Published by Portland Press Herald on April 15, 2026.
Written by Jon Calame.
If the housing market in southern Maine were a coal mine, the canaries would be dying. Small birds the color of school buses.
This is an architectural problem with large and intimidating downstream implications. There is a well-known cascade effect, or weave, which pulls us all together into the unkind vortex of this broken system and spreads the pain far and wide. We can use the school bus as an emblem for this process. A community allows the cost of housing to rise beyond the reach of a family with young children, so they move away. The local elementary school cannot operate with shrinking enrollment, and regardless its teachers cannot afford to live nearby, so the school closes. Now even if new, inexpensive housing is developed, the lack of an elementary school keeps new families away. That door is shut, leaving older wealthy property owners blissfully to themselves. Who will shovel their driveways in winter is anybody’s guess.
How high is the barrier? How wide is the gap between wages and housing prices? Clever persons have developed a useful figure called a “housing wage,” which imagines the challenge in reverse. They asked how much a person would need to earn per hour in a full-time job in order to afford a typical two-bedroom apartment in a certain location without spending more than 30% of their income. Nationwide, the housing wage is $33.63, while the average hourly wage $23.60 – a $10 chasm, very difficult for the ordinary person to bridge. A Lyft driver makes an average of $19.55 per hour, a sanitation driver $17.72. Portland is relatively expensive, with a 2026 housing wage of $38.67 against an average hourly income of $27.13. In Portland, a nursing assistant makes $22.33, minimum wage is $16.75, and we have previously seen how regular food service staff make out in this environment. It leaves a person rubbing their chin about how Portland can keep a single restaurant open.
Put very plainly, there is no county and no state in the nation where a single parent earning minimum wage full time, 52 weeks a year, can afford to rent a two-bedroom apartment. This certainly illustrates the “minimum” part of the phrase, but in what sense can it be considered adequate or acceptable?
The crisis, viewed in a certain light, appears avoidable. It has been estimated that Maine needs no fewer than 84,000 new units of affordable housing to meet demand. In the meantime, the rudderless war in Iran has cost American taxpayers approximately $41.3 billion and counting. If we had it to do over again, in addition to the thousands of people who would still be alive, the diverted funds could have produced 125,151 units of new housing and eliminated the shortage in Maine for decades. Which is to say that we are a wealthy society with lots of interesting options. Our hands are not tied.
Viewed in a different light, the crisis seems immovable, nearly organic. Private developers claim that their profit margin depends on the creation of market-rate housing. Some would prefer to pay hefty, one-time fines than meet affordable unit quotas. Perhaps it is natural, in the minds of some, for a free market to behave this way, penalizing lesser earnings with crowded, ugly, uncomfortable, unhealthy living conditions. This suggests that unpleasant, unaffordable housing is a sort of punishment, or counter-incentive, for those who could do more, so that decent housing becomes a privilege and a just reward of productivity. The World Health Organization disagrees. It says that quality housing is a “social determinant of heath” in addition to a human right, and inalienable (though the United States may be exempt from this lofty notion since it withdrew from WHO last year).
Maine is fortunate to have many thoughtful organizations that are confronting the harmful implications of housing market failure. A noteworthy example is the Rockland nonprofit Island Institute. The Island Institute has had front-row seats for school closures, rising energy prices, and severe jolts felt by small businesses while gentrification is on the rise. All of these concerns either stem from, or lead to, decreasing affordable housing stock. Though similar threats cast their shadow on the mainland as well, island residents typically feel the chill first, and with less insulation. This is probably due to their scale, remoteness, vulnerability.
These same factors make island communities potentially excellent laboratories for problem-solving, which is one reason why the Island Institute recently launched an affordable housing program to explore how superior housing strategies may become a “catalyst for community vitality.” The logic is simple and convincing: small, tightly knit island communities provide ideal conditions for pilot projects since short-cycle, high-impact experiments generate informative results (both successes and failures) quickly and cheaply. Every mad scientist wants short feedback loops. These small-batch results can then be assessed, tweaked and expanded. Size and a built-in awareness of interdependence generally make island communities more aware of mounting problems, more motivated to seek solutions, and more agile with decision-making than their urban counterparts.
The Institute is not planning to purchase a backhoe and a cement mixer. President Kim Hamilton explained that their role has been to listen to communities as they articulate high priority concerns, then help to assemble the resources needed to address them. Such resources often include policy research, advocacy, partnerships, expert consultation, pilot project development, information pooling and strategic funding. During the most recent cycle of listening, the need for more affordable housing was “issue number one, two and three.” In response, their goal is to support the creation of 1,200 new housing units through collaboration with at least 15 coastal municipalities and 15 nonprofit housing organizations and developers in their efforts to advance sustainable, year-round housing.
It is helpful to have measurable goals, but Hamilton emphasized that the urgency of the affordable housing crisis in Maine should not be articulated only in terms of available units or price points; rather, she observed, a broad understanding of the problem reveals a cascade of interwoven resources, concerns and systems. Housing that is too expensive means that people spend less on medicine, or food, or heating fuel, leading to countless forms of illness. To support the expansion of housing options is to promote community health, first for the nonaffluent and, sooner or later, for the affluent as well. Hamilton’s colleague Nick Battista, who manages the Island Institute’s housing initiative, noted that a successful affordable housing project offers “proof of the value of income diversity” in any community, and emphasized that Maine’s island communities may provide an exceedingly useful litmus test for all the rest of us. Such insights are of the greatest value.
