The public will get a chance to comment next week on proposed changes to Biddeford’s comprehensive plan, and the lack of available housing citywide appears to be taking center stage.

“There’s nowhere near enough (homes). (The local housing market is) always very tight,” said City Councilor Amy Clearwater.

Abigail Smallwood, the city’s community development coordinator, said a proposed draft of the comprehensive plan has been available for review for a year now.  Since January, officials have been conducting a series of public surveys to gauge feedback on the current draft. 

Now, Smallwood said, the public will have a chance to comment on those changes in a series of public work sessions over the next week, starting Tuesday at 1 and 6 p.m. and again on Thursday, April 14, at 1 p.m.

The city is overdue for an update to its comprehensive plan. The last official update was back in 1999. Mayor Alan Casavant said the current process actually began about seven years ago, but disputes over whether to employ an outside contractor to update the plan or do it in-house took several years to resolve. More recently, he said, the pandemic slowed progress.

“It’s just dragged on,” Casavant said.

Plenty has happened in Biddeford since 1999, including the selling off of nearly all the buildings in the city’s mill district, with the last being the Maine Energy Recovery Company’s incinerator plant, which the city bought in 2012. All of the buildings in the district are now either fully renovated or in the midst of renovation projects. 

Today, the cluster of about 30 brick buildings along the Saco River are home to hundreds of residential and commercial tenants. Casavant said the growth happened so fast, he doubted any comprehensive plan could have kept up.

“If we had finished the comprehensive plan five years ago, it would already be out of date,” he said. “The speed of those changes blew me away.” 

Smallwood said next week’s sessions will cover affordable housing, including potential zoning changes that would allow affordable multi-unit buildings in the city center. She said landlords who have been trying to expand for years could finally get their chance.

“It gives them extra income that they wouldn’t have otherwise,” she said. 

Casavant said the city definitely needs to update its current zoning, which he called “out of date and bizarre.” He mentioned a friend who owns a two-unit building, and can’t build a third unit because the current zoning laws for his property don’t allow it.

“(But) across the street, he could do it. It made no sense,” he said. 

Smallwood said the proposed changes also include permitting accessory dwelling units, commonly referred to as “in-law apartments,” which may be attached to existing homes or built separately on the same property. The idea, she said, is to encourage growth where structures already exist, as opposed to wholesale clearing of open space to build new buildings.

“We’ve been focusing on a number of strategies,” she said.

Clearwater, who covers Ward 5, where the mill buildings are located, said encouraging existing owners to build on their own property is the best way for the city to promote growth.

“The market is taking care of the big projects. There’s a lot of incentive for a developer to turn a mill building into housing,” she said.

Smallwood said the three work sessions will be virtual, and are free to attend, but pre-registration is required. To learn more about the comprehensive plan, proposed updates, and to register to attend a work session, visit https://www.biddefordmaine.org/comprehensiveplan.