If you make less than six figures per year and want to live in the Maine island town of Stonington, you’d be out of luck right now.
The only places for rent right now are seasonal and charge hundreds of dollars per night. Homes are more likely to sell for millions than for less than $400,000. That affordable housing shortage has been crippling for year-round residents, contributing to a declining school population with many businesses either shuttered or chronically understaffed.
Town officials are at the end of their rope. The solutions they see include zoning reform and manufactured homes that have faced decades of stigma and local laws banning them in certain parts of Maine. They are considering putting a mobile home park on town-owned land to provide embattled locals an attainable homeownership option.
“Mobile homes and trailer parks, and even campers, are sort of the new starter homes,” Travis Fifield, a town selectman and business owner, said. “The prices have gotten so out of whack with people’s incomes.”
Fifield has owned his family’s multi-generational fishing business since 2017. The lack of housing options meant he was unable to attract anyone to work for him for years. Three years ago, he bought a second home so he could rent it to employees himself. At $270,000, he thought that was a financial stretch at the time.
The town has convened a housing task force that Fifield co-chairs to collect data on Stonington’s housing stock and look for ways to entice development. Ideas have included decreasing minimum lot sizes, eliminating parking requirements and building manufactured homes on town-owned land, Linda Nelson, the town’s economic development director, said.
“A large chunk of our inventory has gone to seasonal housing: second homes. That pressure has created an economic situation [where] people can’t afford to live and work here,” Nelson said. “It’s a completely cyclical thing. It can be a death spiral for a lot of communities.”
Stonington is not the only Maine town caught in this “death spiral.” Others are also considering building mobile homes as a way to alleviate the housing crisis, said Rebecca Graham, a lobbyist with the Maine Municipal Association.
“They provide a better living standard at a cheaper rate than similar development, and already have a familiar land lease model in many communities,” she said.
Some Maine municipalities are considering owning or managing these new parks themselves, Graham said. Stonington officials want to sell town land to a developer who would then own the park. In Skowhegan, the town’s former drive-in theater was bought by a developer who plans to turn the space into a 30- to 40-unit park.
The construction of new mobile home parks would mark the reversal of a decades-long trend. Though the modular building industry has seen a boom in activity in recent years, developers in Maine and elsewhere have moved away from building new parks. That scarcity of new units has contributed to increased investor activity in that sector.
“The value proposition associated with mobile homes or manufactured homes can be a little bit short-sighted,” Thatcher Butcher, the president of Oxford-based modular builder KBS Homes, said. “You can deliver a lower-cost product upfront, but ultimately, through higher heating bills and other things like that it ends up having a higher cost of ownership throughout [its] life cycle.”
But the manufactured homes of today are not the inefficient trailers of the 1970s, Graham said. Building standards have increased significantly. Like modular single-family homes, mobile homes are built off-site in controlled environments. That’s an attractive proposition for a place like Stonington, a remote location strapped for workers and in need of housing that costs less.
Officials hope that offering a piece of town-owned land for such a project will cut development costs and provide housing options for what’s known as the missing middle: those who make too much to be eligible for housing assistance but can’t afford market rate options.
The park would be aimed at both year-round residents and seasonal workers, Fifield said. The biggest challenge would be hooking up any town-owned land to public utilities and ensuring there are enough water resources, according to Nelson. But officials think that most of the town would be on board with the manufactured home park idea for simple reasons.
“People are struggling to find workers, and our children are struggling to live here,” Nelson said. “We want to be a successful community with a year-round economy.”
