of time each year or every other year going forward.
In the meantime, Myatt’s team will go through all the lists and make sure everyone on them is still interested in moving into public housing.
Bangor Housing has periodically closed the lists at various points in the last 20 years, according to Myatt. It already closed the waitlists for its Autumn Park West and Crestwood properties, both managed by the housing authority and owned by its nonprofit affiliate Bangor Housing Development Corporation, in March.
Federal housing funding availability will also be a factor in the agency’s progress toward getting more people into affordable units, according to Myatt.
He doesn’t know how much federal funding Bangor Housing will get in 2026 because the housing and urban development budget is not yet finalized, he said.
“There’s just a lot of uncertainty in the world right now,” Myatt said. “Closing the waiting list for us is just, I think, another consequence of all that uncertainty.”