Billions in federal funds could help Maine tackle the thousands of affordable housing units that are outdated and inefficient, local experts said.
The average age of a property managed by Maine’s public housing authorities is 47, according to Debora Keller, the executive director of the Bath housing authority. That means inefficient heating and cooling systems, outdated appliances and structural deficiencies in at least 7,000 of Maine’s affordable housing units, she said. MaineHousing, the state housing authority, manages about 20,000 additional units, most of which also need rehabilitating.
“We are fast approaching a timeframe where we are going to need an infusion of capital to keep these sustainable and affordable,” Keller said.
As Maine strives to build at least 76,000 new homes by 2030 to meet demand, public housing authority directors say making sure the affordable housing we already have stays viable is just as important as building new.
That’s the top priority for Portland’s housing authority, according to executive director Brian Frost, and for other agencies like Bath, Sanford and Lewiston, too. Preservation projects account for about a third of what MaineHousing has financed in the past few years, according to agency spokesperson Scott Thistle.
“If we start losing units off the back end, all these new unit construction numbers, they don’t matter as much,” Chris Kilmurry, the executive director of Lewiston’s housing authority, said.
Preservation is no small task, but authorities are hopeful that nearly $9 billion earmarked in the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act will start trickling down into Maine — administered by housing authorities — in the next few years. It’s unclear how much Maine will receive, and the funds are specifically for home electrification and conversion from fossil fuels. Those are retrofits for which most of these aging public housing projects could be eligible.
“When these new funds arrive, that’s going to bump our ability to do more rehab going forward,” Thistle said. “The idea is shoring up the public housing units that can be shored up.”
These funds aren’t expected to be in hand in Maine before late 2025, Liza Fleming-Ives, the executive director of the Genesis Fund, said. Until then, Maine’s public housing authorities are starting to map out exactly how much it will take to preserve their existing stock and where to direct federal resources.
It’s already adding up. Just one energy retrofitting project at Harbor Terrace, a 122-unit Portland housing development, cost millions, Frost said. The building is 52 years old and had an old, poorly insulated brick facade that needed replacing, he said.
Different approaches to addressing these aging units are being proposed. One alternative housing authorities will consider is whether it’s cheaper to just declare projects as being past their useful life, demolish them and build new, Kilmurry said. But some agency heads, like Frost in Portland, like the idea of using the federal funds to retrofit these properties and add new units while doing so.
“It’s sometimes not as newsworthy to preserve existing housing as it is to build new. But in terms of the impact, both economically but more importantly to the resident’s comfort and safety, this is really critical,” Frost said.