This developer thinks sprawl is one of Maine’s biggest housing problems

Tom Landry has made housing his “life’s work.” Now the Portland-based developer, real estate agent and builder is writing down his take on Maine’s housing market.

Last week, Landry released a short book called “Priced out of Portland.” It examines some of the root causes of the housing crisis and advocates for solutions that include doing away with inclusionary zoning and limiting sprawl by adding density to downtown areas.

We sat down with Landry for an interview. His answers have been edited for length, clarity and brevity.

BDN: Your book is called “Priced out of Portland,” but a lot of what you write can be extrapolated and applied to other cities and other towns all across Maine. Why have communities of all sizes been so unable to respond to the changing market conditions of the last few years? Why are we so ill-equipped to meet this moment?

Landry: It’s a very valid question. I think that gets to the frustration people have, right? However, the population of Maine hasn’t increased except in the last several years . We’ve been chugging along, with maybe Cumberland County doing fairly well but still nowhere near the growth other places have seen.

You don’t build housing in advance of the need, so I think it’s OK to let ourselves off the hook. We weren’t going to build on spec when there was no demand. But now there’s demand, which really started because of COVID and the “ work wherever you want , live wherever you want” trend. Now you add in climate change, climate migration, and you wind up with this perfect storm.

We need to act swiftly. Nobody’s to blame, but we need to do something now.

That’s something you explore in your book: How do we build all this housing without worsening our climate crisis ? For you, the answer to that is density.

Oh, absolutely. We have to build significantly taller.

I think rural communities have much more at stake here, because if they can look at their downtowns and up-zone and rezone them, they’re going to create walkable environments. They’re going to create these vibrant downtowns which we saw 70 or 80 years ago, before the flight of people out of urban areas, before the automobile took over. I think we need to just get back to that.

These rural areas need to think about their zoning, and some of the worst zoning that they have is 4-acre minimum [lots]. The idea was to keep growth away. Well, it just created sprawl, and it’s just terrible for the environment, terrible for our way of life, and also is one of the things that we do that has the worst carbon impact. The zoning needs to change.

You write that, in meeting our housing goals, we need to “go beyond” affordable housing and unleash market forces to fill that void. But if we don’t mandate affordable housing construction, how are we going to sort of ensure that affordable units get built?

To me, that’s just a fundamental misunderstanding about how this works. The free market is going to apply. When municipalities do inclusionary zoning, you have consequences. It adds a level of complexity — usually cost — and it causes [developers] to pause. So how do you do it? You really try to streamline the process for building and building more of any type.

Does that also hold outside of southern Maine, where there’s less private demand?

Absolutely. It’s supply and demand, fundamental economics. If you increase supply, anything at any price point, it’s going to help meet that demand and drive prices down.

How big a role do you think the not-in-my-backyard phenomenon plays in our low housing inventory?

It is a huge thing. We say to ourselves, “Yeah, I’m all for housing, but,” you know? “Not by me,” or, “not if it affects my view.”

To me, the thing that’s going to help with the whole “NIMBY” thing is if municipalities up-zoned in places which are not going to cause consternation. If we build in the business zones, in the downtowns, those are already commercial areas.

That’s less chance for people to say, “Well, I don’t like that because it’s blocking my light or my view,” because it was always a business area. Let’s think strategically.

What do you hope reading your book inspires people to do?

I hope they get involved. I hope they say, “I have agency, I can go down to City Hall and talk to my planning department and talk to my economic development folks and say, “What are we doing right now, to plan ahead, not be reactive?”

We are in a reactionary mode. That’s fine, but we need to take fairly bold action because the demand is there. We know it’s there, we’re on the backside of that. We probably haven’t done enough and quickly enough. So, what are we doing right now?

I hope that people realize that they have a voice in this. We’re going to have [sprawl] if we don’t plan ahead and start to really rethink our zoning statewide.