Maine is still building homes for seniors away from public transit

SACO, Maine — Maureen Sullivan has lived in the same place for more than 10 years. She didn’t know there was a public bus stop within walking distance until last week.

“You pretty much have to have a car,” Sullivan said. “I don’t know of anybody who takes the bus anywhere. We usually help one another.”

Sullivan, 75, lives in Cascade Brook, a 30-unit senior housing project off Route 1 built and managed by Avesta Housing. The nearest bus stop is a half-mile away, so most residents drive to get to the grocery store or to appointments or rely on those with cars. An on-demand shuttle will take residents places, but you have to call in advance.

Even senior developments considered walkable by the state are set away from transit lines, prompting a nuanced debate in Maine’s housing policy realm between those who want the state to pay to make bus lines more flexible and those who want cities and towns to pay more attention to the locations of new developments.

“I would argue that our current system, the way it’s structured, is not easily accessible,” Jean Saunders, the executive director of Age-Friendly Saco, said.

Residents of a new senior complex being built by Avesta in Biddeford will be a quarter-mile from a bus stop. To score well with Maine’s state housing authority, a housing project has to be within a “walkable” half-mile of public transit. That is walkable for many but not for those who live with disabilities or have mobility issues.

“It’s just not feasible,” Ryan Fecteau, a former Maine House speaker who works as a senior officer with Avesta Housing, said. “What [residents] end up doing is wait for that family member who will come around once a week.”

Even when housing projects are on a bus route, that doesn’t mean residents have around-the-clock access to transportation. One of Bangor’s largest public housing complexes, Capehart, is on the outskirts of the city. The bus route ends its service at 6 p.m., noted Mike Myatt, executive director of Bangor’s housing authority.

Fecteau and Saunders believe the state should invest in extending routes right up to people’s doorsteps. Avesta is in talks with local operator Chad Heid, the executive director of Biddeford-Saco-Old Orchard Beach Transit, to do that, but it’s not easy to add extra stops.

“We are in a resource-constrained environment,” Heid said. “Every new area or new trip request requires some tradeoff elsewhere in the network: less trips, less frequency, less reliability.”

To overcome that, Maine would need to send more funds to transit operators. More money for fuel, insurance, wages and benefits would allow routes to extend farther, more drivers to be hired and more buses to be purchased. As of now, Heid said his group gets nearly $32,000 of the $1.1 million allocated by the state to transit operators. Cities and towns cover the rest.

This would be a short-term solution, leading critics to ask why Maine is still building housing developments away from transit routes and amenities. In Cascade Brook, placing a senior housing project even a half-mile from a bus stop off a main thoroughfare has created an almost-entirely car dependent community.

“Maine really should be looking at putting new housing where it makes sense in the long term,” Nancy Smith, executive director of GrowSmart Maine, said.

For most housing providers, like BangorHousing and Avesta, siting housing developments within that half-mile “walkable” distance the state encourages is a first priority. But the severity of Maine’s housing crisis is forcing those like Myatt of Bangor to look farther afield to Levant or Old Town if the need is there, despite the lack of transit options.

To planners like Smith, who advocate against sprawl for its environmental implications and for the strain it places on municipal budgets, that’s not the best approach.

“Simply building out in green fields and rural areas and [saying], ‘We just need transit,’ is not the solution,” she said.