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rising costs in materials, and labor shortages met with an increasing population, relatively stagnant wages, and outdated land use regulations.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. 


2026 Project Spotlight: Plans to Porches Toolkit

Funded by the Phase IV of the Joint Land Use Study with the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard and the Town of Kittery, SMPDC created a concise, information packed toolkit included four regulatory strategies to increasing housing production that suits municipal needs and design desires. 

Plans to Porches Toolkit

 

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.