The good citizens of Bar Harbor, the cash cow of Hancock County where I live, recently voted to severely limit the number of cruise ships allowed to drop anchor in Frenchman’s Bay and how many of their passengers will be allowed ashore to ransack local souvenir emporiums, an annual ritual worth billions to the local and regional economy. The merchants are not happy, and the shipping lines are suing.

Some of the liners coming into the small harbor resemble aquatic apartment houses with flippers; capacity up to 4,000-plus. At times, when one of these behemoths ferries loads of vacationers ashore, Bar Harbor’s sidewalks become so clogged with folks and their shopping bags as to be impassable. The buses that transport the sightseers to the top of Cadillac Mountain, Acadia National Park’s centerpiece, crowd the narrow and sometimes scary alpine road.

Acadia attracts nearly four million visitors yearly, many arriving by auto and motor home. Route 3, the only road into Mt. Desert Island, Acadia’s and Bar Harbor’s location, is two-lane and resembles the Lincoln Tunnel helix at rush hour during tourist season. Locals tend to stay home until the folks from away go home. As long as they leave their money behind, Mainers can tolerate a traffic jam or two.

But our fine state is slowly changing and not always in keeping with “the way life should be,” as a favorite state motto goes. Portland, the state’s largest city, is, for all intents and purposes, a Boston suburb, with attendant urban woes. The restaurants are terrific, but the prices are big city all the way. Ditto the rents. And the city, like the Blob, just keeps spreading, putting pressure on its neighbors to follow suit, slowly but surely eroding a country way of life for many of us.

The pandemic brought a surge of folks here, some for good, others to weather the panic. One unhappy result is that many local folks can’t afford housing. Visitors buy homes and land that locals can’t afford, often to use as a second home. Trouble is, that leaves many not-so-well-off Mainers without their first. One resort to that is buying a mobile home, which us older folk used to call trailers, and parking it in a trailer park and paying rent for the land and services. But outside money—those dreaded hedge funds—are offering the original landowners, i.e. landlords, beaucoup bucks for their properties, then, guess what, raising the tenants’ rent, in one case doubling it. In such instances, mobile homeowners find that mobility is not so easy. They are more or less stuck. Some apartment dwellers in Portland have had their rents tripled when a new owner takes the reins.

Maine is a great place to live but not if you are homeless or scraping by. Bangor, my nearest big town, has an ongoing homeless problem which the cold weather can turn into a human disaster. Where to shelter people when there is a continuing and worsening housing crisis? It’s estimated that the state is some 46,000 homes short, but many local restrictions, zoning, and the like allow only single-family homes to be built; when multiple-occupancy developments are proposed, NIMBY-ism is sure to follow.

Another big problem with the housing shortage is how it impacts the tourism business, worth over $9 billion a year to the state and employing more than 150,000 people. Those cruise ship passengers, mobile homers, private jet owners, damned near all the 4 million visitors expect a fair measure of decent hospitality, whether a high-priced lobster or lobster roll, an expensive living accommodation, or good service at any place open for tourist business. But the folks that operate these enterprises can’t find help. The reason: The help can’t find a place of their own for the four months of the season. My best friend and Moravian classmate Andy Semmel lived in resort-owned and rent-free barracks during his waiter’s stints in the Catskills long ago, saving every spare dollar for his college expenses. Here in Maine now, what a waiter earns goes mostly toward rent and commuting from an affordable place, so more and more of the young-and-willing aren’t too willing.

In Bar Harbor, there isn’t even a place to park your car, much less find a cheap place to live. Ironically, Mt. Desert Island has scads of incredible homes, many worth several million or more. I was in one once with a kitchen worth a college education. The house, I was told, was used on weekends in the summer and stood vacant most of the year. It had six bedrooms and five bathrooms. It also was not a unique abode; plenty more like it. And all empty a good deal of the time.

How this deeply ironic problem of inequality is resolved here in Maine and in America seems almost immune to a reasonable solution. More and more people, fewer places to live, and a paucity of answers and actions don’t add up to a rosy future. Something has got to give. Hope it happens soon before the cold comes.

—Ron dePaolo ’64
Penobscot, Maine