MaineHousing policy generally requires one parking space for each apartment.

State Treasurer Bruce Poliquin has recently taken Maine’s affordable housing agency to task for the high costs the agency pays for new affordable homes. Much of Poliquin’s criticism is overblown political bluster: He is a Republican and Dale McCormick, who runs MaineHousing, is a Democrat.

Still, when MaineHousing is spending the public’s money on apartment buildings that cost more than $250,000 per unit, even liberals should admit that we should be building more homes with less money — and that Poliquin may have a point.

There are some legitimate reasons for MaineHousing’s projects being more expensive. They are more likely to make special accommodations for the elderly, for instance, and be located on more expensive in-town real estate where tenants have better access to jobs and services. Many of their projects take advantage of historic preservation tax credits, which attract more private-sector investment but also drive up the costs on the other side of the balance sheet.

All of these extra expenditures can be justified, because they ultimately provide better value to tenants, neighbors and taxpayers.

But there is one huge MaineHousing expenditure that is incredibly expensive, and incredibly damaging to its mission, to neighborhoods and to the public’s bottom line: free parking.

MaineHousing policy generally requires every new apartment it invests in to include at least one parking space. These state-mandated parking quotas are particularly onerous for developers who would like to build smaller, more affordable apartments, since it requires them to set aside nearly as much real estate for automobile storage as they need for rentable living space.

Want to build an affordable triple-decker within walking distance of downtown jobs and services? You would have to spend big bucks on an extra floor with a three-car garage. Want to build studio apartments for college students? Not all of them own cars, but you would still be forced to build a parking lot that is nearly the same size as the apartments themselves.

The net result of this unhealthy obsession with free parking is to drive up rental rates and diminish the supply of affordable homes available for the thousands of non-motorist households in Portland, Lewiston, Auburn and Bangor — the very cities where affordable housing is most needed.

So our housing agencies can offer at least one comfort to Maine’s homeless hordes this holiday season: They might not have a roof over their heads, but they will have plenty of parking spaces.

The current political controversy swirls around a project proposed for the corner of High and Danforth streets in Portland, where Community Housing of Maine, a local nonprofit, is planning to rehabilitate a historic building into 38 new apartments.

At a cost of $10 million ($264,000 per apartment), the price tag is justifiably raising eyebrows in Augusta.

But in addition to 38 apartments, the project also proposes to excavate an underground parking garage, at a cost of roughly a quarter of a million dollars, to hold just 11 cars (Portland planning documents reveal that the average construction cost for a single underground parking space is $25,000).

The proposed apartments lie within easy walking distance of thousands of jobs and most of the city’s bus lines, not to mention dozens of underutilized downtown parking lots.

To the agency’s partial credit, the developers did win a waiver from MaineHousing to build fewer parking spots. But the idea that they need to build any parking here at all, and at such an expense, is idiotic.

According to Census data, even middle-class households in downtown Portland are unlikely to own a single automobile. Why do cars at an “affordable” housing project deserve the Bruce Wayne treatment?

More importantly, why are we spending $250,000 of our state’s too-scarce affordable housing money on a parking garage that houses mute machines, instead of spending those dollars on apartments that house living, breathing, cold and destitute people?

A few blocks away, another MaineHousing project is seeking city approval for gates and fences around the little-used parking lot they were forced to build. That is because homeless vagrants are spending more time in the building’s first-floor garage than auto-owning tenants.

Which goes to show that, whether you build proper homes or a cold, barren garage, the destitute will find a way to shelter themselves.

And that is why MaineHousing’s policymakers need to meet some of the people who sleep on the crowded floors of our shelters. To think about how their careless addictions to free parking affect the people who struggle with darker addictions for the lack of a stable home.

And when they get back to their comfortable offices in Augusta, those bureaucrats need to stop forcing our underfunded social service agencies to spend millions of dollars on empty parking garages, and liberate them, instead, to build more of the affordable homes our communities really need.

Christian MilNeil is an economist, writer, and community activist in Portland, Maine. He blogs at vigorousnorth.com.