Will Maine’s blue economy get boxed out by wealthy vacationers?

“The lobster industry is really what's holding the coastal Maine economy together, and it's the wharves and piers that are on that interface of land and water that are critical spaces that make the industry possible,” said Hugh Cowperthwaite, senior program director at Coastal Enterprises, Inc.(courtesy of Steele Hays)

Mud season brings the illusion of stasis in Maine. The snow banks shrink and disappear, only to be replaced a few days later. Boots become stuck in the muck of a newly thawed garden.

The staccato rhythm of spring’s emergence suggests an aversion to change.

But in Stonington, a town known for its adaptability, change is happening at a disconcerting pace – threatening to remake economic life on the southern end of Deer Isle, and perhaps render it unrecognizable.

“We have a wall of water coming at us and a wall of money coming at us, both of which can knock out our infrastructure,” said Linda Nelson, the town’s economic and community development director.

In the right context, a wall of money might not sound like such a bad thing, but for many residents (and would-be residents) of small towns like Stonington, this wall has made home-buying an impossibility. Limited inventories and outlandish bids from deep-pocketed second- and third-home-buyers have pushed housing prices to record highs. In 2023, median home prices in Hancock County rose 32%.

Meanwhile, the waves keep getting higher.

“We’re losing our community,” Kathleen Billings, Stonington’s town manager, wrote in an email.

‘This town is not a bank’

The mood at the outset of Stonington’s annual meeting, held in early March, belied any sense of impending doom. Neighbors greeted one another with smiles, nibbled on the homemade treats in the back of the hall, and commented on the healthy turnout.

Community members were gathered to tend to a variety of town business, approving annual tax rules and rubber stamping a lengthy list of budget items, including requested increases for the fire department, library and local opera house.

Most of the articles on the docket passed with minimal debate, but just a few minutes into the meeting, the mood on the top floor of Stonington’s Town Hall shifted as the meeting’s moderator read a series of changes to local land-use ordinances.

Though some of the ordinance tweaks seemed benign — cleaning up discrepancies among local regulations, ensuring the roads in new housing developments are roomy enough for public service vehicles like ambulances and snow plows — dissenters expressed concern that these changes were being pushed through too hastily.

Like most zoning and land-use discussions, this one included lively debate about parking. One of the more substantial amendments sought to relax the parking requirements for property owners intent on turning the top stories of multi-story buildings into year-round housing.

All of the regulatory modifications (but especially the parking rule change), according to both Billings and Nelson, are part of a broader, on-going effort to expand the town’s affordable housing options.

While those who spoke in opposition were mostly short on specific objections, it was clear more than a few Stonington residents are upset about the possibility that new land use rules might dictate what they can or cannot do with their property.

“Our homes and property are our most significant investment,” said Genevieve McDonald, executive director of the nonprofit Island Workforce Housing.

McDonald, who served previously as a state representative, questioned the legality of the language in one of the ordinance changes and claimed the public had not been given enough time to review the amendments prior to voting on them. Amendment language was finalized during a public hearing seven days prior to the town’s annual meeting.

“There isn’t anything nefarious with what we’re trying to do,” Billings said.

Both Billings and Nelson said they weren’t surprised by the pushback. Many of the dissenters, they pointed out, were the community members most displeased by the short-term rental ordinance that was passed last summer.

“We know real estate is a very emotional issue for people,” Nelson said.

Nelson characterized the opposition as landowners concerned about their ability to make money off their properties.

“This town is not a bank,” she said. “It’s a community where people live.”

Increasingly, Maine’s coastal communities have become places for investors, big and small, to park their cash. A study published last year found one in five Maine homes put on the market are being bought by investors, defined as buyers who own three or more properties. Most of these investment properties become short-term rentals.

Stonington is one of a number of Maine towns trying to control the growth of short-term rental units, especially those owned and managed by investment firms. When, last year, the town required short-term rental units to officially register, half of the registrants turned out to be non-owner occupied properties. 

Maine should be more than just a pretty view. We don’t want to be a tee shirt and taffy shop town.

– Kathleen Billings, Stonington town manager

Positioned at the southern tip of a series of remote islands hanging off the Blue Hill Peninsula, where pine and prehistoric granite give way to the waves of the Atlantic, Stonington offers the kind of postcard-worthy vistas that can seduce the most seasoned travelers. When investors buy a property on Deer Isle, they do so knowing they can charge vacationers a premium for a few months each year (likely more than they might make from a full-time resident) while their much-coveted asset appreciates in value.

It’s not that visitors are unwanted in Stonington.

“Stonington understands the importance of tourism, but there is definitely a carrying capacity that they can’t exceed because they can’t service it and it would choke out other opportunities,” said Jim Damicis, founding partner of Camoin Associates, a consulting firm Stonington hired to help develop an economic resiliency plan.

Throughout the summer, as well as the other nine months of the year, Stonington is a working waterfront. The town’s quaint harborside village and surrounding neighborhoods are home to some 2,000 year-round residents.

“Maine should be more than just a pretty view,” Billings said. “We don’t want to be a tee shirt and taffy shop town.”

Threats to the blue economy

The same convergence of stone and sea that draws a seemingly ceaseless caravan of visitors each summer is what has long fueled Stonington’s economy. For centuries, Stonington families have harvested the region’s resources and postmarked them for distant markets. 

As early as the 19th century, workers cleaved massive hunks of granite from local quarries and schlepped them, along with lumber and other commodities, onto specially built schooners for destinations south. During the early 20th century, stone blocks exported from Stonington docks ended up in the foundations of dozens of famous buildings, bridges and monuments — and plenty of not so famous ones, too — from the Statue of Liberty to the U.S. Treasury Department.

By the middle of the 20th century, however, the flow of goods reversed. Locals took up fishing and began securing the sea’s bounty to be hoisted onto the docks and loaded into trucks. Fishermen first netted mackerel and cod, and later haddock and other groundfish, until stocks began to decline in the 70s and 80s, and locals once again pivoted, turning their attention to the succulent crustacean now synonymous with the Pine Tree State. For the last 30-odd years, lobster has ruled Maine’s maritime economy, and for most of those years, Stonington has been the state’s top lobster-landing port.

“The lobster industry is really what’s holding the coastal Maine economy together, and it’s the wharves and piers that are on that interface of land and water that are critical spaces that make the industry possible,” said Hugh Cowperthwaite, senior program director at Coastal Enterprises, Inc., a development group that provides financial services to underserved communities. 

Cowperthwaite and others recognize that these critical pieces of infrastructure are increasingly vulnerable to both rising sea levels and climate change – but also the prospects of neglect.

After a 25-year boomtime, lobster stocks have plateaued and begun to slump over the last several years.

“Around 2012, 2013, it really just exploded and there were tons of lobsters in our area,” said Joel Billings, a Stonington lobsterman. “During that time period, a lot of people got into it, and you couldn’t find a place to park at the pier.”

But Joel Billings said things haven’t been as good as of late. Though he still operates his lobster boat, a few years ago, he decided to get into the storage facility business.

“With my wife’s help, we were able to fit that into our life with three young kids without forgoing lobster fishing entirely,” Joel Billings said.

The other business has offered Joel Billings and his family some financial stability, but he knows it’s not going to save Stonington’s working waterfront, which is why he and others are cautiously optimistic about the prospects of aquaculture.

“I see opportunities all over the place for small aquaculture farms,” Cowperthwaite said.

Joel Billings said that if his children show an interest in joining Maine’s blue economy, he’ll encourage them to pursue aquaculture. But despite a bevy of programs aimed at training and encouraging fishermen to consider farming sea vegetables and raising oysters, the uptake among lobstermen has been slow (and near non-existent in Stonington).

Damicis of Camoin Associates said it’s important for Stonington to encourage a variety of business opportunities – “If you do too much of any one thing, it’s going to be a problem” – but he said it’s not time to abandon lobster fishing.

“The lobster industry is absolutely under threat as we know it,” Damicis said, “but right now it is still valuable and you can’t say it’s about to go away tomorrow.”

But whether it’s lobster today, or kelp tomorrow, the prospects for a year-round economy in Stonington depend on those connections between land and sea.

“I cannot stress enough the importance of infrastructure resiliency,” Damicis said.

It’s a common refrain among those who have invested their time and energy into preserving Maine’s coastal economies, especially in the wake of this winter’s barrage of storms, a couple of which brought hurricane-like winds and damaging tidal surges that destroyed lobster shacks and ripped pilings from docks.

A healthy economy requires jobs, workers and housing

As Kathleen Billings, Nelson and other local leaders work tirelessly to piece together grant funding from state programs and nonprofit organizations to bolster the town’s climate resiliency, they are also constantly looking over their shoulders, worried that wealthy home-buyers and real estate investors might slowly suffocate access to the waterfront.

“We need to have water frontage that is available to these guys to onload their bait and offload their product,” Kathleen Billings said.

Whenever they get the chance, Kathleen Billings and her staff try to find creative ways (usually with the help of outside funding and cooperative sellers) to purchase properties that can help the town preserve access to the water. Unfortunately, their resourcefulness is often unable to surmount that encroaching wall of money.

Kathleen Billings (right) and Linda Nelson (2nd from right) stand with Gov. Janet Mills and U.S. Sen. Susan Collins as they accept the Northern Borders Regional Commission Catalyst Grant on behalf of the town of Stonington. The town is using the $670,000 award to upgrade Oceanville Road to ensure climate resiliency and transportation of lobsters and other products critical to the local economy. (courtesy of Linda Nelson)

“A few years ago the town was very interested in buying the Old Quarry charters in Oceanville [an adventure kayak outfitter] that provided some great waterfront access,” Kathleen Billings wrote in an email. “But the owner got a much better offer than we could justify with an appraisal and we lost the opportunity to work with the land trust. It went to a very rich person who appears to be turning it into a seven-house family compound.”

Stonington’s efforts to preserve access to the waterfront and strengthen their shoreline infrastructure are vital to the cause, but on their own, they don’t guarantee a sustainable, year-round economy. A healthy economy requires jobs, and perhaps most importantly for Stonington, workers to fill those jobs – which is why housing remains the top priority for Kathleen Billings and her colleagues.

“I have had a very difficult time trying to hire people, because there are almost no houses available that match up with the salaries being offered,” Kathleen Billings said.

Data shows lobstermen are moving farther and farther from the coast – in Stonington and elsewhere – as a result of rising housing prices. Even as lobstermen continue to land their product at the Stonington docks, less and less of that money stays in the local economy as lobstermen migrate inland and stretch their commute.

It’s not just lobstermen. Kathleen Billings said the community needs a dentist, but again, recruiting has been a challenge. Almost every small business in Stonington has been affected.

A few years ago, when a veteran housekeeper at Boyce’s Motel got tired of renting and decided to look for an affordable home for her and her two children, she couldn’t find anything for miles. The employee and her family ended up in Old Town, an hour-and-a-half away, but she continued to drive to work each day for three more years.

“In June of 2023, between road construction, traffic and a speeding ticket trying to make it to work on time, we both decided that perhaps she should find work closer to home,” Boyce’s owner, Barrett Gray, wrote in an email. “She was a big asset to our team and it was tough to see her leave.”

Back at the town meeting, despite some spirited opposition, three of the four land-use amendments put forward by Kathleen Billings and the town’s Select Board were ultimately passed, suggesting the community, on the whole, is supportive of efforts to curb gentrification and expand housing options. For now.

Maine’s coastal communities are changing, Stonington included.

“The people these ordinance amendments are for aren’t here right now,” Nelson said.

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