Search | Legal Library | Helpful Organizations | Maine Courts |
About Us
History of the Maine Home Sharing Project
In 2011, The Cumberland County and South Portland Community Development Block Grant programs awarded a planning grant to study the feasibility of creating a homesharing program modeled on HomeShare Vermont to match up people who have room in their homes with people looking for affordable housing.
Elizabeth Trice in the Cumberland County executive office convened an advisory group made up of representatives from:
- Opportunity Alliance
- Pine Tree Legal
- Avesta Housing
- Southern Maine Agency on Aging
- municipalities, and
- other interested parties
The group hired a part-time project assistant Ken Murphy to develop a summary of homesharing program budget and services in other states, collect surveys from over 80 homeowners, and conduct focus groups with an elderly group in South Portland and with a state-wide group of housing foreclosure counselors.
While the group found agencies in this area were interested in homesharing as a concept, we did not find one interested in actually providing the service due to already pressed budgets. Also, with the availability of tools like Craigslist and online background checks, the group thought that good results could be had through providing good how-to and legal information and spreading that information through social and professional networks. As a result, the group decided to use the majority of the planning funds to hire Pine Tree Legal to create advisory and how-to documents to be hosted on the web. These pages are the result of that effort.
Revised January 2012