Portland officials are once again reaching for the wrong tool to solve Maine’s housing crisis. In March, the City Council voted to create a “Social Housing Task Force” with the stated goal of exploring a system where the government owns, develops, and manages housing for residents.
At first glance, this may sound like a bold solution. After all, Portland has seen skyrocketing rents, long waitlists for affordable housing, and an acute shortage of units. But the reality is that “social housing,” a European-style model where the government builds and owns apartments, often mixed-income, has a long track record of cost overruns, mismanagement, and unintended consequences. Even progressive economists have raised red flags about whether social housing can deliver affordability.
Instead of tackling the real barriers to homebuilding in Maine, zoning restrictions, permitting delays, and high construction costs, Portland is looking to double down on government control. That approach will fail both practically and ideologically.
The Practical Problems
Portland can’t even manage the housing it has
MaineHousing and local housing authorities already struggle to maintain the subsidized housing stock they oversee. Public housing voucher waiting lists stretch for years. Federal audits have found mismanagement and misallocation of funds in housing programs across the country, and Portland has no track record of doing better. Creating an entirely new, taxpayer-funded housing bureaucracy only increases the chances of waste and inefficiency.
Social housing costs far more than advertised
Advocates point to Vienna or Singapore as success stories, but they ignore that those systems were built under radically different conditions: massive land availability, decades of consistent government subsidy, and political cultures that tolerate higher taxes and centralized planning.
Here in Maine, the average cost to build a house ranges from $280,000 to over $430,000. Social housing would require public borrowing or new taxes to replicate that, and government projects historically cost up to 25% more, not less, than private builds. Portlanders would end up footing the bill for an expensive, slow-moving experiment.
It ignores the real bottlenecks: zoning and permitting
MPI’s housing report, Under Construction: Fixing Maine’s Self-Imposed Housing Crisis, makes clear that restrictive zoning and red tape are the most significant obstacles to expanding Maine’s housing supply. In Portland, multifamily projects face neighborhood opposition, regulatory delays, and inconsistent enforcement. Rather than streamlining approvals and opening more land to development, the City Council wants to expand government ownership, which won’t fix the core supply problem.
The concerning leadership
And let’s not overlook who’s leading the charge: Kate Sykes, a self‑identified Democratic Socialist, has been tapped as co‑chair of the task force—a clear signal of its progressive tilt and ambitions, as well as the obvious agenda the task force brings.
As Kristen Leffler, a Portland high‑school social studies teacher and task force member, put it: “I’m still a renter in Portland. I’ve been pretty much completely blocked out of the traditional housing market here… as a teacher I see firsthand how housing insecurity really disrupts students’ education and learning… It’s been a commodity too long and really in my view it should be a human right.”
Her words underscore not just personal frustration, but also the ideals underpinning the effort: framing housing as a human right, and somehow attempting to exempt it from the rules of supply and demand. Combine that with Sykes’s political identity and vocal advocacy, “the market isn’t going to create the solutions that we need… this is a housing crisis and it should be met with force,” and what you’ve got is a task force poised not to tinker at the edges but to declare war on private housing development fundamentally. The obvious answer that Sykes ignores is that the market can’t currently provide solutions to Portland’s housing crisis because she won’t let it.
The Ideological Problems
Government shouldn’t be a landlord
At its heart, social housing shifts property rights away from individuals and private actors to the state. That puts housing at the mercy of politics: who gets units, how rents are set, and which neighborhoods are prioritized. History shows this is a recipe for favoritism, lobbying, and declining quality.
As one left-leaning think tank, the Urban Institute, has stated that they prefer housing subsidies or housing vouchers to government-owned housing, because “tenant-based assistance recipients are far less likely than public housing residents to be concentrated in high-poverty neighborhoods.” Even left-wing researchers prefer other forms of public housing assistance to government ownership, because it tends to create slums and segregation. Again, Portland ignores the experts on housing policy, because they are approaching the problem with an agenda.
It crowds out private solutions
Developers already hesitate to build in Portland due to high costs and political hostility to growth. If City Hall starts competing with them directly, it will only drive more private builders away. Instead of encouraging more market-driven construction, Portland risks entrenching a two-tiered system: low quality public housing for the working class, and private ownership becoming a luxury for the ultrawealthy.
It distracts from real reform
By focusing on government-owned housing, policymakers delay the kinds of structural reforms that could actually make Portland affordable again. Loosening zoning codes, reducing costly design mandates, and speeding up the permitting process would empower private builders and nonprofits alike to deliver housing at scale. Every dollar spent on a government-run housing agency is a dollar not spent on those reforms.
A Better Path Forward
Portland doesn’t need another task force, it needs to look at housing economics. It needs to stand up to NIMBY opposition and reform zoning and reduce regulatory burdens for developers, rather than blame developers for problems the Portland government created. It needs to simplify the permitting process and let more builders compete. It needs to trust Mainers themselves, families, entrepreneurs, developers, nonprofits, to solve the housing crisis, rather than assuming centralized planners in City Hall have the answers.
MPI’s Under Construction report lays out a clear roadmap:
- Expand local zoning reform to allow more duplexes, triplexes, and multifamily projects where they’ve long been banned.
- Reduce regulatory costs that add tens of thousands of dollars to the price of every unit.
- Leverage the private sector, rather than trying to replace it, to meet the demand for housing.
Maine’s housing shortage is a crisis of too much government intervention, not too little. Portland should focus on breaking down barriers, not building new bureaucracies.
Conclusion
The Social Housing Task Force is a costly distraction from the real work of housing reform, and will likely make the housing problem worse. Portlanders deserve more than another government experiment that will raise taxes, waste money, and fail to deliver affordability.
If policymakers are serious about solving the housing crisis, they should stop chasing failed European fantasies and start freeing Mainers to build the homes our communities desperately need.
