2025 Speakers

This session explores how the pursuit of the perfect parking space has forced us to sacrifice affordable housing, attractive architecture, walkable neighborhoods, and lively town centers in favor of congestion, sprawl, and waste.

Allison seeks out design opportunities that can be lovable, sustainable, and walkable places so that we can save our productive and sensitive ecosystems from sprawl. Allison will also explore biases that are embedded in local property assessments and why so many communities are seeing property tax hikes to homeowners.

Build Maine and GrowSmart Maine innovated a new process for engaging a broad statewide conversation, best described as public policy crowdsourcing. Learn about work that started in 2019, involving hundreds of people across the state, and the big policy moves from the 2025 session to improve built outcomes while reducing demand for development on rural lands.

Housing cannot be both a basic human need and right as well as a financial instrument on which the entire economy is built. Chris Allen will unpack what communities can do to combat the downsides of market based housing and how to create truly affordable options. He will also explore the financial argument for locating housing near service centers rather than on rural lands far from jobs centers.

This interactive session lead by Nancy Smith, with GrowSmart Maine, follows Chris Allen's presentation about Unlocking Housing. Smith invites the audience to explore policy ideas that promote housing in locations that work for Maine communities.

Monte Anderson, president of Options Real Estate Investments, Inc., is a practicing real estate developer in the community where he grew up. He also teaches and coaches communities and neighborhoods across the nation that are underserved, impoverished, and forgotten, and feels he has a solution for them. His answer is encouraging and empowering local ownership of real estate to help reverse the erosion of the middle class and to drive reinvestment into our communities. Join Monte to learn about The 12 Steps of Town Making, a book he coauthored with his partners at Neighborhood Evolution, on how small-scale development and local ownership can help revitalize neighborhoods. He will also share his work in transforming obsolete properties into vibrant gathering places for local residents. His work has proven that people across the country want something better than the next big apartment complex or strip mall.

The time for Building Small has come. Join this session and gain real world knowledge, inspiration, and valuable insights to the power of incremental, and more organic community building approaches. Jim will share his book, Building Small, an inspiring and educational call-to-action. This 250-page toolkit champions fine grained, evolutionary development as a way to support more resilient local economies, foster more authentic places, heal and grow disinvested neighborhoods, and provide a democratic form of community building that spans age, economic means, and the rural to urban transect. Building Small presents an insightful view at what is possible along with the tools needed to make it happen.