Kevin Johnson has seen Harpswell completely transform.
He called the peninsula and island town a great place to grow up. It remained affordable through the 1980s, when housing construction boomed nationally. From 1992 to 2001, the town was building an average of 50 homes a year. In the new millennium, construction slowed.
“I think the world kind of discovered Harpswell,” said Johnson, who is 69 years old. “The demographics changed. More people were coming here for retirement purposes and buying more expensive property.”
By 2003, home prices and incomes kept rising. That’s when town officials rang the alarm bell and commissioned a study of Harpswell’s housing stock. The results were grim. High sale prices were driven by out-of-state buyers. Roughly 2 in 5 renters were burdened by housing costs, as were 1 in 5 homeowners. Young families increasingly could not afford a first home.
Harpswell is remarkable because it saw these problems coming yet has been perhaps more paralyzed by the pandemic-era housing crisis than any other Maine town. The average home value in 2002 was $287,500, according to the report. After the COVID-19 pandemic housing boom, the typical home value is $742,000, according to Zillow.
No multi-family housing has been approved here since the 1980s. Only 22 homes on average have been built annually in recent years, and some are tear-downs, according to the town’s new draft comprehensive plan. An affordable housing task force convened in 2022 faced massive pushback and set tepid sights on “attainable housing” in a report issued this year.
“We would have been in much better shape if something had been acted on,” Johnson said.
Harpswell is now the oldest community in Maine, with 38 percent of the population older than 65. There are so few young families with children left in town that Harpswell’s two elementary schools were consolidated into one in 2011. Selectman Jane Covey noted the community’s fear that the last school may have to close as well, which would further speed a long transformation from a working waterfront community to a rich enclave of villages jutting into Casco Bay.
Restaurants have reduced hours or switched to a self-service model, given a shortage of housing for seasonal workers, Courtenay Snellings, an Orr’s Island resident on the town’s affordable housing panel, noted. That has been driven by the conversion of long-term seasonal rentals traditionally leased out to those workers into short-term rentals, Covey said.
“We’re all responsible for where we’ve gotten ourselves,” Bob Gaudreau, a Harpswell resident and retired housing developer, said. “We’re barely keeping ahead of what we’re supposed to do.”
A landmark state housing reform law from 2022 mandated that Harpswell take some action. It had to repeal a longstanding lot minimum of nearly 2 acres and allow duplexes and in-law apartments. That is a start, but officials are “doubtful” that adding one or two units at a time is going to be enough to meet demand, Snellings said.
“If you’re a couple of teachers, there’s no way you’re going to be able to live here,” Snellings, who moved here nine years ago from Connecticut, said. “There’s no way, unless you live with your folks.”
Harpswell’s 2003 housing study, put together by Planning Decisions, Inc., found that home sale prices increased 72 percent from 1995 to 2002. Home prices have increased over 350 percent from 1995 to today. There are only a handful of properties under $400,000 available for sale in Harpswell, and most of them are fixer-uppers or seasonal cottages. One is a garage.
Though there is consensus that more attainable housing is needed, there’s strong resistance to any development aside from single-family homes. Officials have effectively promised that the town won’t approve any apartment building with more than a couple of units.
Snellings cited the desire of many to keep the community looking as it long has. Residents visualized the large apartment buildings that have sprung up at the nearby Brunswick Landing, the former Air Force base that now houses hundreds of people. Nothing that large will ever go up in Harpswell, but many in town were not assuaged.
“We could not explain that all apartment buildings did not have to look like that,” Snellings said. “So we just, we gave up.”
Resistance to large developments is largely driven by fears about the water supply in the town that relies on private wells, officials said. Snellings noted that sea level rise has led to saltwater seeping into the water supplies of some seaside homes, but Johnson said most areas of town have nothing to fear.
Even small changes have been shot down. A short-term rental panel tasked with investigating how short-term rentals contribute to unaffordability was dissolved in February due to backlash. When the affordable housing task force suggested they recreate one successful conversion of town land into affordable housing, it was also scratched.
“Most people, frankly, they’ve been here for the last 15 to 20 years. They’re here, and they’re not sure they want anybody else moving here,” Johnson said.
The affordable housing task force, whose draft report was approved by the select board this month, is now “waiting for the backlash to die down,” added Johnson, who hopes that a new comprehensive plan promoting rental and multifamily housing development in Harpswell’s more inland areas will be approved by voters next March.
“Either we can turn our backs and just say, ‘Well, we can’t fix it, so why bother?’ Or, we can say, ‘Okay, you know, we’ve been able to help six families,’ or, ‘We found four servers a place to live,’” Snellings said. “We’ll just start small.”
