Going south?

Bangor, ME

Some random, loosely connected musings on a Sunday morning

I had some hours to kill yesterday so I drove up to Bangor to see Pal Nancy’s and my first home and just see how the town’s fared in the past 40 years. Not well.

Even back in 1981 Bangor reminded me of Bridgeport, a once vibrant city of faded glory. It was dying then — had been for decades — and while, like Bridgeport, it had its boosters, it was clear to me that it was doomed. Nothing in yesterday’s brief visit proved that wrong.

The streets, never overly active, were empty, a product of the shutdown. But the main streets are littered with retail shops that closed long before the state ordered them to, and they’re surely not coming back.

A visit to Pal Nancy’s and my former house in East Holden was even more depressing. When fresh out of law school I dragged poor Nancy up there, we purchased an 1835 farmhouse and set about restoring it. The narrow country road we lived on, six miles off Route One, held a mixture of housing then, house trailers interspersed with fine homes, and other farmhouses being brought back by couples our own age. The trailers are still there, but the good houses are good no longer. Our own house, which Nancy and I lavished so much time on, retains the roof we put on forty years ago and shows it, the trim is peeling, and the meadows surrounding it have been reclaimed by the forest. I saw no car up on blocks on its lawn, but surely that will come.

Portland will probably recover from this disaster, eventually and temporarily, because it has attracted some technology companies and some health and insurance businesses, and their employees will stay in the Portland area, below what is referred to here as “ the Volvo Line”. The restaurants that made Portland a dining hub and attracted national media attention will probably not come back, but new ones will; there’s something irresistible to rich yuppies about investing in restaurants featuring heirloom potatoes and John Dory scallops in leek sauce. How long that recovery will last is an open question, though, as the state collapses around it.

Portland may see a temporary reprieve, but I don’t think Bangor will. Businesses that were barely clinging to survival before are gone, and what fool would put new capital into a venture that has a proven track record of failure? The same is true of all the other collapsed mill and lumber towns in the state; they won’t be back after this.

I’d considered buying a house up here, but no longer. 3/4 of the state is terminal, and the immigrants in southern Maine are busy turning it into their native Massachusetts, capturing the governorship, the House and the Senate, and undoing the budget constraints imposed by the hated Governor Le Page. They’ve already run up spending an additional $800 million in just the first two-year budget since his retirement, wiped out his surplus, and pushed into a $200 million deficit. With an expected unemployment rate of 30% looming, “social spending” with its concomitant ruinous taxation will be arriving soon. That, in turn, will drive existing businesses out and dissuade new ones from coming in, and the Prius squad will follow their employment.

In 1990, when Coffee by Design opened the first independent coffee shop there, the commercial vacancy rate in downtown Portland stood at 47%. That changed over the ensuing years as a community of newcomers formed, attracted by coffee shops, book stores, and concert venues. Say what you will about the political views of these people, they did transform the city and dragged it from its decaying somnolence. Property values soared, and the city became far more than its former identity as a place where drunken fishermen gathered in Old Port dives and punched each other’s teeth out.

There is no place to gather now, and the community has scattered. Surely that will come back, slowly, as new entrepreneurs take over failed businesses, and people emerge from their hiding places, but it’s going to be a slow process, and it will depend on how many employed people stick around.

Maine’s population is already the oldest in the nation, as young people have fled and retirees stay; the only change I can foresee in that equation is that the retirees will join their children in their flight.

Last one out, turn off the lights.