In his recent State of the City address, Auburn’s mayor correctly identifies major challenges facing the city: generational poverty, food insecurity, an above-average property tax rate, and a lack of affordable and equitable housing. He is also correct to focus on housing as the basis for addressing the other challenges and achieving “equity for all residents.”

The core of the mayor’s housing vision consists of taking advantage of Auburn’s 70 square miles to encourage the development of 2,000 market-rate homes. Doing this will, in his words, require stripping away “needless regulation and red tape,” revising “biased” and “unfair” zoning ordinances, and restoring a belief that “individuals, not government, will continue to grow and become vibrant and sustainable.”

Sadly, by relying on a market-driven growth-at-all-costs approach to urban development, his prescriptions not only fail to address Auburn’s real challenges, but may unintentionally make them even worse.

Based on recent debates over the Ag Zone and increased development around Lake Auburn, many of the 2,000 homes he envisions will presumably take shape as single-family dwellings in outer-lying areas of the city. The record from other communities on this kind of development pattern is clear: low-density sprawl will invariably cost the city much more in public service costs than what it will contribute in property taxes. It will lead to more vehicle traffic, less walkable and vibrant downtowns, degraded water quality and forests, and fewer social connections among neighbors.

To be fair, the mayor supports some density and infill development. Plans like the New Auburn Village Center are a good start in this direction, but simply expanding housing supply with market-rate homes will not serve the majority of Auburn residents. The pandemic has exacerbated material and labor shortages in Maine’s construction sector, driving prices up dramatically such that even a modest 3-bedroom ranch with no garage goes for $250,000 and an entry-level cape for $275,000, not to mention tens of thousands more for land. The median Auburn household would need to spend more than half their income on housing to afford this version of the American Dream.

Growth alone doesn’t lift all boats equally. Just look at Portland’s well-documented housing crisis, which despite massive increases to its market-rate housing stock has squeezed the budgets of even solidly middle-income professionals like teachers and nurses, and pushed lower-wage service workers into far-flung suburbs. Gentrification and displacement of working people, fueled by a market-friendly growth-at-all-costs approach, continues to roil cities of all sizes, from Boston and San Francisco to Madison, Wisconsin and Auburn, Alabama.

Finally, the notion that unregulated markets and private investment will lead to housing equity should sound suspicious to anyone with a memory of 2008’s calamitous housing bubble, crash, and recession. Governments large and small have always intervened in markets; the question is whether they do so on behalf of everyday working people and communities, or in the interest of a wealthy few.

Fortunately, there are alternatives to the false choice between doing nothing and market-rate growth.

The city can encourage density and a more-compact city by eliminating or relaxing minimum parking requirements, which add enormously wasteful dead space and financial costs to compact urban development while undermining transit, walkable neighborhoods, and downtown businesses. They can revise zoning codes to allow “tiny homes” and other accessory dwelling units in residents’ backyards, providing affordable options in which caregiving adults can house an aging parent. Or they can follow a growing number of American cities that have eliminated single-family zoning altogether and allowed the construction of multi-unit housing, which is more economical than detached homes.

They can create an interest-free revolving loan fund to stimulate much-needed weatherization and energy efficiency in Auburn’s aging housing stock, with savings from these investments paid back, often quickly, into the fund. This would provide physical comfort and savings to households paying hundreds of dollars a month in home-heating costs, and help reduce the city’s impact on climate change.

Or they can take steps to democratize housing and treat it as the public good that it is, by actively supporting housing cooperatives and community land trusts. They can partner with Lewiston and Portland to lobby in support of the Green New Deal for Housing Act or the Homes for All Act, which make major federal investments to overhaul and add to the nation’s stock of public housing, making it into attractive, green, social housing where people are proud to live.

Whether pursued alone or together, these innovative approaches to housing can address the big challenges that the mayor rightly identifies, while putting the city on the pathway toward a future that is truly sustainable and equitable for all.

Francis Eanes teaches and researches urban sustainability in the Environmental Studies program at Bates College.

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