Maine permitted more housing than it planned to last year. The trouble is what kind of housing it was.
That was the takeaway from a Maine Monitor panel at the Belfast Free Library on Thursday, Oct. 1. Benjamin Hooper, a local developer who owns the Little River Homes subdivision in Belfast, said the biggest lesson in the state's new building permit data is that most new construction in Maine is either single-family homes or subsidized multifamily buildings. Market-rate apartment buildings aren't keeping up.
According to the Monitor's write-up, Hooper has seen firsthand how costs drive that imbalance in his own work.
What the data shows
The numbers come from the state's first-ever survey of communities on housing production, released in June. According to the governor's office, Maine communities permitted an estimated 7,499 new housing units in 2025, beating the state's goal of 6,900 by about 9%.
Look under the hood, though, and the mix tilts hard toward houses. Single-family homes made up 67% of all permitted units statewide. Buildings with five or more units were 20%, and accessory dwelling units were 7%. Towns reported permitting 722 affordable units, about 13% of the total.
Activity was concentrated in southern Maine. Portland led with 548 permitted units, followed by Biddeford (220), Lewiston (186), Sanford (180) and Windham (169). Towns of 4,000 people or more have to report; in the first year, 79 of the 88 required towns did, along with 103 that reported voluntarily, covering about 73% of the state's population.
The goals only get harder from here. The state's annual target climbs from 7,600 units in 2026 to 13,300 in 2030, on the way to the state's goal of 84,000 new units by 2030.
Codes, site law and 33 hearings
Hooper pointed to two big state-level drags on bigger projects. He said building code requirements and the Department of Environmental Protection's site law rules can discourage developers from taking on large projects. And because the Maine Uniform Building and Energy Code, known as MUBEC, is required in municipalities with more than 4,000 people but not in small towns, developers often find it cheaper to build outside cities.
Laura Mitchell, executive director of the Maine Affordable Housing Coalition, said material costs, workforce costs and interest rates are mostly out of the state's hands. What state and local officials can control, she said, is how long it takes to permit and approve a project. She cited a project in Cape Elizabeth that went through 33 public hearings as an example of excessive bureaucracy.
"Housing is expensive to build because of processes that we've created and are abiding by, and are changeable," Mitchell said.
She pointed to L.D. 128, a bill passed this year that should let developers save time on small multifamily projects. But she said there's more to do, including expedited permitting and a new level of building code for smaller multifamily buildings.
State Sen. Glenn "Chip" Curry, D-Belfast, who co-chairs the Legislature's housing and economic development committee, said the permit data will get more useful as trends emerge over several years. "You can't manage it if you can't measure it," he said, adding that counties and towns need to do their share.
Belfast itself is a case in point. Waldo County issued the second-lowest number of building permits of any county in Maine last year, and Belfast issued just 16. Mitchell noted Waldo County recently lost its maternity unit and called that a "rallying cry" for towns to make building easier, for example by pre-approving sites for certain densities.
"We need people here," she said. "So these services that we care about are here."
Why it matters for Contractors
If you build in Maine, this data is a map of where the work is and where it isn't. Single-family homes and subsidized apartments are carrying the load, while market-rate multifamily, the small apartment buildings a lot of mid-sized contractors would love to build, is lagging. The rules are a big reason why. MUBEC applies only in bigger towns, DEP site law can push developers away from larger projects, and approvals can drag on for dozens of hearings. Watch L.D. 128 and any push for a separate code tier for small multifamily buildings. If those take hold, the small apartment buildings that are hard to make pencil today could become a real line of work.