Change is never easy, whether it’s for the better or the worse. Lottery winners often end up just as stressed and unhappy as people who go bankrupt.

Portland today is in the midst of historic change. For the most part, it is positive change. Every few months the city is recognized in some national survey as the “best city” for business startups, foodies, retirees, greens or young families. With this kind of national praise come tourists, visitors and new year-round residents. This is a truly transformational moment in the city’s history, one we have long worked for and one that is important not just for the future of the region but for the entire state of Maine, given Portland’s economic and cultural importance.

Yet there is a downside. The housing supply is slow to respond to population changes. Longtime residents now compete with newcomers for a limited stock of housing. Prices are up, and on the peninsula they’re way up. Last month the Portland Press Herald documented with depth and power the housing crisis now facing many city residents, our working families and housing-challenged in particular.

Figuring out just where and how to deal with the population changes will require careful, detailed work.

To start, we need to revisit the 15-year-old housing element in the city’s Comprehensive Plan, affirm its sound and abiding goals and focus on just a few things in a new and needed housing strategy for the city, namely production, density, public transportation and collaboration.

Here are just a few ideas, gathered from successful cities in Maine and elsewhere, that could make a difference in Portland:

• Increase density. Rather than just restricting the height of new buildings on the peninsula, also require a minimum height: nothing less than 2.5 stories, with a minimum of four stories along the major thoroughfares of Marginal Way, Congress, Franklin and Spring streets, and Forest, Brighton, Stevens and Washington avenues.

• Create new village centers. Promote and incentivize private development of mixed-used village centers off the peninsula, at Woodford’s Corner and along Forest, Brighton, Stevens and Washington avenues, making use of a form-based zoning code like that just adopted by the City Council for the India Street neighborhood.

• Invest in public transit. Connect these places to the downtown with public transportation that is safe and attractive, regular and reliable. Buses are good for now, but why not think in terms of restoring trolley service along the major thoroughfares? Just imagine the pleasure of riding a handsome Canadian, German or Swedish-built trolley (none are now made in the U.S.) onto the peninsula to work, relax and play.

• Use state incentives. With the private sector, make creative and aggressive use of Maine’s affordable housing tax increment finance program and new senior housing bond funds to build affordable middle-income housing throughout the city.

• Collaborate with neighbors. Work with the communities of South Portland, Scarborough, Westbrook, Falmouth and Saco-Biddeford, all of which have a stake in Portland’s success, to address the region-wide housing shortage together; and to create a regional public transportation network that will be practical, accessible and useful for all.

Portland is feeling its housing pain because of its success as a city in attracting new people, new businesses, new art venues, new restaurants and new energy. Portland today is like a lottery winner, but we must not react like the lottery winners mentioned above, who become stressed out and long for the past. We must embrace this moment and act with courage and confidence.

The matter won’t get better on its own. The Maine State Housing Authority reports that between 2013 and 2014, Portland home values increased by 8 percent, and rents by 11 percent, even as median household income declined by 2 percent. This affordability challenge will only grow greater in the future if corrective action is not taken.

Portland is not alone in facing this prospect. A recent study by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies finds that almost three in five of all households nationwide now pay more than 30 percent of their pretax income, the desired norm, for housing, and more than one in four households pay in excess of half their income. The findings are widespread across the nation, in areas both urban and rural, often creating deteriorated housing, blighted neighborhoods, depressed property values and increased crime rates. With federal subsidies for affordable rental units about to expire within the decade, the study’s authors conclude that “efforts to address urgent and longstanding housing challenges should be among the nation’s highest priorities.”

Successful cities are people magnets. They especially attract young, energetic, creative and upwardly mobile persons looking for economic and social opportunity. In addition, aging baby boomers looking to downsize their living arrangements in a prospering cultural and medical setting are attracted to cities like Portland.

Historically, a diverse population and robust economy require a diverse and expanding housing stock – one that is owner- and renter-occupied, single- and multi-family, in-town and suburban, manufactured and stick-built, all connected to downtown opportunities and amenities by adequate and accessible public transportation.

Portland has a largely aging housing stock, and in recent decades it has seen insufficient new housing construction to meet current and projected demand, raising today’s prices for all. The relationship is simple. When enough new supply is provided to meet new demand, everyone wins; one family moving into a new home frees up its housing down the chain, and two or three additional families benefit. But when supply falls behind, the causal chain is reversed. Each newcomer who outbids a family for an existing home makes it harder for families farther down the housing chain to keep up, much less to advance.

The answer is not to try to stop people from coming to Portland. For one thing, it is not possible; for another, it is self-defeating. Maine needs the energy, creativity and, yes, disposable income of new residents to grow the economy and help enhance our distinctive and attractive way of life. The right answer is to build new supply and accommodate the new people, with their energy and ideas, as well as those who are already here.

But how to do this? We might learn a lesson from Boston, of all places. When the industrial revolution came to Boston before and during the Civil War, it soon ran out of space on the peninsula where, like Portland, it began. In response, city leaders filled in first the Back Bay and then the Fens, turning both over to private developers for new housing and support services. When it ran out of wetlands to fill, the city annexed (at the ballot box) neighboring towns like Charlestown and East Boston and then extended public transportation into outlying settlements in Dorchester, Roslindale and Hyde Park, where generations of immigrant families came to settle, work and build the city’s prosperity, as well as their own.

At the Press Herald’s recent public forum on housing, Mayor Ethan Strimling said we need 2,000 new housing units to stabilize the Portland housing market. To meet even moderate projections of demand, Portland must double its annual production of new housing from some 200 to 400 units. Given the limitations on land available within the city, this will require greater density, both on the peninsula and off it. Some political leaders feel this is not feasible, that it “goes against the grain” of Maine people. But done well, higher density housing, served by high-quality public transportation, will create greater opportunity and quality of life for all.

Portland has always been a city of change, from its very beginnings at the foot of India Street. In 1846 its most famous native, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, returned to the city of his birth and later wrote in his poem “My Lost Youth” of how the buildings in Portland had changed in his lifetime … but not in spirit:

“Strange to me now are the forms I meet

“When I visit the dear old town;

“But the native air is pure and sweet,

“And the trees that o’ershadow each well-known street,

“As they balance up and down,

“Are singing the beautiful song …”

It is time for us now to act, and not to waste the present crisis, a time to build a Portland for the coming century that may well include “strange” new forms, but continues to sing the same beautiful song.

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