The town of Falmouth will decide Wednesday whether to sell a plot of land for the purposes of constructing workforce housing there, but the developers behind the project fear backlash.
“We feel good that the Town Council will be in favor of selling us the land, but we are concerned about NIMBY opposition,” John Finegan, one of the developers behind the proposed project, said in a Facebook post last week asking for people to show support for the project.
Finegan’s fear stems from recent votes in Kingfield and Cumberland, where residents shot down proposed housing developments similarly aimed at giving workers priced out of those regions an affordable place to live.
The development in Falmouth, proposed by Finegan’s Scittery Woods Partners, would be 49 townhouses made up of 2-bedroom, 1.5-bathroom condo units on 25 town-owned acres on Marshall Drive that have been vacant since the 1990s. The developers behind the failed Cumberland project proposed a project for this site, but Scittery Woods Partners won the bid.
The proposed homes would have “some sort of income restriction” on the first sale, Finegan, an associate broker at the Boulos Company, said earlier this month. The original request for proposals the group submitted said all the condos would be affordable to those making up to 120 percent of the area median income, which is $122,400 for a two-person household.
Falmouth, just north of Portland, is in desperate need of the sort of housing his group is proposing. Like much of southern Maine, the town and other local employers have been struggling to hire workers in recent years because of a lack of affordable options.
“I have had potential hires that have not been able to locate housing and relocate, and they’ve declined the job offer,” Nathan Poore, Falmouth’s town manager, said in February. “I am hearing from employers in the community that they’re concerned.”
Finegan named the town’s challenges in recruiting teachers, firefighters, town employees and entry-level workers in his post as being the impetus behind his project. When those workers have to look for housing in surrounding communities and commute to work in Falmouth, it creates a “growing wealth disparity” in the community, he wrote.
“I’m 32 years old, most of my friends have student loans and are paying too much money in rent, and are just caught in this perpetual cycle of expenses and costs and totally unable to save up enough money for a down payment for a home,” Finegan said earlier this month. “For most young people, [housing] is probably the biggest issue most of us face in Maine right now.”
There was the same need for workforce housing in Cumberland and Kingfield, too. In Falmouth, it’ll be up to the town council to sell the land, but that doesn’t mean residents won’t show up and have their say. Even in February, before Scittery Woods Partners’ project was even selected, Poore predicted there would be opposition.
“Some people will support it, [the concerned ones] who are the most vocal show up to meetings,” Poore said then. “They’re not necessarily against workforce housing but maybe not this location, or traffic concerns. And then there are some that flat out say, ‘Why is the town getting involved in the workforce, affordable housing business?’ There’s definitely a range.”
