Each time I have moved in Maine, I have chosen multifamily living, or used the town’s existing accessory dwelling unit ordinance to create it. I’m surprised that people forgo the benefits simply because they don’t like the idea of sharing “their” space with another unit. Their loss, I say. My loss, they might say.

Keeley Crane Service lowers the second half of an accessory dwelling unit, or ADU, to its foundation in Topsham in 2021. Whether or not to allow the creation of an ADU should be left up to local governments and not handed over to state control, Christopher Hickey writes. Ben McCanna/Staff Photographer, File

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Christopher Hickey, a former member of the Gorham and Falmouth planning boards, is a Falmouth resident.

Having no converts after years evangelizing friends on creating an ADU, I can say with confidence that it’s not about statutory obstacles. However, not to be deterred, our studious studiers have announced – through the legislation L.D. 2003 – that, one way or another, my preference for higher-density living shall be yours, too. Now the law is marching across local land use codes in what strikes me as flawed political and cultural force majeure.  

In reviewing one study, I learned of areas within Greater Portland where multifamily housing is not just discouraged but completely prohibited. These include: state and municipal parks, schools, ponds, electrical substations, airport runways and cemeteries. Deering Oaks and Evergreen Cemetery alone account for one out of every 20 acres of land in Portland cited by the study as “not allowed” for multifamily development. Not In My Grave Yard, apparently. 

This would all be a very amusing example of GIS sophistry if it didn’t inspire state government to humiliate home rule authority and invent new veto power over municipalities. Studies often serve just to garnish the ideological biases already baked into the process. In this case, the study alleges that existing patterns of development reflect not benign expression of human preference, but a conspiracy of selfishness blocking our common prosperity.

Never mind that Maine has empty spaces the size of Rhode Island and post-industrial communities vandalized by globalization, the real menace is your too-large dooryard.  

Consider the awkward fact that Greater Portland towns already allow ADUs. These ordinances emerged from local public hearings to fit the goals of the subject community and yet still, few are built. Why? Because much to the chagrin of progressive housing experts, people show a continued, utterly suspicious preference for detached single-family dwellings in their purchasing decisions. 

In his book “The Vision of the Anointed,” the economist Thomas Sowell writes: “… processes which depend upon the direct experiences and revealed preferences of millions of human beings … are all treated as mere nuisances to be swept aside by public policy when these systemic processes impede the carrying out of the vision of the anointed.”   

Sowell’s “anointed” (née “experts”) believe that people cannot be trusted to organize their own lives and resources in a society with distributed authority. Negative externalities – pollution, traffic, depletion, disease, crime – are presumed to arise because we didn’t just let the smart people run everything. Indeed, it must be very annoying that we are constantly messing up their nice plan for our lives. 

Thus, in housing and elsewhere, I predict continued erosion of local control, with the sediment accreting to state and federal agencies. Never mind the poor track record of central planning to solve, let alone anticipate, novel problems. Because it believes government is supposed to engineer specific social outcomes, the bureaucratic state will always try to stuff 10 pounds of complexity into a 5-pound bag, concluding, “There, I fixed it.” Why the “fix” often creates other problems, equal to or greater than the original, is seldom asked. Please address all inquiries to the Maine State Department of Unintended Consequences. 

Although our most recent tenant went Down East for improved cost of living, buying a quaint and affordable home with an ocean view, this was apparently a defective result. Dreaming of a four-bedroom home on 5 acres in Cornish and willing to grind out the commute? Sorry, you belong in an apartment in South Portland, traveling by bus. Motivation from places of high competition for resources to places of low competition for resources – the driver of human migration for the past 50,000 years – is evidently now a curable condition. L.D. 2003 is from Augusta, and it’s here to help.