Dear Editor:

The latest solution for the housing shortage from Maine Housing is shared housing, in which two or more unrelated people share a house or apartment. and the state helps to make the connections. It beats living at a 200-bed-per-room homeless shelter built by CEI and its for-profit subsidiary, Boulos Realty, in an industrial opportunity zone in Portland.

The cause of the housing shortage is obvious because the world has never seen this situation before where there is a housing shortage in most communities everywhere in the world, but the developers and realtors who did the study for the Legislature for the recently enacted LD 2003 HP 1489, decided not to include the cause in the study and instead to attribute the shortage to “underproduction of housing.”

According to this interactive timeline, in 2008, when Airbnb was born, the population of Maine was 1,330,509. In 2023 the population is 1,395,702, that’s an increase of 65,193 residents in 15 years, an increase of .048%

In 1970 the population was 993,732 and in 1985 it was 1,162,936, an increase of 169,214 people in 15 years, or 17%. Did we have a housing shortage in 1985?

According to the Bangor Daily News, between 76,400 to 84,300 new homes need to be built in Maine by 2030, to meet current demand and to allow the state’s population to grow,

The number of homes we are told will be needed (76,400 to 84,300) in the next six years is greater than the population increase in the last 15 years (65,193).

The articles authoritatively state how many houses we need to build but in terms of population increases the math only makes sense if the plan is to expand the short-term rental business, taking up homes that used to house the permanent residents and moving the permanent residents into overcrowded undersized housing units. That’s the plan called for by HP 1489, an assault on Home Rule if ever there was one.

Wouldn’t it be less costly, more enlightened, and better for the environment, to regulate the short-term rental industry instead?

Susan Mackenzie Andersen

Boothbay