When an old church on Congress Avenue in Bath went on the market a few years ago, Bath Housing Executive Director Debora Keller saw an opportunity.

“That site came available, and we just grabbed it, we bought it. We didn’t have a plan,” she said.

This was part of their new model, a shift from how housing authorities have operated in the past.

“We don’t know if we’ll develop it. We don’t know if we’ll find a partner, but we think it’s a good site for some type of housing,” Keller said, “and we want to be part of the divisioning, the strategy of making that happen.”

Communities throughout the state have had to rethink their approach to housing as Mainers have faced soaring rent and home prices over the last five years. The growing housing crisis has put pressure on municipalities to ramp up production, but rising construction costs and other factors have made building more difficult since the pandemic.

In some cities, housing authorities are stepping up to help their communities figure out how to navigate the increasingly complex landscape of building and preserving housing.

Historically, housing agencies largely managed voucher programs and low-income public housing. But in the last decade they’ve taken on more real estate development, and are increasingly partnering with private developers to get different kinds of projects built.

“It’s great to see housing authorities stepping forward to recognize how important it is for them to play a role and to use these new resources to develop in their communities,” said Liza Fleming-Ives, executive director of The Genesis Fund, which works with groups throughout the state to help finance and coordinate new housing projects.

As community needs have changed, housing authorities have changed with them, Fleming-Ives said. They’re no longer just managing low-income rental units, but using new state funding pools to address housing needs across different income levels through affordable home ownership projects, partnerships with private developers and local employers, and smaller-scale rental housing in rural Maine.

“They may be more uniquely able to blend some sources, both federal and state, to make development happen,” Fleming-Ives said.

A 2023 Maine Housing study outlined the severity of the housing crisis, finding that the state needs to add at least 76,000 housing units by 2030 to account for the current shortage and projected population growth.

Since Gov. Janet Mills took office in 2019, the state has invested $315 million in housing, adding 2,100 new apartments and homes, Jackie Farwell, spokesperson for the Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and Future, said in an email. Another 1,800 units are currently under construction, and Maine Housing has approved an additional 1,500 for financing.

The state doesn’t currently have a reliable way to track total housing production, but legislation passed this year will require municipalities of at least 4,000 people to report building permits, demolition permits and certificates of occupancy. The first full year of data will be released in early 2027.

Barriers to building vary depending on the area. High construction costs remain the biggest obstacle, but complex water and sewer hookups, community opposition and zoning challenges have also led projects to fall through before construction crews break ground.

Overcoming these challenges requires thinking outside the box to get projects approved, funded and built quickly, which Keller of Bath Housing thinks housing authorities are well positioned to do.

In Bath, her group works directly with residents to understand what communities want — and don’t want — to try and ensure projects don’t get killed. They also have the ability to navigate the complicated landscape of grants, low-interest loans and other funding sources that for-profit developers may not have access to, and have an established relationship with the city government.

Housing authorities in other parts of the state, including in Bangor, Biddeford and South Portland, have also made concerted efforts to ramp up production in recent years.

A critical part of that shift has been investing in a real estate development team, said Mike Myatt, the executive director of Bangor Housing.

Before the pandemic, Myatt was managing the day-to-day work of Bangor Housing and squeezing in real estate development work at night. But the pandemic moved his focus away from development and toward Bangor Housing residents who needed more support. Since then, Myatt said they’ve been able to hire a full team to focus on pursuing new projects.

“Once I finally figured out that that was the missing piece, we’ve taken off like a rocket,” Myatt said.

Bangor Housing added 32 income-restricted units in 2023, and has plans for 130 more in the coming years, addressing about a quarter of the city’s current shortage of 700 rental units for low-income residents, Myatt said.

The Developers Collaborative is one of the main developers behind affordable housing in the state, sometimes working in partnership with housing authorities. The firm has worked on at least 40 projects in 16 different cities and towns, from homeless shelters in Portland to workforce housing in Ellsworth. They’ve also done market-rate, commercial and historic preservation projects.

“The great thing about housing authorities… is that they are firmly rooted in one town,” said the collaborative’s founder, Kevin Bunker. “They have that holy pulpit of ‘we are part of the community. We are you. We are your neighbor.’ If they leverage that, it’s very powerful.”

Housing authority leaders said they have had failures that taught them how critical it is to involve different community groups in the conversation and address concerns early on.

In 2017, Bath Housing and The Szanton Company, a real estate developer and property manager, proposed a workforce housing development for a vacant site that met vocal opposition from community members concerned the site didn’t have enough parking. The city ended up tabling the project. While frustrating, it forced them to reflect on how they needed to change their approach, Keller said.

“As we started thinking about partnering with other developers and thinking about other projects, we went about it really differently,” Keller said, “making sure you’re really having conversations and listening to the people that will be impacted by the project early.”

A couple of years later, when two historic buildings downtown and a parking lot nearby came on the market, Bath Housing bought them with the intention of keeping costs stable for the commercial and residential tenants. They also hoped the parking lot could be used for a future housing development.

They passed the property off to The Szanton Company, which renovated 10 existing units in the building and added four new apartments on the upper floor. They also built The Uptown, a 46-unit building for seniors with mixed income levels on that same vacant site next door. With the addition of the parking lot they were able to get the building approved with less opposition.

Local business owner John Ring runs Open Door Books, specializing in rare, used and out-of-print titles, out of the first floor of one of those historic buildings on Front Street in downtown Bath. When The Szanton Company finished renovations, Ring said they offered him a unit.

“They called me first because they knew I was looking,” he said. He was living in Brunswick at the time and the renovation allowed him to move back to town, right above his business. “It’s very convenient,” he said.

Ring said the previous owner had prioritized renting to small businesses at an affordable price, something The Szanton Company has continued to do.

“They’ve been able to keep the rents low,” he said.

Since then, Bath Housing has cut the ribbon on a new 18-unit building and has helped facilitate another 155 units that are in the works, all set to be built by the end of 2027. The projects target a range of different income levels, from low-income to those making slightly above the median income in Bath.

Although Bath Housing helped arrange the development of these projects, they don’t always own or manage the property. In some cases they are just “stewards of the land,” Keller said.

The old church on Congress Avenue is one of those.

They ended up selling that property to Bath Iron Works and the Developer’s Collaborative, where they’re building 84 units of housing for Bath Iron Works employees. Bath Housing is also building a new 47-unit project and replacing a dated senior living complex on the same block. And they’ve reserved a piece of land for single-family homes and duplexes to match the feel of the neighborhood.

Bunker of Developer’s Collaborative said Keller played a key role in making sure the Bath Iron Works project and nearby developments met the needs and expectations of the neighborhood, and it was a condition of the sale that they build something in line with what she had spent at least a year pitching to the community.

The work being done by Bath Housing and other housing authorities may serve as a blueprint for how smaller communities can attack their housing shortage, said Mathew Eddy, the executive director of the Midcoast Council of Governments.

“Bath is a really good example of a community that uses all of its resources to create the housing that they need,” Eddy said. “You cannot do these housing projects without having everybody engaged.”

The Midcoast Council of Governments is piloting a program called “Housing Forward,” designed with input from Keller and other leaders in the region, to help neighboring towns develop a targeted strategy to address their specific housing challenges. They hope to get their first pilot community started in the coming weeks.

What works in Bath might not make sense for smaller towns or more rural areas, but there’s still a need for a cohesive approach across the region, said Alexis Mann, a senior policy strategist who oversees housing initiatives at the Midcoast Council of Governments.

The plan is for three municipalities in the region to go through the certification process over the next year, where the council will support them in identifying what they need most and how to approach the problem.

The framework outlines three priorities — building new projects, preserving existing homes and making sure projects and policies are inclusive and align with local needs — and the tools to address them.

If an area’s top concern is maintaining current housing, potential tools include adopting a short-term rental policy or designating funds to support housing preservation projects. If the goal is to build, streamlining the permitting process or updating zoning regulations is an option.

“The idea for this framework really came out of learning best practices from what is being done by creative housing authorities like the one in Bath,” Mann said. “There needs to be the flexibility for communities to choose what pieces of this puzzle are right for them, with an understanding that those pieces fit within a larger framework.”

This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.