Building homes and lifting lives

By Gov. Janet Mills

You know, every family should be able to make memories in their own home. Yet the national news is filled every day with stories about the difficulties in renting or buying a house, from California to Connecticut. Here in Maine, we’re doing something about it.

My administration is doing everything we can at the state level to build and preserve affordable housing, both homes and apartments, for Maine people. Recently, I signed into law L.D. 2116 to extend Maine’s landmark Affordable Housing Tax Credit. We extended it for another eight years. I signed legislation to establish that credit back in 2020 with strong bipartisan support in the legislature, and it was at that time the largest state investment in housing in Maine’s history. Since then, the Affordable Housing Tax Credit has helped preserve 108 units of affordable housing across the state, with another 824 units either built or currently in the pipeline for construction. The town of Washburn, for instance, utilized this affordable tax credit to purchase the Salmon Brook Meadows property, preserving 20 units for older adults in Aroostook County.

In addition to preserving housing, we’re building out our housing inventory so we can increase the availability of good homes for all Maine people. Since I took office, my administration has authorized more than $350 million to build more homes, more than five times what the state of Maine spent on housing production from 2000-18.

We’ve also worked with the legislature to enact zoning, land use, regulatory, and permitting reforms to allow the private sector to build more of the market rate homes that Maine people need. We’ve expanded tax relief programs like the Property Tax Fairness Credit, the Homestead Exemption and the State Historic Rehabilitation Tax Credit. We created the Mobile Home Park Preservation Fund so mobile home residents can purchase their own parks before wealthy out-of-state corporations can swoop in and buy them out from under them and then evict them.

And we’re also helping towns provide emergency housing shelters with wraparound services for people who are chronically homeless. Stable housing is the most effective way to help those people and to reduce costs for communities and for taxpayers.

It has been said that a life is measured not by what you build, but by who you lift. Well, here in Maine, we’re both building and lifting lives up, doing everything we can in a creative, innovative way to make sure people have a place to call home, either to rent or to own, a place they can afford here in Maine, a place to make their own memories in their own home.