Maine Voices: Stop shutting new residents out of our state

Just lately, communities throughout southern Maine have rejected new improvement proposals that might have helped alleviate our regional housing scarcity. Some municipalities have been extra accommodating – South Portland, Portland and my very own, Scarborough – however to ask a small variety of cities and cities to bear the brunt of the increasing inhabitants of southern Maine is solely unsustainable. The rejections, furthermore, come from all sides – not simply the liberal higher crust in Cape Elizabeth, predictably rejecting something besides extra mansions for the wealthy, but in addition from Kittery and Brunswick, each of which have rejected new builds and enacted moratoriums regardless of the rhetoric of their municipal complete plans.

The arguments of those noisy NIMBY naysayers are neither coherent nor backed up by actuality. On the one hand, inexpensive housing supposedly dilutes property values, though the mechanism by which this worth destruction works is unsupported by information or previous expertise. Others declare new residents disrupt our “character,” though Maine was constructed by outsiders, not solely from the suburbs of Boston but in addition from England, Quebec and, sure, Somalia. Some present their misanthropy by decrying the truth that new residents carry youngsters, who have to be educated – oh, the horror. And the entire arguments ignore the truth that as Maine ages, we’d like new employees to serve our faculties, shops, emergency companies and the elder care services, that are already strapped for employees. The newest argument, from a Kittery resident who claimed that new residents would dilute the worth of their vote on the town elections, appears to easily need all inhabitants enhance to cease.

These moratoriums are persistently pushed by a small however vocal cadre who really feel that renters and first-time homebuyers ought to grovel to be deigned worthy of residing right here, to the extent they’re allowed to return right here in any respect. Life in Maine is a blessing, there’s no query of that, however it’s not a privilege to be granted by those that care little for the longer term and easily grasp with chilly arms a imaginative and prescient of the previous that by no means was. Few of the obstructionists would welcome a return to the financial wasteland Maine confronted for a lot of the latter half of the twentieth century, when highschool graduates who had a alternative left the state en masse to search out alternative elsewhere – however their actions appear to encourage a return to that period of decay.

What’s attention-grabbing is that this isn’t a celebration political challenge, both. I lately ran for city workplace, and this terror of change exists throughout the political spectrum. Certainly, the one challenge uniting LePage and Mills voters appears to be “We hate development, we hate change, we hate outsiders and we would like the whole lot to cease.”

Maine must evolve, not stagnate; we’d like an open perspective towards change to retain the very best of our youth and provides them a Maine they could be a a part of for his or her whole lives, not simply as a dream retirement vacation spot. However the message we’re sending with the fear-mongered rejection of workforce and dense-scale improvement is saying one thing a lot completely different.

The signal that claims “Maine: The Means Life Ought to Be” has been round for a very long time, however alas, it’s now old-fashioned. Extra correct at this time could be “Maine: Solely Include Cash. And Children, Good Riddance, And Don’t Come Again Till You Have Some Money, Too.”

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