The actual property market in Maine at the moment is as scorching as a February woodstove, defying all of the fears from a yr in the past. A brand new migration to Maine is underway, and it’s not simply individuals from Boston or New York, exiting large cities for extra reasonably priced and safer smaller ones, but in addition individuals from each nook of the nation who wish to reside in a spot like this.
And so they aren’t simply shopping for summer time properties. They’re shifting right here, typically bringing household or pals and even their companies with them.
Maine has had its share of booms and busts in actual property during the last century. However that is one thing totally different, and it’s going to vary the trajectory of Maine’s economic system and communities in profound methods, bringing each welcome financial alternatives and a brand new set of housing and college challenges.
The quick plus facet is that a number of individuals, in massive swaths of the state, are promoting their properties or land for greater than they ever thought doable. The draw back is {that a} scorching housing market means it’s more durable for everybody else to purchase or hire a home.
As a builder of lakefront properties, now engaged on my third dwelling in two years, I’m seeing this shopping for frenzy firsthand. Skilled crews are in excessive demand. Buildable land is more durable to seek out. High quality properties and even fixer-uppers are flying off the shelf, notably in cities with good faculties and guarded pure magnificence.
I additionally am experiencing this increase by my son’s eyes. After a couple of many years within the “large metropolis,” he’s eventually returning to Maine along with his household. Not so way back, individuals who wished to maneuver to Maine struggled to discover a good job however to not discover a good home. My son acquired a fantastic job, however can’t find the house he and his family need, at a worth they’ll afford, anyplace within the eight or 10 communities by which they’re looking out.
It’s tempting to suppose that that is only a short-term phenomenon that can go away as soon as this extraordinary year-of-the-virus is a fading reminiscence. Nevertheless it isn’t. We’re witnessing one thing that would change into a disruptive upheaval in Maine, one predicted 15 years in the past by the Brookings Institution and GrowSmart Maine, of which I used to be then a component.
What we mentioned then is that this: Maine has a terrific model and character that will likely be immensely enticing to in-migrants, as quickly as we’ve good transportation to the remainder of the nation and high-speed web connections all through the state. If we’d had a extra exact crystal ball, we’d have added that good software program, like Zoom, would mark the second when it actually started to occur in earnest.
COVID-19 has given us a crash course in what distant work seems to be like, and adjusted what was a trickle of in-migration to a raging stream. It could change into a river, in time, as we develop broadband speeds in Maine, recommit to bettering bus, prepare and air journey to and from the state, and start to deploy new applied sciences, just like the StarLink low-altitude satellite tv for pc web connections for distant websites, and solar-battery dwelling packages for off-grid or unreliable-grid properties.
This in-migration was additionally accelerated this yr by Maine’s wise and balanced response to the COVID-19 virus. As painful because it has been to handle a pandemic of this sort, we’ve struck a reasonably good stability (that’s when everyone seems to be grumbling) between the competing wants of science, medication, enterprise and training. Nothing has been excellent, however general we’ve let the science information us greater than the politics.
The outcome has been that when individuals throughout the nation have turned on CNN or the opposite networks for his or her nightly information, they’ve seen nationwide maps of COVID-19 infections that at all times present Maine doing higher than most, additional sharpening our already-strong model.
The credit score for that success goes to many individuals – beginning with everybody who wore masks and saved their distance – however two individuals stand out. Gov. Mills has offered a gentle hand on the helm, even whereas surrounded by concern and anger from those that thought we might think about a pandemic away, or just impose normality as a result of we wished to.
The second is the irrepressible and irreplaceable Dr. Nirav Shah, who rivals America’s most trusted physician, Anthony Fauci, in sincere truth-telling and compassion.
So now, by a convergence of a robust model, a virus that was thrust upon us and accountable motion on our components, we’re seeing a profit that we might solely think about earlier than. The problem now could be to make it work for the individuals who had been right here all alongside.
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