Francis Eanes

Long before Protect Lake Auburn signs appeared, and years before the fawning coverage of his plans to add 2,000 new homes, Mayor Jason Levesque trained his sights on Auburn’s Ag Zone. He blamed the Ag Zone — roughly 20,000 acres of forest, farmland and wetlands — for the city’s relatively high property tax rates.

When that didn’t get much traction with residents, he pivoted to Maine’s housing crisis to tell a new story: the primary culprit for high housing prices, he says, is too little supply, and the only way to increase the overall supply of housing is to “unleash the market” by taking a sledge hammer to decades of zoning and land use planning.

Never mind that “unleashing the market” in the decade leading up to 2008 nearly brought down the global economy, wiped out untold equity for millions of homeowners, and forced millions more out of their homes through eviction and foreclosure.

What makes all of these stories compelling is that they sound true. Property tax rates in Auburn are quite high compared to Maine and national averages. There is a very real shortage of housing in our city that’s financially in reach of working families, and an overall lack of supply has contributed somewhat to the overall rise in prices.

Unfortunately, these stories grossly oversimplify things, and the solutions the mayor is peddling won’t come close to addressing our urgent housing challenges — and might even make them worse.

High tax rates in Auburn, for example, are the result of mill owners offshoring thousands of unionized mill jobs in search of cheaper labor, systemically gutting our tax base. Building luxury homes in far-flung corners of Auburn’s Ag Zone won’t plug this hole: unlike compact development in the urban core, low-density housing costs far more in city services than it contributes in taxes.

When it comes to sky-high home prices, short supply tells only a small part of the story. With trillions of pandemic relief money to burn, Wall Street financial institutions are gobbling up homes en masse, converting some into rentals and flipping others just to make a profit. A growing number of Silicon Valley tech giants are turning an astounding amount of housing into more-profitable short-term rentals (like AirBnB), or using their algorithms to outbid regular homebuyers (like Zillow).

The myth of the “free market” distracts us from seeing how a small number of megacorporations use their outsized wealth to dominate an increasingly unequal marketplace. Cities that roll out the red carpet for profit-seeking speculators shouldn’t be surprised when housing that meets the practical needs of shelter is in short supply.

Some of the steps the city has taken recently, such as adding new multifamily affordable housing in our urban core and allowing accessory dwelling units, move us in the right direction. But there’s much more the city can do.

As a first step, the city council should establish a housing commission, staffed with members from every ward who have no conflicts of interest, and charged with deeply understanding and crafting proposals to address Auburn’s housing challenges. The commission should hold public meetings in every neighborhood in the city to actually hear residents’ housing needs and their ideas for how to build a city that meets everyday people’s needs.

If they did, they might hear demand for mortgage and tax relief from those struggling under high inflation, or see strong support for significantly expanding the city’s generous rebate-matching program to help homeowners save money through energy-efficiency upgrades. Maybe they’ll consider regulating short-term rentals like AirBnB, passing an eviction moratorium, or adopting rent-control measures to keep tenants housed amidst soaring rents. Likely they’ll hear about the importance of good transit options and walkable neighborhoods with safe routes to school for our kids.

Or perhaps they’ll see the wisdom in expanding last year’s groundbreaking $20 million bill to build green, affordable housing. Critically, this bill gets us beyond the zero-sum thinking that has plagued Mayor Levesque’s housing policies: at the same time as it finances dense, energy- efficient, and actually affordable housing, the bill sets high-road labor standards that not only begins to tackle economic inequality, but also trains the next-generation construction workforce we so badly need.

Building on this model, Auburn could use some of the city’s allocation of federal COVID relief funds to subsidize the rehabilitation of the former Lunn and Sweet mill building downtown, turning it into a community- and resident-controlled housing cooperative.

We need to grow our city with more housing in reach of working families, but how we do that matters. We must resist the false idea that addressing the housing crisis means sacrificing clean and affordable drinking water, strong labor standards, and the working farmland and forests that make our city a desirable place to live.

Francis Eanes of Auburn has previously taught and conducted research on sustainability, housing, and urban development.