Housing
This section of the BDN aims to help readers understand Maine’s housing crisis, the volatile real estate market and the public policy behind them. Read more Housing coverage here.
No one has used Bangor’s preapproved housing plans, a year after city leaders made them available to the public.
The city paid Scarborough-based Gawron Turgeon Dillon Architects $182,400 in 2025 to design four homes of various sizes that developers can choose from when building new housing.
The free plans, which are available to download on the city’s website, range from smaller accessory dwelling units someone can put in their backyard to four-family developments. All of the designs are intended to blend into Bangor’s neighborhoods.
While a few local developers have pulled four sets of plans for the multi-unit building options, no one has applied for permits to create them in Bangor, according to Anne Krieg, Bangor’s director of development.
“I feel like a lot of people don’t know that this is available,” Krieg said. “It’s really on us now to get the word out to people, including residents, because we have plans for accessory dwelling units too.”
Bangor hoped offering preapproved plans would remove another barrier to housing development and speed up the building process, Krieg said. The plans were approved a month after the publication of a housing study that revealed Bangor needs 700 more units for people earning less than $35,000 annually. That shortage forces local renters to pay more than their incomes can afford, making them housing cost burdened.
That’s a drop in the bucket of the more than 76,000 additional units needed statewide to fill a housing shortage created by years of underproduction, a statewide housing needs study found in 2023.
“We need to have more housing,” Krieg said. “We know the demand is there, but the supply isn’t.”
The completed mock-ups spare a developer the headache of ensuring a design meets all city code requirements, Krieg said. Using one of the city-provided plans could also save someone from needing to request approval from the Bangor Planning Board, though that depends on the size and planned location of the project.
“If someone wants to build one of the accessory dwelling units, they can go right to the code office to get a building permit,” Krieg said. “The other value of the pre-approved plan is that the city code staff have already reviewed these plans. I’m sure people will need to tweak them for their own use, but overall, that will reduce the review time for our staff.”
Providing blueprints also saves developers from paying an architect to design housing, Krieg said. That removes one of the many costs that come with creating housing, which has grown to be prohibitively expensive for many.
Typically, architects will charge developers 10% of the total cost to construct a home, Krieg said, so the larger and more expensive a home is, the more the architect will cost. This means a developer will pay an architect $100,000 to design a building that will cost $1 million to create.
While Krieg doesn’t know why local contractors haven’t put the blueprints to use, she acknowledged that building costs are likely holding many projects back.
“We were looking to remove barriers to housing development,” Krieg said. “There are some things you can’t control — like construction prices — but if we take out you know the cost of preparing a set of plans, every little bit helps.”
Having new rental units available is especially appealing to people moving to Bangor from another state who may be used to newer housing and aren’t ready to buy property, Krieg said. More housing will also create competition in the real estate and rental market, potentially leading to lower costs for residents.
“We need to be able to give those options to people and the key is diversity in the types of units,” Krieg said. “New construction to historic homes — the whole gamut — enriches the options for people and makes Bangor that much more valuable for people who want to be here.”
