PORTLAND, Maine — Habitat for Humanity of Greater Portland's new executive director has hit the ground running since he took over in June.
Chad Mullin is a University of Maine graduate, and he has been with the southern Maine branch since 2011. Mullin joined the nationwide organization in 2008, serving full-time with Habitat for Humanity of Charlotte, North Carolina, as a construction site supervisor.
"Ultimately, I'm a builder at heart, and I just have to scratch the itch sometimes," Mullin said. "I have a fair amount to contribute, so they don't just think I'm in the way."
His current construction manager, Ryan Carmichael, agrees. Mullin is the third executive director Carmichael has worked for and the only one to put on a tool belt and get his hands dirty.
"He's been my construction mentor my whole career, so to have him out helping is normal," Carmichael said.
Mullin returned to Maine in 2011 and served as Habitat's director of construction and housing programs, leading the volunteers and leading families in building their future homes.
"[A home is] a launching pad for people, and at the same time it's kind of like a safety net for them," Mullin said.
For 2024, Habitat staff and volunteers are building homes for four families in South Portland and at least four homes in Standish. Mullin said these homes still cost about $350,000 to build, but H4H gets donations, sponsorships, corporate and federal grants, and more. That generosity allows the people living in these homes to pay about $150,000.
"People are mentally and physically more healthy if they're homeowners or if they've grown up in a home that their parents owned. They get higher rates of education, lower rates of incarceration, and they typically have better-paying jobs, and so it is holistic," Mullin said. "Your family may have been impoverished your entire life, but to own a home—that's usually the greatest wealth-building tool that any person in our society has."
Their help has been in high demand.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, people started moving to Maine in droves, driving up sale prices. More people vying for a small number of available homes made each one extremely valuable, driving up demand and cost of a limited supply.
Supply chain impacts also increased building costs.
"It put a lot of pressure on the market here. It was about that time we realized, 'Man, this is getting out of control, and it's also way more expensive.' So, we can do less with the money that we're being given," Mullin said.
Five years since that spike, Maine's median home price was $406,000 in June 2024, according to data from the Maine Association of Realtors. The median income is $69,543, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
"That, to me, must have been pretty disheartening for many people to realize ... that I'm going to be stuck in a rental for a long time unless things start to come back out, and there's no prospect of that happening, really," Mullin said.
A MaineHousing report from 2023 that analyzes the need for housing production in the state found Maine needs roughly 80,000 new units to meet the expected demand by 2030.
"Obviously we recognize the need, but I didn't realize it was that drastic," Mullin said. "It's mind-boggling. It feels almost hopeless to some degree. But we're about building hope here as well."
That state report found that, on average, Maine's homes are older than the rest of the country. Thirty-five percent of Maine's housing stock was built before 1960.
That's where a lesser-known but critical feature of Habitat's work comes in: repairs. Between building new homes and fixing damaged ones, Mullin said the staff hours are nearly equal, and they can serve nearly five times as many people.
"It's not just creating new units. It's preserving what is still in stock. And so now we're not just preserving the structure, we're helping people age in place so that they don't have to transition out of the house that they've lived in for 30, 40 years," Mullin said. "I think that's what we're doing here is we can't possibly house everybody, but we're making a difference for one family at a time."