The Gentrification of the Working Waterfront Part II: Why would you want to be the next Martha's Vineyard?

Maine is so hot right now.

To be clear, Mainers have known this since time immemorial. But the internet has created a slow boil over the past decade, and it seems like our pot is starting to boil over.

Maine is an incredible place to live and work, and most Mainers love the good parts and even embrace the challenges, knowing we'll be rewarded with gorgeous sunsets, briny air, and crisp fall mornings. We complain about the black flies and frigid winters, but shared hardship also tightens bonds and brings people together.

I recently shared a post on my Instagram, "It's kinda chic to visit Maine and not post about it," and it resonated with a lot of people: almost 5k likes, over 230 comments, and nearly 500 shares. For Instagram, that's not even viral, but what was interesting is that nearly all the comments said the same thing. People are tired of influencers and content creators misrepresenting Maine, sharing Maine's secrets, and even co-opting our "look."

It seems harmless, but I think it's negligent to ignore the role of influencers and marketing when we're talking about how Maine's coastal communities are changing.

I live in the midcoast, and over the past decade, I've watched the town where I live go from an isolated working waterfront community to a place that argues about affordable housing, where a campaign starts every time someone dislikes a new project, and where people move here to retire or to work remotely, having fallen for the view, or maybe for a version of it they first saw on someone's feed.

Some might argue Maine has always been this way, and they’ve got a point. Maine has been Vacationland since 1936, after all. Others might point to tourism efforts and media publications that enticed people here over the decades. More recently, social media seems to be playing its own role in how people find their way to Maine.

There are other forces too, like COVID migration, climate migration, and amenity migration, which I touched on in my last blog about gentrification. I think it's all of the above. But the complicated part is that Maine needs people. We need a strong workforce, and we need visitors and tourists who spend their dollars at local stores.

People simply posting and sharing about their trip to Maine is not an issue. The issue arises when it is done inauthentically, with misinformation, or in a way that exploits a place. When the person posting takes a photo of a locally made product in a store but never purchases anything in that store. When more is taken than what is given back.

A craft shop on Nantucket that has sold local baskets, antiques, and carvings since 1948 recently hung a sign inside: "No Influencers." An influencer saw it, took it personally, and told her followers the sign was really about mocking women and delegitimizing the creator economy. Maybe. But I doubt it, and from where I sit, a few hundred miles up the coast, that sign is the politest version of something coastal communities in Maine have been trying to say for a decade or more.

But what's happening in Nantucket is not what's happening in Maine, and that distinction is important.

I want to be careful not to flatten Nantucket into a punchline either, because that sign didn't come from nowhere. Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard have Indigenous, whaling, and maritime history. They were working communities long before they were vacation ones. But they gentrified a long time ago, and what's happening there now is further down a road most of coastal Maine hasn't reached yet. The urban geographer Loretta Lees has a term for that next stage: super-gentrification, which she coined in a 2003 study of Brooklyn Heights. It's what happens when an already gentrified neighborhood gets transformed again by an even wealthier class, this time pricing out not the original working community but the earlier gentrifiers who arrived first. The displacement doesn't stop once a place has been made over. It just moves up the ladder.

There's also something I think of as tourism over-saturation, when there are just so many people that local stores and restaurants are actually running out of goods and finding it incredibly challenging to find, plan for, and manage staff. Much of rural coastal Maine is not there yet. (Bar Harbor and Boothbay Harbor are raising their hands, though.)

The gentrification that's happening in most of our fishing communities is first-wave displacement: families losing the ability to live in the town they work out of. It's a different problem than Nantucket's, even if some of the terminology is similar.

Coastal Maine is incredible, but it's also a byproduct. It exists because of the people doing the unglamorous, mostly invisible work that keeps it what it is: the ones running the small businesses, the fishermen on those photogenic boats, the volunteers who keep the hiking trails clear.

When coastal Maine, or Nantucket, or Martha's Vineyard, gets posted and shared as a lifestyle, the property values chase the aesthetic, and in Maine the fishing families who make the place worth photographing get priced off the coast where they work. The lobster boat in that post belongs to someone who can no longer afford to live near the water where it's moored. Someone who now has to wonder how you raise the next generation of fishermen when the place they'd need to work is a place they can't afford to live.

Now, I know some communities would love to tap into this over-abundance of tourism. Widow's Bay, for example. While it's a fictitious town (and definitely not cursed), the mayor is thrilled when Widow's Bay is suggested to be the next Martha's Vineyard in the New York Times. He proceeds to ignore various signs (hauntings) that should perhaps make him reconsider, but if the mayor in Jaws refused to close the beach because business was booming, we can't expect differently in Widow's Bay. Some towns are dying for tourists.

A working waterfront, unlike a craft shop, can't hang a sign. And with more and more residents in town, living closer and closer, challenges to daily work get more complicated. New neighbors threaten lawsuits over the sound of a boat leaving at 4 a.m. They call to complain about clam harvesters working the mud at low tide, convinced the exposed flats are their private property. (They aren't.) Others join the planning board to meet people and end up blocking the new wharf down the road because they've decided it will hurt the environment.

There's a civic cost, too. Maine is a home rule state, so once a fishing family can't afford to live where they fish, they lose the ability to vote on the decisions that decide what happens to the wharves they fish out of. Our lobstermen can adapt to a changing ocean, different seasons, and tides. It's literally part of the job. What they can't adapt to is being loved out of their own community.

Part of what makes this hard to fight is that it's hard to pin down. There's no single dramatic eviction notice or shuttered restaurant that marks the moment. Trying to specify exactly when and where gentrification is happening can feel like playing whack-a-mole: you address one town's ordinance, and three more properties change hands somewhere else along the coast. And there's a real reluctance to say anything critical about newcomers or tourism at all, because coastal Maine genuinely depends on both. This isn't an argument against people visiting or moving here. It's an argument for being honest about what's actually happening, so towns can make informed decisions instead of just absorbing the change and hoping it works out.

None of this means stay away. It means there's a difference between photographing the wharf and calling it chic. A lobster boat isn't chic. It's a working vessel, tied to a living, tied to a person who needs to be able to afford the shore it returns to.

The Nantucket shop put up a sign that's funny, and a little on the nose. The sign on the way into my community says, "We are a working waterfront community." They read differently, but they mean the same thing. This is a real place, and people make their living here. Don't love it into something none of us can afford.

Because even when you stop thinking it's chic, we will still be here.