The Urbanist Coalition of Portland (Maine)
The Urbanist Coalition of Portland is a political group with the goal of making Portland, Maine more livable for everyone. We support middle density, mixed-use neighborhoods, with access to transit and cycling infrastructure. Our policies and approach are strongly inspired by the YIMBY movement, Strong Towns, and more. If you think building housing is a good thing and that you shouldn't need to drive everywhere you will fit right in.
Our Mission
Housing
We must ensure that we have enough housing in Portland that people can afford. Portland is a great city because of it’s people and we need to make sure we have room for them to live here. We want to reduce the barriers to building more multifamily housing like exclusionary zoning and building codes and encourage the construction of affordable housing.
Transit
Owning a car should be an option, not a requirement. Public transportation gives people that option and it reduces traffic and pollution for the whole city. We should make a great experience for current riders and attract new riders by investing in a transit system that is frequent, reliable, and pleasant to use.
Walking and Biking
Everybody is a pedestrian at some point but unfortunately, our street design often prioritizes speed for cars over a safe and pleasant experience for people walking and biking. We want to make sure that pedestrians and cyclists are prioritized on our streets.
Complete Neighborhoods
Allowing a mixture of uses like businesses and community spaces makes for walkable neighborhoods, favors local businesses over large chains, fosters a sense of community, and can even help provide more revenue for the city.
What We Do
We are an organization of volunteers in and around Portland, Maine. Here’s how we get involved:
Policy Advocacy: We want to advocate for policies that prioritize housing, transit, walking, biking, and complete neighborhoods so we make policy recommendations and engage with the public policy making process to give our feedback.
YIMBY Advocacy: Often city planning processes only encourage voices that have concerns about new housing to speak up. We keep people up to date with new housing projects and encourage people to show up and make the positive case for new housing.
Tactical Urbanism: Sometimes small improvements can make a huge difference for walking and biking. We identify low cost changes that we can make to make walking and biking more pleasant and safe and we make a plan, gather feedback, and make the improvements.
Community Building: We host events like our regular beer social to help people interested in urbanism meet each other and talk.
Education: We write articles and do data analysis around local issues to help keep people informed.
The Transit Tracker: We want the experience of taking the bus to be as pleasant as possible so we built a convenient, mobile-friendly website to stay up to date with bus arrivals at your stop. Check it out at https://transit.ucop.me.
Candidate Questionnaires: It can be tough to follow local elections and know where the candidates stand on issues like housing, transit, walking, biking, and complete neighborhoods so we ask them and publish the results.
