Chipping away at the housing crisis, one vacation rental unit at a time
OTHER NEWS: Winners/losers in court victory for affordable housing in NEH; KKK in Maine in the Twenties; Strong showing at DOT meeting in SWH, will it matter?
BAR HARBOR, June 30, 2024 - Short-term vacation rentals here continue to decline, albeit slowly, since the town began requiring permits in November 2021.
A total of 634 permits were granted by the annual May 31 deadline for applications and renewals, according to Angela Chamberlain, code enforcement officer. That compared with 642 in 2023 and 681 in 2022.
Rentals with VR2 permits - non owner-occupied units with a four-night minimum - made up the largest decline, from 522 permits in 2022 to 470 this year. That is a material change because VR2s are seen as a much bigger contributor to the housing crisis than a homeowner whose is just renting out rooms.
The goal of the vacation rental ordinance enacted in December 2021 was to stem the growth of STRs, which many blamed for the decline of affordable housing for year-round residents. The ordinance capped STRs until their total dropped to 9 percent of the town’s 3,000 dwelling units.
They are still higher than 20 percent of the housing stock, and critics have pointed to that as evidence the ordinance is not working.
However, they failed to account for the growth which might have happened without the cap.
Since 2022, Bar Harbor is the only town in the Rt. 3 corridor, including Trenton and Ellsworth, which did not show a growth in STR rentals.
AirBNB and VRBO, the online companies which facilitate short-term rentals has downgraded Bar Harbor as a favorite destination. It has only 539 active listings, according to AirDNA, the STR data provider. (Not all permit holders rent out their houses the entire season.)
Meanwhile, the Ellsworth market, which has no cap on STRs, has become the darling of STR rental companies in the region with 597 active listings, or an 18.4 percent growth over one year - 2022 to 2023.
Other MDI towns without any caps are not far behind Ellsworth. Tremont, Mount Desert and Southwest Harbor all showed double-digit increases in STRs since 2021.
Bar Harbor’s ordinance is tiered to favor owner-occupied STRs - presumably because an on-site landlord would be more sensitive to the potential chaos from bad behaving tenants.
Such landlords may rent their rooms but at a two-night minimum.
As a result, 27 percent of STRs in Bar Harbor are in the 1-to-2-night category, including hotels and motels which also advertise on AirBNB and VRBO, according to AirDNA. Single nights are 12.6 percent of Bar Harbor’s STR listings.
In the Ellsworth market, that segment is 43 percent. That translates into a lot more visitors and a lot more transient traffic.
Bar Harbor’s biggest segment is 4-6 nights at 41 percent. Ellsworth’s is less than half that. The following are AirDNA data for Bar Harbor, Ellsworth and Southwest Harbor.
While Bar Harbor did a good job clamping down on STRs, it allowed tourist business owners to acquire year-round homes to house their seasonal staff with no restrictions.
Last November Town Council member Gary Friedmann called out the largest concessionaire for Acadia National Park which operates the Jordan Pond House restaurant, for its takeover of the Compass Harbor apartments on Lower Maine Street and then evicting its year-round residents.
The taking of year-round homes for seasonal staffing is not just a Bar Harbor problem.
At the Mount Desert Planning Board meeting June 12 when the massive expansion of the historic Asticou Inn was unanimously approved, engineer Greg Johnston said in response to questions that the owner (Tim Harrington, who also owns the Claremont Hotel in Southwest Harbor and the Salt Cottages in Bar Harbor) has employee housing “all over Mount Desert Island.”
Employees who cannot afford to live here commute by car - often long distances - and exacerbate parking congestion and their carbon footprint.
A bartender in Northeast Harbor told me recently that virtually everyone of her co-workers commute from Bangor, Brewer or Bucksport. She grew up on MDI and had a place on the island.
“It’s the people with money driving us out. The poor just get poorer.”
FOOTNOTE: The 2021 vacation rental ordinance was challenged by former Planning Board member Erica Brooks, who sued the town to reverse the November 2021 amendment to the Land-Use Ordinance which created the short-term vacation rental registrations. She and a co-plaintiff took the suit as far as the Maine Supreme Court, which ruled against them. Erica Brooks is a real estate agent in town and a member of the board of Island Housing Trust, which has other board members, including its vice president, who owns STRs and lobbied against Mount Desert’s proposal to regulate them.
Winners/losers in battle to protect Mount Desert’s remaining year-round community
NORTHEAST HARBOR - The town manager and developer of the Heel Way subdivision are waiting out the 30-day period to see if the Mount Desert Seven will appeal Superior Court Judge Thomas McKeon’s decision June 24 in favor of the town’s approval of the six units of affordable housing in the village.
Any appeal will have little chance in front of the state Supreme Court after the plaintiffs lost two rounds in the lower courts - once to end run the Planning Board to seek approval from the Zoning Board of Appeals and the second in front of McKeon who wrote a detailed and well-argued decision.
The MD Seven - all summer residents - were the biggest losers in the ugly neighborhood imbroglio. Will they accept Judge McKeon’s decision quietly or take the town through another wrenching chapter?
The named plaintiffs are Ann Cannon, Marc Cannon, Melissa Cannon Guzy, Lamont Harris, Joseph Ryerson, Stuart Janney and Lynne Wheat.
Another loser was the manager for the Summer Residents Association, Tracey Aberman, a vocal opponent of affordable housing in the village. Aberman was a loose cannon and one unchecked by the SRA board, which is listed on the town website as a quasi-public organization.
Aberman, who caters to the summer crowd with her business at 123 Main Street, said at a Planning Board meeting in March some folks are “spinning” the idea that Northeast Harbor “was dying” in the winter.
“I don't think that's the case anymore,” she said on Zoom. She runs a restaurant on Main Street which is open only during tourist season.
I drove through Northeast Harbor last December. Tracey Aberman’s business was closed as was most of Main Street. I bought a cup of coffee at McGrath’s, walked into the Pine Street Market, froze at the prices, and escaped to my favorite store, Brown’s Hardware, where I admired its rearrangement which made it seem more quaint and authentic as a New England general store. I walked out into the December chill, breathed deeply to enjoy its fresh, unencumbered air and ended my trek at the Nor’Easter Lobster Pound, where I feasted on clams.
Except for the restaurant, I was the only patron in all the other shops.
The village may not be “dying,” but it is certainly comatose in December. Here is my post from March with a fuller account.
Other losers include the 205 signatories to a petition filed with the Planning Board in September 2022 long before there was a formal application for Heel Way. Apparently, just the mention of “affordable housing” was enough to activate protesters, including Leonard Leo, the notorious dark money political operative at 46 South Shore Road who is familiar with protesters, since he has had to face them in front of his house since Roe V. Wade was overturned.
The protests in front of 46 South Shore Road, next to the Fleet yacht club, requires a full-time private, security force and more regular police presence than six families at Heel Way would ever need.
On the flipside, the winners included a cross section of the town’s best known residents, businesses and municipal leaders who publicly supported the Heel Way project after the protesters filed their petition with a counter petition.
The pro-project group included the chairs of the select board, warrant committee, economic development committee, sustainability committee, two other select members, an appeals board member and the town manager. Their competing petition garnered 245 signatures.
Planning Board chair Bill Hanley, the lone vote against the project, was also a loser. He said the project density was incompatible with the neighborhood where his office is located.
But Hanley also agreed with MD 365’s calculation of the density. He did not explain the inconsistency. (Mount Desert 365 is the non-profit set up by billionaires Steven and Mitchell Rales to effect more affordable housing to bring back year-round homeowners.)
In December 2023 Hanley signed the legal document with the majority approving the Heel Way project so technically it was a unanimous vote.
The town obviously was the biggest winner and those fighting to preserve some of its year-round characteristics.
But the town would not have won without the vigilance and legal prescience of attorney Andy Hamilton, with whom I have had many differences, especially over his representation of APPLL, the Bar Harbor businesses suing to overturn that town’s 1,000-passenger cruise ship visitation cap.
Hamilton and Hanley also attempted to prevent me from taking photographs of the public Planning Board meeting but withdrew their effort after I hired the best First Amendment law firm in the country.
Hamilton guided the board through all the intricacies of the ordinances which allowed for lower-density workforce housing in the village. He and Hanley went at each other toe to toe at the meeting Oct. 24, 2023, which lasted 4 hours and 21 minutes. Hamilton then ushered the town’s defense through the court proceedings and made sure Judge McKeon appreciated all the legal nuances.
His adversary, attorney Grady Burns, was another loser.
How Mount Desert rebuffed the KKK’s bias against Catholics, Immigrants
SOUTHWEST HARBOR - Maine had the largest membership in the Ku Klux Klan outside of the South in the 1920s, Raney Bench, director of the Mount Desert Historical Society, told a roomful of residents at a special presentation last week on the historical nature of the housing crisis on MDI.
There were virtually no members of the Klan in Maine in 1920. By 1925, 28 percent Maine’s population belonged to the Klan, she said.
The Klan held a rally, a “Klam bake” in Trenton in 1925 with 5,000 persons attending and burned crosses to celebrate the election of Republican Gov. Owen Brewster in 1924. It burned a cross similar to the photo above in front of the Neighborhood House in Northeast Harbor, Bench said.
The target of Maine’s KKK was not blacks, as there were very few African Americans here at the time, but Catholics and immigrants, especially French Canadians, Bench said. The KKK wanted to make it difficult for them to assimilate and erected roadblocks to housing.
“An MDI resident with first-hand knowledge of this, Ray Foster, who was a local pastor and contractor who gave this oral history to Bob Pyle in 1974,” Bench reported.
“The Ku Klux Klan was active in 1928 and a lot of us joined thinking it was kind of like a cross between the Masons and the Boy Scouts. We liked the encampments.
“It wasn't long before we were told we had to hate black people. We weren't excited by that, but there weren't many blacks around MDI. So it didn't make much of a practical difference. Besides, society was different.
“Then next we were told we had to hate the Jews. Guys started to get uncomfortable. There weren't many Jews around but there were people like Dan Rosenthal, peddler who came in the summer. Everybody liked Dan, he was a good man.
“Then we were told we had to hate Catholics. Well, that did it. There were a lot of Catholics around we knew damn well that they were good people. A Catholic priest and a priest in Northeast Father Kinney was active in the fire company.
“For example, there was a Catholic church on Lookout Way in Northeast Harbor. The Catholic Church had just bought one of the old-school local houses on Summit road and was renovating it for a rectory. The Catholic Church was enlarging into a large three-story rectory when all the workmen in Northeast Harbor donated at least a day's work on that rectory and we signed our work. That was our message to the Ku Klux Klan. From every damned one of us. You'll find our signatures all over that house. And that was the end of the KKK.”
Bench also told of how the island struggled with the influx of automobiles. She was followed by Noel Musson and Susanne Paul of the Musson Group who talked about efforts to combat the housing crisis. I can’t do justice to the entire presentation, which is worth watching in its entirety and posted online on the Southwest Harbor Public Library’s website.
Strong showing by citizens at DOT listening session on Seawall Road; will it be enough?
SOUTHWEST HARBOR - Despite the anger, anguish, hearsay, contradictory information and posturing displayed at the citizens meeting with DOT officials Thursday, the most important goal was accomplished regarding the road closing at Seawall.
It was a significant showing of concerned citizens, almost 200 by my count. That is a respectable show of force which is what ultimately influences political appointees like the DOT commissioner Bruce Van Note.
At the end of the 90-minute meeting, Deputy Commissioner Dale Doughty said, “We’re going to make a recommendation and make it fairly quickly.”
Residents queued up to the microphone to state their grievances, including a few gratuitous cheapshots at the DOT and the Park Service, whom one resident said was being too passive. The Park Service owns the land and has given the state a permit to repair Seawall Road, which was destroyed by multiple storms last winter.
Amanda Pollock, public affairs officer for Acadia National Park, stated, “We have been as involved as we can be given that we have no ownership rights or maintenance rights related to the road. All decisions related to the road remain with MaineDOT, but we have been heavily engaged in conversations with MaineDOT, Southwest Harbor, and Tremont.”
The most disingenuous comment came from former select board member Luke Damon, who said the DOT failed to communicate with local officials.
In fact, the select board, with Damon still as a member, showed little interest or urgency after the storm, as reported by the QSJ in Mid-January.
Charlotte Buchanan Gill, owner of the Seawall Motel and Charlotte’s Legendary Lobster Pond, was so upset at the select board’s lack of interest that she appeared in person in early June to demand to know why the matter has not been on a board agenda.
Another resident asked Doughty why the DOT hasn’t allowed local contractors to help repair the road. Doughty said he wasn’t aware of such efforts. The QSJ has heard similar rumors, but Town Manager Marilyn Lowell said this might have been a private conversation in town which got circulated locally but no one has officially approached town officials.
Some residents worried that emergency vehicles would not respond fast enough with Seawall Road closed.
Tremont Fire Chief Keith Higgins said, “We don’t want people going home tonight afraid that we can’t get to you.” The Islander reported that he stated in an email, “A few traffic cones won’t stop our emergency vehicles should the severity of the situation warrant crossing through the closure.”
Former Select Board chair Kristin Hutchins, who drives an ambulance, said she wouldn’t take a vehicle across that section of Seawall Road given its current condition.
Letter to Grohoksi: Rt. 102 unsafe for bikers
Dear Senator Grohoski,
I have lived most of my 77 years on MDI and raised in SWH. I used to do a fair amount of biking when I was younger. Back 20-25 years the edges of route 102 were solid and with the white line on the edge it afforded me a relatively safe track to ride. But as the years have taken a toll on the edges one can’t use the areas to the right of that white line because it’s mostly not there or so broken up it’s dangerous.
I was following a light panel truck up Long Hill past Gott’s store as I was coming into SWH and close to where 102 meets 102A, as you see in my photo the edge of the road for the biker had him going up long hill on the roadway. In front of the panel truck was a tractor trailer where was going about 2 MPH because of oncoming traffic and knowing he couldn’t give the biker the 3 feet of space. So, very slowly, we all got to top of Long Hill and away we went.
If you are a biker there is a wonderful breakdown lane on both sides all the way into SWH from the head of the island but that’s where they stops. The whole of 102A and from the center of SWH all the way on RT 102 to the Indian Point Road is a nightmare for bikers and has been for years.
I had to go to NEH a day or so ago and noticed wonderful breakdown lanes on both sides of the road. Same from Somesville to Bar Harbor. Same from the head of the island on Rt 3 into Bar Harbor. Same from the Fire station in Somesville to the Indian Point Road.
Large sections of Rts 102 and 102A are unsafe for those who love riding on the island, both locals and those from away.
Isn’t it about time to have safer roads on the SWH, Bass Harbor, Bernard, West Tremont, and Seal Cove side of our incredible MDI so locals and visitors alike don’t have to worry about that 3 feet of space a vehicle is supposed to give them.
Dalen Mills, SWH homeowner (the writer was chair of the SWH planning board in the ate Eighties).
SWH resident wistful over closed Sawyer’s Market
To the Editor:
The rich folk have come and bought up the town.
They’ve bought up the town and they’re shutting it down!
In the winter of 2021, David Milliken called me put of the blue. He’d just bought Sawyer's Market, and he’d read my op-ed about "the heart" of Southwest Harbor [Islander, Feb. 21, 2020]. He told me he wanted to preserve the store out of a sense of nostalgia, and he wanted my advice. I was touched by his candor and gave him a great deal of very good advice. He then leased the store to a young idealistic person who was quite out of touch with the town’s needs. Now, the store has been for sale for a year, at a staggering price, and it is still closed.
Sawyer's Market was the epicenter of our town and, while Mr. Milliken tries to recoup good money after bad, the rest of us little people are left bereft. It is no exaggeration to say that the owner could reduce the price to a terrestrial sum and feel little pain in the loss. Southwest Harbor needs the old Sawyer's Market back, and if the owner truly wished to preserve the store for nostalgia’s sake, he would do it. Unfortunately, no amount of money can accomplish that task; it takes work to run a store. When summer folk buy a downtown business, I suggest they do so to be in service to the needs of the community rather than themselves. I know I’m not the only one who misses the the beating heart of our village.
Bowen Swersey
Southwest Harbor
(This letter first appeared in the Islander)
"The protests in front of 46 South Shore Road, next to the Fleet yacht club, requires a full-time private, security force and more regular police presence than six families at Heel Way would ever need."
The peaceful protests, on the public street outside 46 South Shore Road, do not require any private security or police presence. At all. That Leonard Leo choses to invest his resources and waste public resources, to indulge his preoccupations and craft his false narrative of persecution, has nothing to do with what is required to insure his safety or maintain the law. In fact, one can reasonably argue that Leo's malign influence - in persuading MDI public officials to illegitimately threaten and punish protestors - is the only actual danger related to the protests.
The SWH Select Board has been trying to get information for many months. Recall that the DOT did reopen the road after the second storm in January. Then the March storm hit, the DOT said it was not going to reopen it anytime soon. We immediately sought a meeting with DOT which never came.
From our March 26, 2024, minutes:
"Manager Lowell added that she attended a meeting at Acadia National Park, she advised there was discussion related to the Southwest Harbor and Schoodic having some structural damage. Lowell also shared the ocean path in Bar Harbor had about 1,000 ft of damage. Lowell also noted that there was mention by DOT regarding abandoning the road at Seawall that connects to Bass Harbor. Members agreed that the town should be part of any discussions. Scott Alley added that he and his crew will sand and plow down to Ships Harbor. Since the damage to the road at Seawall, he and his crew members have had to go the long way around to plow and sand that small area. Manager Lowell will call Lisa at DOT to discuss this further and get more information."
At just about every meeting since, this has been a subject of discussion during the presentation of the Town Manager's report and items for the next agenda, which some writers don't always stick around for, so they might get the impression we haven't talked about it.
- Jim Vallette