PORTLAND – Housing affordability remains a major obstacle to solving Maine’s housing crisis, according to the latest report from MaineHousing.

The quasi-nonprofit that serves as the state housing authority released its report last week, offering an outlook to 2026, and trends from previous years are expected to continue.

“It was a reaffirmation of much of what we’ve already known,” said MaineHousing Director Dan Brennan.

For at least a decade, the data shows, there has been what Brennan called a “dramatic affordability issue” in Maine when it comes to housing.  

For the last 10 years, according to the report, incomes statewide went up by about 44%, but housing costs went up by 187%.

“We’re still in this situation where we have dramatic price increases with incomes not keeping pace, so that simply means it’s harder for people, and more expensive for people to get a home than it was 10 years ago,” Brennan said.

Community Housing of Maine, a nonprofit that provides affordable housing statewide, is seeing the impacts of the demand firsthand. In Portland, for example, one building, Phoenix Flats, caters to residents ages 55 and older, who make less than 60% of area median income.

Kyra Walker, the nonprofit’s interim executive director, said this week that the building has 45 apartments, and like all of CHOM’s properties, there are no vacancies. 

“There’s a huge demand for affordable housing,” she said. “Our units are kept essentially full at all times, and then, we have a wait list, and then that is then causing a lot of folks to stay longer in homeless shelters so their shelter stays are growing longer.”

While MaineHousing has worked to help by funneling state and federal funding to housing construction, building costs have gone up, too. 

The report’s data shows that the units of rental housing alone that MaineHousing built in 2025 cost an estimated $348,145. That’s higher than the same number for 2024, which came in under $300,000. The data also shows that the number has been steadily rising since 2021.

“We’ve known that incomes aren’t keeping up with housing costs, either to buy a home or to rent an apartment,” Brennan said. 

But Brennan remains optimistic. He said MaineHousing continues to break records for annual unit production, and while out-of-state buyers are still impacting local markets, the rush that Maine saw during the pandemic seems to be ebbing.

“I think we’ve seen some tempering of the crazy real estate market where people were buying things sight unseen for three times as much as it was worth, I think some of that’s tempered,” he said.

Brennan said he is hoping to see more funding in the pipeline, either from the governor’s supplemental budget or a bond issue in the next legislative session, so that MaineHousing can continue to help produce more units.

“Keep it going, really, is what we want to do,” he said.