Construction has begun on 89 Elm Street, which will be 201 homes affordable to those who make 60% of the area median income. The project complies with Portland’s Inclusionary Zoning ordinance, allowing for 603 market rate units to be built later, but what made it possible is public dollars. The project’s entire funding stack comes from publicly subsidized sources. This financing was going to be spent on affordable housing with or without Portland’s Inclusionary Zoning. The project demonstrates the power and necessity of public finance if we want to build significant amounts of affordable housing.

We changed our view to favor moving Portland’s new Amtrak station to Site 3. While we still feel that Site 2 would be a better location but there are many challenges with building a station there and it seems unlikely that a quality station will be built there soon. Because of the benefits of moving the station to the main line we feel the best course of action is to move forward with Site 3.

Portland approved more housing units in 2025 than any year on record, which is often cited as evidence that the city’s expanded Inclusionary Zoning policy is working. But just because a project was approved after 2020 doesn’t mean that it was subject to the expanded Inclusionary Zoning policy or that it will be built at all. Most of the projects approved after 2020 were either subject to an older policy, subsidized, on hold, or cancelled. We went project by project to see what these numbers really mean.

We wanted to add some additional context to the population graphs in Portland’s Housing Needs Assessment. The trends show that population growth in Portland is much slower than the rest of Cumberland County.

The first project to use the LD2003 bonuses we advocated for has just received approval from the Planning Board. The project has 156 units with 78 of them affordable to those making area median income or below.