A Map, a Mission, and Many Meetings: MDI Launches Housing Talks
Jun 27, 2025
MOUNT DESERT ISLAND REGION—This week, Noel Musson and Susanne Paul began visiting all the major town governing boards in the Mount Desert Island Region, starting with the Southwest Harbor Select Board.
It’s not quite a road trip because the meetings will be spaced apart (often by weeks) and often (unless there’s an accident on the Trenton bridge), they won’t be spending hours in the car, but it is a journey in a way: a big step in explaining about the League of Towns’ housing initiative, which is very much related to work that the Musson Group has been working on for a few years: The MDI Housing Initiatives.
“The idea is to really come together and talk about big picture goals,” Musson told the Southwest Harbor Select Board members on Tuesday night.
Collaboration many agree will be the only way to create more year-round homes for year-round residents: workers, families, and singles.
The MDI Housing Initiatives began in 2023 with an organized summit. About 70 people from throughout MDI attended and spoke about actions needed toward meaningful progress. Two grants and another summit ensued. The initiative had multiple actions including the housing opportunities map, housing and needs assessment (with RKG), and a regional strategic plan initiative which has grown beyond housing but toward how everyone works together as a community.
The League of Towns (a monthly meeting of town administrators, which is open to the public) took up the gauntlet and for months have been talking and organizing around potential shared goals for the region’s towns and Ellsworth.
Better transportation has been talked about quite a bit and so has housing—more housing, more available and affordable homes to rent and to own.
Data has been gathered. Information is being shared. And multiple region-wide elected officials’ meetings have occurred. Another is scheduled in the fall.
At the League of Town meeting earlier that same day, Musson said that throughout July and August, he and Paul will focus on discussions and presentations in area towns, hoping to have goal statements at the League of Town’s July meeting. The September meeting would be working on logistics for the elected officials meeting and summarizing local input.
The key is to get those preliminary conversations with the towns directly.
“That’s really going to be the focus for us right now,” Musson said.
On Tuesday, Musson and Paul presented a map and some images to help explain to the select board some of the details and data involved in making some essential decisions like where homes could potentially be built on Mount Desert Island.
“The goal of this map is to look at a couple of different policy decisions,” Paul said.
The map looks at proximity to water and sewer infrastructure, areas that allow high-density zoning and village-style patterns.
There are a lot of factors that impact how and where to build homes and why they aren’t currently being built.
“Like many areas across the country, housing is increasingly scarce on Mount Desert Island (MDI) due to a variety of factors, including market dynamics, regulatory forces, the high costs of construction, inflation, labor shortages, residual fallout from pandemic supply chain issues, and low interest rates during the pandemic spurring a surge in purchases of primary and second homes. The MDI region faces additional pressures due it its desirable location, the lack of new home construction keeping pace with demand, limited land availability, limited public infrastructure, and a historically hot second-home market and, now, increasingly hot short-term rental market,” the MDI & Acadia Housing initiative website reads.
The map is a work-in-progress and lighter shade areas meet less of the criteria as compared to the darker shades. It’s meant to prompt conversation and has the assumption that villages that exist should be built upon.
Criteria used in this analysis include:
- Proximity to public sewer infrastructure
- Proximity to public water infrastructure
- Village-type land use patters (clusters of smaller lots sizes)
- Areas designated as “Growth Areas” in municipal comprehensive plans
- Higher density residential zoning
“It’s a tool to think where future opportunities are,” Musson said. “How do we direct housing to where we want it to go?”
The questions that towns need to decide include: How much housing does the island need and where should it go and finally, what are the steps to get there?
“It’s a big, big challenge,” Musson said.
According to a report by the Hancock County Planning Commission, the population of Hancock County has increased “by 1,060 people or by 1.9% since 2010.”
The housing situation is overwhelmingly messy, Musson said and made a comparison. The only way to clean the room is to start on a few messy areas.
“It looks different in every town,” Paul said of the housing situation and needs.
The regional strategic planning initiatives is in its beginning stages, Musson said, and meant to help all the communities in the micro-region to look at the key areas that towns need to be collaborating on.
“It’s so intertwined: the business community and the housing community,” Southwest Harbor Town Manager Karen Reddersen said, adding that the solutions aren’t so far away that the towns can’t meet them.
Also during the meeting, Holly Masterson of the Acadia Chamber emphasized that the chamber is a resource to the town. She said they had 134 members.
“We’ve gotten pretty big and we’ve got a really good foundation now,” she said, referencing Phil Whitney, in the 1950s, who had the first meeting upstairs at the Dry Dock.
The chamber survives on donations and would love to have more participation from the town, which they currently receive no funding from.
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Acadia Brochures of Maine.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
https://www.mdihousingsolutions.org/2024summit
https://www.mdihousingsolutions.org/latest-updates/mdi-amp-acadia-region-housing-opportunities-map
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