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Nancy Smith is CEO of GrowSmart Maine, a statewide nonprofit helping communities navigate change. Kara Wilbur is chair of Build Maine, and a small-scale developer with projects underway across the state. GrowSmart and Build Maine lead Policy Action 2025.
Maine is at risk of becoming home to two different kinds of places: The place we love, that brought us to Maine, or that has kept us here; and the place we’ve been building for the past six decades, with development that looks and feels out of place and that is eroding the qualities we love most about our state. Change is happening. As more people are drawn to Maine, development pressure is heating up the housing market and altering the makeup of our rural lands.
We have an opportunity to confront these interrelated issues and determine how we want to grow, or these decisions will be made for us. It’s not too late to alter the outcome, but there is urgency in getting it right for every Maine community.
Our human relationships are intimately tied to the physical places we call home. Our cities, towns and villages are the backdrop to our lives, and historically have been a mix of built and open spaces, with housing for our families and neighbors, and gathering places that provide for social interaction and economic opportunity. Wildlife habitat and productive lands for farming, forestry and fishing have been an integral part of our place identity, with public access and trails for all users. Affordable and stable property taxes have been available to most of us over the decades.
Yet, former rural lands continue to be carved up into subdivisions and apartment complexes that yield very few housing units relative to land consumed and resources expended, eroding our rural way of life, increasing traffic, and pulling more energy and investment out of our villages and downtowns.
As diverse as Maine is, it’s remarkable how similar our wants are, as evidenced in something as seemingly mundane as municipal comprehensive plans. Comprehensive plans — where residents define their vision of community and describe their hopes for the future — tend to call for the same things: safer streets, more housing options, protecting open spaces, strengthening local business and increasing social connections and community. However, development outcomes, driven by outdated suburban land use regulations, often fail to address these goals in a coordinated way.
We can address the housing crisis without undoing climate action solutions and without creating the next crisis of access to food and farmland. But it requires a commitment to look holistically at problems rather than trying to solve every problem in isolation. It involves breaking down silos and talking to each other, learning and working collaboratively to find the best, most strategic solutions.
It involves trying to remember and embrace the ways Maine used to build our communities, through the work of many hands and at a much smaller scale. It involves learning, taking risks, changing the status quo. It requires putting our shared goals first, and believing that the private market will adapt. It involves a development industry that is more responsive to the voices of local residents, with projects that are in the right places and designed in response to local community context. It involves neighbors accepting change when that change aligns with stated community goals. Everyone has to do their part.
Policy Action 2025 is working to facilitate this important conversation about how we grow at this historic moment, with urgent calls for action. This crowdsourcing of advocacy is a pragmatic approach inviting many perspectives, bringing people together in a collaborative forum for debate and problem solving. In Policy Action 2025, we have a chance to build a Maine that we can all love now and be proud to leave for future generations.
If you believe, as we do, that our built environment is a direct expression of our policy environment, then you know that building the communities we want to live in starts with building a strong base of local and state advocacy. We’re in a time that calls for reconfiguring how we build our communities, and your voice is critical.
