The Political Geography of Maine’s Economic Future: Cities and Their Metro Regions

Following a global trend that now has more than 55 percent of the world population living in cities and their metro regions, Maine’s economic and population growth are driven by our cities and the surrounding metro areas. The trend, however, will not meet Maine’s goal to attract a future workforce and reduce greenhouse gas emissions without regional solutions to housing, education, homelessness, climate adaptation, and public transportation. Meeting these challenges will require a loosening of attitudes about local control and an embracing of regional solutions to the critical issues inhibiting Maine’s economic growth. The political leadership of the state, cities, counties, and metro regions must develop new models to achieve greater density for affordable workforce housing and more public transit, including improved bus and new light-rail systems. THE DECLINE OF MAINE’S CITIES T growth of Maine’s metro regions may be a recent development, but for much of Maine’s history more of its people lived in cities and mill towns than on farms and in rural regions. Maine’s cities were located on its coasts and rivers to facilitate shipping goods in and out of the region. Maine’s resource economy based on forestry, farming, and fishing relied on cities with deep-water ports to ship products to market, as did the state’s mills that produced textiles, shoes, paper, tanned hides, canned goods, and various wood products. In 1836, Maine’s first railroad connected Bangor and Old Town, and soon thereafter rail lines began reaching all its cities, extending north to Montreal and south to Boston. The Portland Railroad Company’s 1909 map1 of its transit system and connecting lines displays a sophisticated urban mass-transportation system with rail and trolley lines that crisscrossed the Portland peninsula, looped into neighborhoods behind the Back Cove, and reached outer sections of the city. It then extended north, south, and west beyond the city boundary. Bangor and other cities had similar rail and trolley systems to transport people to and within cities and to bring timber, potatoes, and other goods to market. In the middle of the twentieth century, local mills began to be sold to out-of-state owners who consolidated and closed many mills. By 1969, all 14 pulp and paper firms and 74 percent of manufacturers employing more than 500 employees were operated by owners with no ties to the state (Scontras 2017). The cotton mills in Lewiston, Biddeford, Saco, Waterville, and Augusta could not compete with newer mills in Virginia, Georgia, and the Carolinas with their cheap electric power, abundant low-cost labor, and state-of-the-art production facilities. Shoe manufacturers in Auburn, Portland, Bangor, and other cities could not compete with low-cost foreign producers. As the US economy revived following World War II, Maine’s cities suffered economic and population loss as wartime ship building came to an end. Portland’s population fell by more than 20 percent from 77,600 in 1950 to 61,600 in 1980.2 During this time, Portland embarked on a project to construct a highway and a boulevard through the middle of its city, tearing down neighborhoods along the proposed route. Bangor’s population fell by 19 percent between 1960 and 1980, and it also took advantage of federal urban renewal funding to raze downtown buildings and construct a highway around the city (Scee 2010). While railroads and trolleys served as the primary transportation system, cities remained the most attractive location for businesses and residents, which restrained suburban development, but when the automobile with its go-anywhere-at-any-time advantage became the preferred mode of transportation, the built landscape of the region changed dramatically. It did not matter that Maine’s cities had sophisticated mass-transit systems. By 1960, the trolleys in Portland and Bangor were long gone and most rails throughout Maine were abandoned, paved over, or turned into walking trails. The destruction of Union Station in Portland in 1961 and its replacement by a strip mall marked the end of the railroad era and the symbolic decline of the city. Cities were deemed noncompetitive because of their lack of parking and easy automobile access. Malls and industrial parks sprang up on their outskirts. Businesses and retail stores saw greater opportunity by moving to the edge of the city or into the outlying communities where they could build large parking lots for customers and employees. THE RISE OF THE SUBURBS M followed people in the rest of the country in exiting cities and moving to the suburbs. The public voted with its feet in favor of sprawling, car-dependent, low-density, and largely homogenous communities with single-family, detached homes on grassy lots. Land devoted to suburbs in Maine nearly doubled between 1950 and 2000 as the parents of the baby-boomer generation fled the cities for newly built suburban homes. Car usage around Portland increased tenfold in those same years. The suburbs had extraordinary appeal in the postwar years—an escape from the proximity of apartment living and away from noise and crime, yet within a convenient drive into the city. The suburbs offered families an opportunity to build equity in a home rather than renting an apartment. Relatively inexpensive land outside cities and the deduction of the home mortgage and property taxes on federal income-tax returns provided an economic incentive too enticing to pass up. Federal subsidies for highways added to suburban development. The move to the suburbs left behind in the cities those who could not afford to buy MAINE POLICY REVIEW • Vol. 29, No. 2 • 2020 103 CITIES AND THEIR METRO REGIONS