Housing Planning

 

Today's Housing Context: What can a municipality do?

Over the last decade, an undersupply in housing production, rising costs in materials, and labor shortages met with an increasing population, relatively stagnant wages, and outdated land use regulations. Consequently, housing affordability and availability have decreased significantly, including in southern Maine. 

While many factors influence housing, local and regional efforts can positively impact housing. Specifically, a community could explore establishing housing or land trusts, conducting public outreach around policy options, assessing the current state of housing, creating public-private partnerships, auditing land use ordinances to remove policy barriers to housing, updating zoning to enable additional housing types, and more. 

 

Our region is full of many different types of housing: farmhouses to new apartments, bungalows to Victorian mansions, cottages to condo conversions. Different housing types suit different household needs. 

 

 

How can SMPDC help?

SMPDC supports a variety of planning processes and projects around housing. In recent years, SMPDC has successfully pursued several grants to support regional and municipal housing work. SMPDC can help member communities with any or all of the following:

 

  • Facilitate and lead committee or board meetings on housing policy;
  • Assist with or lead your public engagement process around housing (surveys, open houses, stakeholder interviews, focus groups, public meetings, etc.);
  • Train your planning boards or elected officials on new State legislation around housing;
  • Conduct developable lands and residential buildout analyses;
  • Create housing suitability maps, including web-based interactive maps;
  • Conduct ordinance audits to evaluate land use ordinances for impacts on housing;
  • Develop visual tools to support public education around housing;
  • Gather and analyze data for a housing inventory chapter;
  • Write your housing inventory chapter;
  • Facilitate your future land use and implementation chapter discussions; and,
  • Write your future land use and implementation chapters.

 

 

2025 Project Spotlight

With a Housing Opportunity Grant from Maine DECD, SMPDC produced a Developable Lands Analysis, Buildout Analysis, and Housing Suitability Analysis for Arundel, Biddeford, Denmark, Fryeburg, Kennebunk, Kennebunkport, and Saco.  

This housing suitability analysis enables communities to make informed decisions about housing growth and development patterns. Municipalities can use the results of this project to determine the effectiveness of current ordinances, the communities’ preparedness for future development, and priority locations for future affordable or missing middle housing development.

 

Check out the deliverables:

 

What did we learn?

  • Zoning regulations greatly influence residential buildout potential.
  • Overall, communities' zones successfully direct growth to growth areas and away from rural and conservation areas.
  • Every community has areas with both high residential buildout potential and high suitability for concentrating housing development. These are great areas to focus efforts for new housing. 

 

Summary Table: Developable Lands and Buildout Results

 If your community is interested in an analysis like this, please reach out.