Charting Maine’s Future

We’re very pleased to announce that GrowSmart Maine recently received two substantial challenge grants from the Maine Community Foundation and from an anonymous donor. In the next few months, membership dues and other contributions to GrowSmart Maine will be matched with funds from these grants.

We’d like to enlist your help in making the most of this opportunity. By visiting our secure webpages and becoming a member now, you can effectively double the impact of your membership contribution!

All of the work that we do to promote sustainable prosperity and quality places in Maine, from our advocacy in Augusta, to finding a common-ground solution for development debates in the Moosehead region, to our Model Town Project, is made possible with the support of our members.

A one-year membership in GrowSmart Maine starts at $25 and includes:

• A copy of the Brookings Report: Charting Maine’s Future;
• GroundWork, our monthly e-newsletter, and legislative updates;
• Invitation to members’ events such as our Annual Meeting, Holiday party, and Awards Dinner;
• Reduced admission to public events at GrowSmart Maine;
• Early registration for our annual Summit at a discounted members-only rate;
• The GrowSmart Maine bumper sticker!
• And, for a limited time, a matched contribution from these challenge grants that will double the impact of your contribution.

Follow this link to purchase a membership online through our secure webpages.

Thank you for your support and your interest in helping to shape Maine’s future.

A couple of fascinating articles published in the last week discuss how changing demographic and economic conditions in Maine and in the rest of America are expected to change the way our towns and cities grow.

First, the Maine perspective: an article in the Kennebec Journal observes that aging, empty-nest baby boomers aren’t as interested in spending their weekends on a lawnmower anymore. Even in the midst of a national housing downturn, developers are rushing to fulfill pent-up demand for smaller, in-town housing units within walking distance of stores and services. The article quotes GrowSmart Maine’s Alan Caron as well as David Goldberg of Smart Growth America, and discusses some of the in-town redevelopment projects that central Maine developers are currently working on.

On the nationwide front, a feature in the March issue of the Atlantic Monthly speculates that the national subprime mortgage crisis is just the tip of the iceberg in the sinking (or transformation) of the postwar suburban ideal. The author, Christopher Leinberger, is a Brookings Institution visiting fellow and “traditional neighborhood” developer. He cites changing attitudes about living in the city versus living in suburbs: whereas culture once idolized the cul-de-sac in TV shows like Leave it to Beaver, suburbs are now more frequently portrayed as places where seediness hides behind a veneer of normalcy in contemporary dramas like The Sopranos. Leinberger also cities the demographic changes discussed in the KJ article above: but besides the aging baby boom, the nation also has fewer families to fill our glut of suburban homes, while both retiring baby boomers and young creative class professionals are showing strong preferences for in-town living.

Leinberger seems a bit alarmist when he warns against suburbs becoming the new slums, with abandoned homes and shopping centers generating vicious cycles of suburban neglect and decay. But his advice that suburbs make themselves adapt to new market demands by investing more in walkable infrastructure and building new, mixed-use village centers is a sound prescription for diversifying the homogeneous kind of housing development that was partly responsible for the subprime mess.

A new bill in Augusta (LD 2082) could revise the state’s school construction rules to give a fairer shake to historic neighborhood schools, which often lie physically and socially in the hearts of Maine’s communities. GrowSmart Maine policy director Maggie Drummond writes about the proposed legislation in today’s Bangor Daily News op-ed page:

“[Current rules assume that] starting from scratch — replacing existing facilities with brand new construction — might be less expensive than retrofitting current buildings, or that new construction would better lead to greater energy savings. While sometimes that may be true, it is most always because we’re only looking at half the ledger. We’d also have to account for the true costs of demolition, transportation of students to remote schools for decades or the full impact of new construction on existing communities or open spaces.“

The GrowSmart-Brookings report “Charting Maine’s Future” observed that Maine’s total school enrollment declined by 13,000 students between 1995 and 2005, but the state funded 5 million square feet of new school construction in the same period, at a cost of $200 million. Encouraging the state to make better use of the infrastructure we already have (what Maggie terms “fix it first” in this column) could be a relatively painless way to make government more efficient and less costly to taxpayers.

We’ve updated our Legislative Advocacy web page with an overview of our top priorities for this winter’s short session in Augusta. Learn more about the bills we’re supporting, their status, and how you can help them on their way to becoming law at www.growsmartmaine.org/programs/advocacy.asp.

Developer Peter Bass, a longtime supporter of GrowSmart, is looking to gain final approval this month for an innovative condo building he’s planned for the corner of Danforth and High Streets in central Portland. The things that set this development apart are also, unfortunately, ideas that required long detours through the city’s planning and zoning regulations, but when it gets built, this building will provide affordable housing to small, middle-class households, without any subsidies from local, state, or federal governments.

The proposed building, looking north from the corner of High and Danforth Streets

Instead, the housing will be made affordable by foregoing expensive amenities that most city-dwellers don’t really want or need. The biggest cost saver: building only 14 parking spaces for 26 condos, and charging an additional $20,000 to any resident who wishes to reserve a parking spot. Two spaces will be reserved for what will likely be Portland’s first carsharing program, open to building residents only. Because the building will be constructed within walking distance of all of downtown Portland’s jobs and services, even those residents who choose to own a car will be able to save significant money on reduced transportation costs.

The homes will also be affordable by virtue of their relatively small sizes: mostly between 400 and 600 square feet. Shared amenities, like a basement workshop, indoor bike storage, a lounge, and a guest room will let residents share more space elsewhere in the building.

The proposed building, looking east from High Street

This unique project fills an important niche for Portland’s first-time homebuyers, but according to Peter, the project is getting widespread interest from all sorts of potential customers, even in the midst of a serious real-estate downturn.

“We initially thought our typical owner would be a newly-minted young professional who wants be close to city amenities,” writes Peter. “We have since learned who else is interested in Portland’s manageable urban lifestyle. Singles of all ages, especially women. Retired couples downsizing their lives. Islanders and people who work in Portland but live far away and want a pied-a–terre to make life easier.”

For more information, contact Peter at info@randomorbitinc.com

A feature editorial in Saturday’s Portland Press Herald takes Maine’s transportation bureaucracies to task for their lack of coordination and their free spending on compartmentalized transportation studies:

Maine has separate bureaucratic structures that oversee the turnpike and rest of the state’s road system. Alternative transportation gets some consideration, but there is little evidence that the entire transportation picture is viewed as a whole…

The weakness of the current approach is demonstrated by the lack of coordination between the plans for I-295 and the Maine Turnpike.

The turnpike, with its Falmouth spur, provides an efficient bypass around the city of Portland while Interstate 295 cuts the city in half.

While the turnpike collects tolls, I-295 is free. That discourages turnpike use while channeling traffic right through the middle of Portland’s downtown.

I-295 has become Maine’s busiest highway, and transportation planners say it needs to be widened in order to maintain safety. If approved, this would be the most expensive Maine highway project on the books, dominating federal highway funds.

But plans to change the toll structure on the turnpike, which could have an immediate effect on I-295 in greater Portland, are being conducted in a separate process run by the independent Turnpike Authority.

The editorial will be on the Press Herald’s website for the next five days; after that, you can read an archived copy here.

Tomorrow, the Legislature’s Business, Research, and Economic Development Committee will hold a work session on LD1215, an act to establish a “Fund of Funds” for venture capital investments in Maine.

GrowSmart is working to encourage passage of the bill, which is sponsored by Sen. Peter Mills of Skowhegan. The “fund of funds” idea has been pioneered in Utah, with significant success for that state’s innovation industries. The Fund of Funds would invest a certain amount of state money in venture capital efforts that specialize in growing Maine businesses: investors, not bureaucrats or politicians, would direct capital to its most effective use. The venture capitalists would then repay debts and profits to the state.

If there are losses, then the state would be on the hook to repay them up to a set obligation limit. However, since the average annual return on venture capital investments has been 17.9% in the past decade, the state is much more likely to earn a profit, even as it helps Maine industries grow.

We’ll keep you posted as this bill progresses through the Legislature. You can also track its progress at the Maine Legislature’s web site.

I just came across a nifty web application called Dapper, which can create new RSS feeds for websites that haven’t yet created their own.

RSS (rich site summary, or “really simple syndication”) is a standardized format that makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s much easier than checking them manually. As some of you already know, this blog has its own RSS feed: it delivers headlines from recent entries onto the sidebar of the GrowSmartMaine.org home page, and at the same time, it also delivers blog posts as soon as they’re published to subscribers’ e-mail clients, home pages, or online feed readers. If you see the logo at left on a web page, that means that it has an RSS feed to which you can subscribe.

By using a feed reading application like Google Reader, you can skim headlines and listings from many different RSS sources - blogs, national news sites, Craigslist ads, eBay listings, etc. - quickly and easily from one web page. It’s kind of like a custom-made, a la carte newspaper that’s constantly being delivered to your computer.

If you’re like me, you end up spending a good amount of time every morning visiting each of Maine’s major news websites to skim over the headlines, because Maine’s news sites haven’t yet implemented RSS feeds for their daily news articles.

Well, no longer! Using Dapper, I was able to create my own RSS feeds of news headlines from the Portland Press Herald and Bangor Daily News. Here they are:

• RSS feed for Portland Press Herald news headlines
• RSS feed for Portland Press Herald op-ed headlines
• RSS feed for Bangor Daily News headlines

I figure that these feeds ought to save you a few hours’ worth of time over the course of the year (one minute a day over the course of 250 workdays works out to be about 4 hours saved annually). If you create any other Maine headlines feeds using Dapper (I’d also like to get the Kennebec Journal, Forecaster, and Sun Journal), please let us know in the comments. And if you’d like to thank GrowSmart Maine for putting these together, please express your gratitude with membership.

The state planning office is seeking grant applications from towns and regional groups for its “Fund for Efficient Delivery of Local and Regional Services.” The deadline for this grant program is on Friday, February 15th, and $500,000 is available. According to Maine Coastal Program director Kathleen Leyden, “There have been proposals funded in the past that featured solutions to environmental problems like stormwater management, and projects that develop or implement interlocal management of coastal and marine resources would definitely be eligible.”

Potential applicants can learn more at http://www.maine.gov/dafs/fund.htm#002.

Saco Island’s mills may not manufacture textiles anymore, but starting soon, the mixed-use redevelopment will begin manufacturing clean, homegrown electricity:

Video courtesy of WCSH6 NewsCenter, originally broadcast on Tuesday February 5th, 2008.