Housing
This section of the BDN aims to help readers understand Maine’s housing crisis, the volatile real estate market and the public policy behind them. Read more Housing coverage here.
Bangor approved far fewer homes than Maine’s other large cities last year, calling into question how the city performed in its “year of building.”
Bangor city councilors set the goal of building more housing, growing economic development and improving relationships for 2025. But a new round of data released by the state last Friday shows Bangor, Maine’s third largest city, awarded building permits for just 32 new units last year.
When broken down per capita, that’s just one new home per 1,000 residents. It’s a fraction of the more than 460 housing units that received building permits in Penobscot County last year.
“I would say it’s safe to say we fell short of where we would have liked to have been,” City Councilor Michael Beck said of the data. “It’s clear there’s a lot more for us to do.”
Meanwhile, Lewiston, Maine’s second largest city with roughly 6,000 more residents than Bangor, approved more than 180 new units of housing in 2025. That breaks down to about five new units per 1,000 residents.
The state’s new data provides for the first time the ability to easily compare how towns are performing against each other when it comes to creating more housing. And what it shows is that Bangor is not approving as many units as other cities its size, or even as much housing as smaller towns.
The Maine Office of Community Affairs and the Greater Portland Council of Governments collected housing data from Maine communities to better track how many units and what kind of homes are being approved, built or demolished.
The goal is to better understand whether the state is making progress on its mission of building 84,000 new units by 2030, which was set by the 2023 Maine Housing Production Needs Study, which credited the state’s housing shortage to historic underproduction.
While Bangor approved more housing than many communities in the region, places like Hermon and Old Town approved building permits for 43 and 38 units, respectively, in 2025 with far smaller populations.
Urban areas in southern Maine, such as Biddeford and Sanford, which both have 10,000 fewer residents than Bangor, approved 220 and 180 units of housing, respectively, in 2025.
Other rural communities, like Dixfield in Oxford County, approved 58 new homes in 2025 despite having fewer than 2,500 residents. Meanwhile, Bridgton in Cumberland County — a town of nearly 6,000 — cleared 69 units to be constructed.
A blog post analyzing the data noted that this first year of data should be considered “an early snapshot rather than a long-term trend.” However, researchers noted that Bangor is allowing new housing to be created, but then “awaiting action by developers.”
Building permits aren’t a guarantee that housing will be created, as projects could get waylaid or canceled due to budget constraints or local pushback. Additionally, some larger housing projects in Bangor were approved before or after 2025, meaning they wouldn’t be counted in this latest data set.
Bangor enlisted its own housing study, released in 2025, which revealed the city has a shortage of 700 homes for households earning less than $35,000. This deficit forces more residents to pay higher rents than they can afford.
Increasing the city’s housing stock would not only allow more people to live and work in Bangor, but likely bring down the cost of homes and fuel economic development. City staff have previously expressed a need for more homes geared toward “the missing middle,” meaning those earning too much to qualify for housing assistance, but who can’t afford market rate houses.
Beck noted that city councilors “recognize we’ve got a problem,” which led them to create an advisory committee on housing. The group will be tasked with developing “actionable ideas” on how the city can increase its housing stock, Beck said.
“Other communities are finding ways to get more housing created,” Beck said. “It’s beyond zoning now in my opinion. What can the city of Bangor do to take some of the risk out of developing affordable housing?”