SUN JOURNAL • June 25, 2022
Long before Protect Lake Auburn signs appeared, and years before the fawning coverage of his plans to add 2,000 new homes, Mayor Jason Levesque blamed the Ag Zone — roughly 20,000 acres of forest, farmland and wetlands — for the city’s relatively high property tax rates. When that didn’t get much traction with residents, he pivoted to Maine’s housing crisis to tell a new story: the primary culprit for high housing prices, he says, is too little supply. We need to grow our city with more housing in reach of working families, but how we do that matters. We must resist the false idea that addressing the housing crisis means sacrificing clean and affordable drinking water, strong labor standards, and the working farmland and forests that make our city a desirable place to live. ~ Francis Eanes, Auburn