On Maine islands, housing shortages threaten community survival

CHEBEAGUE ISLAND — It only took a few days for the 1.5-acre lot to start looking like a home. The modular boxes that will soon become a large duplex for two families went up quickly, like giant wooden Lego blocks stacked atop each other.

The rain, which fell steadily on the mainland, held off on the island and the newly hatched blackflies hadn’t started biting yet. By all accounts, the first day of construction went better than expected.

But it took months of setbacks and false starts to get to that point.

There were unexpected insurance snags. Snow and ice in February prevented the barge from carrying the modules and the crane over a chilly Casco Bay. The crew wasn’t available until mid-March. Then, Chebeague’s roads were posted until May, prohibiting heavy vehicles to protect the roads while the frost worked its way out of the ground.

Finally, on a gray spring morning, the first boxes were placed on the woodland property, a milestone in a years-long effort to add more housing that resident Bob Earnest said is “critical to the survival of a diverse and vibrant year-round community.”

In most Maine towns, the addition of two new rentals is no big deal. But on the state’s 15 unbridged islands, each unit has an outsized impact — and the stakes are high.

Without affordable housing, the islands are at risk of dying off — and if they do, experts say the state would lose not only valuable tourism money but also a uniquely “Maine” way of life characterized by self-sufficient attitudes, working waterfronts and close-knit communities.

Just a few miles away, a small group of volunteers on neighboring Long Island has been trying to add housing to the island for nearly 20 years.

“We’ve probably been the least successful of (the) islands at actually having standing houses that people can move into,” said Mark Greene, president of the town’s year-round housing corporation, as well as the director of maps and assessing.

Long Island received money from a state housing fund in the early 2000s and again in 2022, but neither project ever really got off the ground.

The properties they wanted to develop needed a lot of work and the development costs quickly eclipsed the available funds. Just one of the four units they wanted to build in 2022 would have cost around $500,000, Greene said.

“When push came to shove, we didn’t have enough money to be able to build them, even with a generous state housing grant,” he said. The state funding had a deadline and when that came and went, Long Island petitioned for more time.

As the projects have struggled, so has the island.

Many of the summer workers are imported, Greene said. It’s been a challenge to find enough bodies to serve on town boards or fill important roles including on fire and rescue squads. The school is down to about half a dozen kids.

Long Island recently finished a revaluation, and even though property values have gone up dramatically, homes are still selling for hundreds of thousands more than they were assessed for.

They need to attract more families if they want the community to survive, but “there is just almost no way for younger people to get a foothold here,” Greene said. “It’s gotten dire quickly. Our population is stagnant. It gets one year older every year.”

The median age across Maine’s islands is 56, according to U.S. Census data, more than a decade older than the statewide median age of 44.

But as the consequences of the lack of housing have become clearer, it has also re-energized the efforts.

Finally, after 20 years, the tide has begun to turn. Another, more shovel-ready property became available, drastically reducing the cost. They found a new developer who tweaked the design and found a company willing to build modular homes on the island.

They resubmitted their application to MaineHousing and voters in May approved a funding plan for site development and startup costs. Assuming tariffs and the overall uncertainty around the global economy don’t cause prices to skyrocket, Greene is cautiously optimistic that things could finally come together.

When Nick Battista talks to island residents about the challenges they’re facing, almost every conversation comes back to housing.

Battista is the chief policy officer for the Island Institute, a nonprofit that works with island communities trying to navigate climate and economic issues.

Maine needs tens of thousands of housing units statewide, and shortages have strained nearly every town in some way.

On the mainland, it can be hard to make the argument that the lack of housing threatens the heart of the community — the school — Battista said, but the need is stark on an island.

“Those two units of housing could be the four kids in the school or it could be the housing for the teacher, without which you don’t have a school,” he said.

And without a school, new families won’t even consider moving to an island “even if we were giving away land,” said Greene, on Long Island.

But the need doesn’t make the hurdles any easier to clear. Development on an island costs more. Many developers aren’t even willing to work out there.

Materials need to be barged over from the mainland, and workers’ hours are dependent on ferry schedules. Lots are often not connected to water and sewer, or sometimes even roads, so there are steep infrastructure costs.

The same house could be built on the mainland and an island, and the island home would cost 30% more, Battista said.

For many of these communities, there’s limited land available, as much of the islands are held in conservation trusts.

There’s also a “finite” set of resources and a lot of projects that need to be completed, Battista said.