The latest edition of GrowSmart Maine’s GroundWork e-newsletter went out late last week with news of our victories in the State House and links to press articles about us and our issues from the past month.
Click here to read the newsletter on our website, or click here to subscribe to our monthly e-mail newsletters.
Along with all of our work done in the state house, our Model Town project in Standish continues to make progress with implementing concepts from the GrowSmart-Brookings report on the local level. Standish’s recently-completed comprehensive plan placed a high value on preserving the town’s sense of community and rural character, and towards that end, the town is working to direct development to revitalized village areas, instead of developing in the town’s farm fields, orchards, and forests.
The town recently commissioned a Standish Corner Village Master Plan from landscape architect Mitch Rasor of MRLD, and a newly-formed implementation committee is examining how the town’s zoning and development guidelines should change to make the plan a reality.
Right: Proposed new village center zoning from MRLD’s master plan. Click here to enlarge.
We’ve created a new web page for the village planning committee, including planning materials, meeting documents, and maps. If you’re from Standish, feel free to read through and get involved; if you’re from another town, it’s our hope that you might incorporate some of these ideas or materials in your own planning processes.
A recent Fred Nutter editorial on WCSH 6 complimented our work to get a statewide building code implemented in Maine and outlines some of the new law’s anticipated benefits. Nutter notes that the statewide code was part of the “action plan for sustainable prosperity” from the GrowSmart-Brookings report, and he concludes that “now it is time to move on to the remaining Brookings recommendations.”
According to conventional wisdom, it’s cheap to live out in the hinterlands, where property taxes are low and you can get more house for your money.
But with gasoline prices zooming towards $4 a gallon, the amount of money that Americans are spending on their cars is beginning to rival the amount of money they spend on their homes. Indeed, rising transportation costs have been a big contributing factor to households’ falling behind on their subprime mortgage payments.
A new tool from the Brookings Institution and Chicago’s Center for Neighborhood Technology maps out which neighborhoods are most affordable when transportation costs are taken into consideration (transportation costs were calculated from a combination of census data variables and geographic variables). These maps only cover major metropolitan areas, but luckily, they included little Portland, Maine as well (CNT also wrote the recent economic impacts report for the Downeaster, which may be why they included Portland in this study).
First, here’s a map of the greater Portland region. Based on the median household income of $44,707, the tan areas are places where housing costs take up less than 30% of the median household’s expenses - the conventional definition of affordability. The blue areas are neighborhoods where housing costs more than 30% of the median household’s income.
This map generally adheres to what most Mainers would expect - housing is expensive in the tony waterfront suburbs of Cape Elizabeth, Falmouth, and North Yarmouth, and also in the Lakes region. But housing is cheap in the inland suburbs of Buxton, Standish, and Gray.
Now here’s the same map with average transportation costs, based on census data, added in. Now the tan areas are places where housing PLUS transportation costs add up to less than 45% of the median household income. Blue areas are neighborhoods where housing and transportation costs add up to OVER 45% of household income.
In this view, most of the greater Portland area is unaffordable. The close-in neighborhoods in and surrounding the Portland peninsula are affordable, as well as the neighborhoods near downtown Westbrook, Old Orchard Beach, and downtown Freeport. Probably not coincidentally, fingers of affordability extend away from downtown Portland into North Deering, the Mall area, and Westbrook along the city’s bus lines.
These maps are interactive on the CNT website - you can dig deeper into the Portland region’s data by following this link. Clicking the “advanced” link in the upper-left corner of the mapping site will allow users to view more in-depth data on the census statistics behind the affordability calculations, including information on employment density, housing rents, and vehicle miles travelled per household.
GrowSmart Maine’s education committee has produced a new educational brief for citizen planners and municipal policymakers around the state. “Smart Transportation Choices” illustrates the impacts that transportation infrastructure can have on Maine’s “quality of place,” and offers suggestions for communities eager to make their streets contribute to, instead of detract from, their towns’ vitality, health, and mobility.
As reported in today’s Bangor Daily News and the Portland Press Herald, the Maine Technology Institute (MTI) has published a new report on the status and potential of Maine’s industrial clusters - collections of smaller businesses that possess tremendous growth potential in the aggregate.
MTI is a research and development organization highlighted in the GrowSmart-Brookings report, “Charting Maine’s Future,” as a good investment for the state’s future innovation economy. Our report also discussed clusters at length - groups of similar small businesses in Maine that together constitute a promising source of economic growth. Examples of clusters in Maine include composite materials businesses (especially composites involving forest products), environmental technology, precision manufacturing, and value-added food products (organic farming, e.g.).
MTI’s newly-released report also contains strategies for growing these clustered industries in Maine. As part of our “action plan for sustainable prosperity in Maine,” GrowSmart has been working hard to include cluster enhancement funds in the state budget. These grants, administered by MTI, can foster cooperation and collaboration within these specialized industries. By growing these clusters, which include some of our most promising emerging industries and small businesses, we can provide new and expanded economic opportunities to Mainers.
Maine’s Senate just voted to approve An Act to Establish a Uniform Building and Energy Code, with statewide enforcement (20 in favor, 15 opposed).
Following Friday’s passage of the bill by the House, this item from the Brookings Institution’s “action plan for sustainable prosperity” is well on its way to becoming state law.
This act of legislation attracted more advocacy from our members than any other issue we’ve worked on - something we consider fairly remarkable, given the relatively technical nature of the issue.
Many, many thanks to the dozens of you who wrote to your Legislators or called the State House to urge this bill’s passage. This bill had some powerful opposition from some of Augusta’s more formidable lobbying groups, and we absolutely couldn’t have done this without your grassroots support.
We’re looking forward to getting rid of the old regulations once and for all and clearing the way for new investments in Maine’s towns and cities.
Last year, the Portland Community Chamber produced Looking Out for Portland and the Region 2007, a report that shared several similarities with our own Charting Maine’s Future report: the Portland Chamber documented the region’s many assets, but also warned that a weakening economy and the burden of old, cumbersome regulations might threaten the region’s long-term vitality.
The Chamber of Commerce then followed up with a task force that was charged with making and implementing recommendations that could address the region’s challenges. Last week, that task force issued its own report: a sort of “action plan” for prosperity in the Portland region.
In general terms, the task force recommended that the region focus on developing an economic development strategy, and streamline the regulations and planning reviews that can make good projects difficult to build in the city.
One of the more intriguing ideas called for an independent development corporation charged with overseeing large-scale developments.
This is an idea that’s been quite successful in larger cities: the other Portland’s Portland Development Commission has used urban renewal funds to spur a remarkable amount of downtown economic development and revitalization in the past three decades, and Boston’s Redevelopment Authority helps guide large projects through that city’s complicated regulatory process. In both cases, the development corporations use public and private money to generate new jobs and promote the kind of pedestrian-friendly, downtown developments that help cities thrive.
The task force also urged the city of Portland to streamline its political processes, eliminating the need for planning board reviews of small projects and delegating the city council’s time-consuming liquor license renewals to staff or subcommittees.
Download the task force’s full report from the Portland Regional Chamber web site.
Maine’s House of Representatives just voted (78 in favor, 58 opposed) to adopt the majority report recommendations for a uniform building and energy code in Maine - including consistent statewide enforcement standards among all towns with more than 2,000 residents. The bill now heads for the Senate, where we expect a closer vote.
Thanks for all your advocacy on this issue so far - GrowSmart advocates have sent hundreds of letters and phone calls to our representatives in the State House to help the best version of this bill get passed. Even if you’ve already written to your representatives, consider calling your senators one more time to urge them to vote for this bill as amended, with statewide enforcement. Call 287-1540 or 1-800-423-6900 to leave a message for your senator.
Maine has neglected its railroad infrastructure for decades, but with skyrocketing diesel fuel prices, increasing disillusionment over hours spent behind the driver’s wheel, and concern over carbon dioxide and other forms of air pollution from motor vehicles, a growing chorus of Mainers is calling for new investment and new services on our state’s freight and passenger railroads.
A recent report from the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a smart-growth ally based in Chicago, has evaluated the various economic benefits of the Downeaster’s passenger service. In just a few years of operation, the Downeaster has already helped to spur major investments in quality, downtown developments near its stations: the developers of the Saco Island project cite the train as a major factor in their decision to rehabilitate that city’s historic mills, and passenger rail access has given new vitality to Old Orchard Beach with major new condominium developments. In Portland, the long-underutilized Thompson’s Point industrial area is now being marketed as an urban transit-oriented development opportunity. In Brunswick, a major downtown, mixed-use development is being planned merely in anticipation of the passenger rail service that state officials have long promised for the town:
Maine Street Station, Brunswick
CNT calculates that the cumulative investments in downtown development that the Downeaster could catalyze might add up to over $7 billion in the next 20 years, providing over 40,000 new housing units and almost 7 million square feet of office space with easy access to transit. The service will also save Maine commuters a quarter billion dollars in transportation costs every year by giving us an alternative to driving, and these new transit-oriented developments will provide an extra $76 million annually in new state and local tax revenue.
Nationwide, the Wall Street Journal has reported on new, multi-billion-dollar investments in America’s privately-maintained freight railways, especially as trucking companies struggle with rising fuel prices and urban congestion. According to the Journal, “a load can be moved by rail using about a third as much fuel as it takes to haul it by truck. And rail transport is becoming more efficient still, [railroads] say, as operators speed their lines and logistics companies build huge warehouse areas along routes.”
The Maine House of Representatives recently approved LD 2019, which would expand Downeaster service north to Brunswick by making improvements to a key freight railroad that connects Portland to the northern part of the state. By investing in this relatively short connection, visitors from the south will be able to ride trains all the way to Rockland in the summer on the privately-run Maine Eastern Railroad, and future passenger connections to Lewiston/Auburn, Augusta, Bangor, and even the Canadian cities of Montreal, Quebec, and St. John would be possible.
Maine’s Senate will vote on LD 2019 very soon - if you’re interested in supporting transit-oriented economic development in Maine, look up your Senator’s contact information here and give them a phone call or send them an e-mail message.
Read the Center for Neighborhood Technology’s full report on the Downeaster’s economic impacts here.
