39. Act Like It's a Crisis: Rick Bennett on Fixing Maine's Housing Shortage

Everyone in Augusta calls it a housing crisis. Almost nobody acts like it is one. That gap between talk and urgency is at the center of my conversation with Rick Bennett, former President of the Maine Senate and current candidate for Governor of Maine.

Rick and I served together in the Maine Legislature, and I have watched him do the work up close. But his housing story starts long before politics. Rick spent six years working in Maine's factory built housing industry back when the Oxford Hills had five factories and 1,200 people building homes for all of New England. Today one factory remains. Rick wants to change that, and in this episode he lays out how.

We dig into his plan to revive manufactured and modular housing as a Maine heritage industry, including what Colorado did with about $40 million in ARPA funds to build a factory built housing ecosystem now producing 3,000 homes a year. For perspective, the entire state of Maine finished around 3,500 homes in 2025. One program in one state nearly matched us.

We also get into the numbers behind Maine's supply problem: the 80,000 homes we need by 2032, the HARP home repair program helping 200 families a year while 2,000 sit on a waiting list, and the 18 month permitting timelines that stall projects before they start. Rick explains his statewide housing bottleneck audit and why he would look at the state's own delays before pointing fingers at towns.

For first time homebuyers, Rick shares two proposals I found genuinely interesting: a state backed insurance program covering three quarters of a down payment, and a shared appreciation model that could bring a $2,000 monthly payment down to $1,200, with the state repaid when the home sells.

We close on the topics that surround housing whether we like it or not: zoning and local control, code enforcement that varies from one zip code to the next, financial literacy in Maine schools, workforce training programs like JMG and Bridge Academy, and why Maine's electricity prices are quietly raising the cost of both housing and doing business here.

Rick is a tenth generation Mainer from Oxford County, the son of a public school teacher and a retail sales clerk, and someone who has spent 40 years engaged with Maine's housing sector as a business leader and legislator. Wherever you land politically, this is a substantive conversation about what it would actually take to build our way out of this.

Housing Matters is hosted by me, Matt Pouliot, CEO and Broker at Pouliot Real Estate in Augusta, Maine. From buying your first home to building your investment portfolio, if it's about real estate, it matters here.