‘Where did all the staff go?’: Maine restaurant owners blame the housing
shortage
[November 18, 2025] By
TAYLOR NICHOLS/The Maine Monitor
When Malcolm Bedell opened Honey’s Fried Chicken Palace in Thomaston
last year, he had dreams of bringing the restaurant to locations across
the state.
But one question is stopping him from moving forward: “Who’s going to
run it?”
Bedell and other employers throughout Maine say they’re struggling to
find and retain staff — in large part because workers can’t find
affordable housing.
“Every single industry sector is being impacted by the lack of housing,”
said Quincy Hentzel, CEO of the Portland Regional Chamber of Commerce.
“Almost every business is finding a shortage or a difficulty in finding
employees.”
Small business owners say they can’t afford to pay workers the high
wages necessary to keep up with rising housing prices, and even when
they can, there’s nowhere for employees to live.
These challenges are particularly visible in the food service industry,
with some restaurants cutting lunch hours or closing down on slower days
of the week, Hentzel said.
In extreme cases, employers say they feel they have no option but to
close down for good.
Honey’s Fried Chicken Palace was an expansion of Bedell’s first fried
chicken restaurant, Ancho Honey, which opened in Tenants Harbor in 2019.
With five years under his belt and two finalist awards for best burger
and best fried chicken in the state, Bedell started to expand, with the
hope of starting a Maine-based chain.
Instead, just one year after he opened his new counter-service
restaurant, Bedell made the decision to shut down Ancho Honey — a choice
that was fueled in large part by problems finding staff.
And he’s not alone.
Mike Fraser has worked in the restaurant industry since the 1990s,
taking the leap from employee to employer over a decade ago. He now owns
or co-owns five restaurants in Portland. But as the cost of living has
ballooned since the pandemic, he said he’s struggled to keep paying
employees a living wage.
This was a factor in his decision to close the Portland bar and
restaurant Paper Tiger at the end of the summer, he said, noting that
his staff consistently told him they needed higher wages to keep up with
housing costs.
“Not being able to operate a business where employees feel like they are
appropriately compensated, enough so that they can live where they want
to live and have the lifestyle they want to live, is the majority reason
why,” Fraser said.
While he doesn’t plan to close down his other locations, Fraser said he
just took a job at a roofing company because of uncertainty in the
industry.
“Every year, for the last couple years, I’ve lost money in the
restaurant industry, and nobody’s happy,” Fraser said. “I’m questioning
my life choices.”
Staff only had two weeks’ notice that the restaurant was shutting down,
leaving them scrambling to find new jobs right as seasonal work was
winding down, said former Paper Tiger bartender Ian King. He said he
believed the restaurant was making a profit and was surprised to hear
that was behind the decision to close.
“It put us all in a very tight spot,” King said. “Not a lot of places
were hiring at the time.”
He found a new position at the nearby Low Stakes Lodge, but was job
hunting again just one month later when the bar announced its closure.
Now he splits his time between CBG Bar & Grill and Maps.
King has worked in the service industry for the last 15 years off and
on, and said he made the switch from back of house to front of house in
2023, a choice driven in part by the need to make more to pay rent.
“Most of the people I know back of house have roommates or live with
their partners,” King said. “I don’t know anyone living alone unless
they’re a chef.”
Housing costs pushed him and his wife to move out of Portland to South
Portland in 2021, where they were able to find a renovated two-bedroom
with parking, a dishwasher and laundry in-unit for $1,400 a month.
The median housing cost for renters in Maine jumped from $870 per month
in 2019 to $1,210 per month in 2024, according to data from the U.S.
Census Bureau. In Portland, the increase went from $1,245 to $1,711 per
month.
Rebounding from the pandemic
The hospitality industry was among those hit hardest by the pandemic.
Employment rates in accommodation and food services tanked in 2020, and
didn’t return to prepandemic levels until summer 2023, according to data
from the Maine Department of Labor.
The number of businesses continued to grow during that same time period,
leaving more restaurants to fight over a smaller labor pool.
“Anytime you need an icebreaker question, it’s just like, ‘Well, where
did all the staff go?’” Bedell said. “I think a lot of people left
traditional work during COVID and just sort of haven’t come back.”
Initially, average weekly pay for restaurant workers saw a boost after
the pandemic. But in more recent years, wage increases haven’t kept up
with growing rent prices in some areas of the state.
“Housing was one of the items where even if the average cost of living
was being covered by wages, housing wasn’t,” said James Myall, an
economic policy analyst at the Maine Center for Economic Policy,
explaining that housing costs increased faster than inflation.
[to top of second column] |
Restaurant owner Malcolm Bedell working in the kitchen at Honey's
Fried Chicken Palace during the Friday night dinner rush on Nov. 14.
(Taylor Nichols/The Maine Monitor via AP)
 It took several years to recover
from restaurant closures during the pandemic, said Becky Jacobson,
the executive director of Hospitality Maine, estimating that the
number of restaurants rebounded by 2023. Since then, the number of
openings and closings have fallen in the realm of normal business
churn in an industry sensitive to economic changes, Jacobson said.
“Some of that is cyclical, depending on what’s going on with the
economy. If we see a recession, then you’ll see closures go up. When
the economy rebounds and there’s more discretionary spending, then
they open back up,” she said. “So I don’t think we’re seeing
anything unusual right now.”
While she isn’t seeing a large number of restaurants closing down,
she is seeing them adapt by closing a few days a week or changing
opening hours.
“The industry is resilient and works around whatever the issues are,
but there’s no doubt that sooner or later, the lack of affordable
housing in some areas has to impact all industries,” she said.
Restaurants are notorious for running on thin margins. If an owner
can make a five percent profit on sales, they’re making it as a
restaurant, said longtime chef and restaurant owner David Turin of
David’s Restaurant in Portland and David’s 388 in South Portland.
But a five percent profit on sales doesn’t leave much wiggle room,
and the rising cost of everything from food to rent has owners
struggling to make the math work.
“The fact of the matter is right now that every restaurant that is
open, certainly in Southern Maine, every single restaurant is a
low-margin business,” Turin said. “We’re all low-margin and we all
have to do more volume as a result.”
While Turin said he believes he is paying his employees enough to
afford housing, he said he has lost around 20 staff members in the
last four years because they couldn’t find places to live. Some even
left the state.
‘It’s an economic issue’
As businesses reckon with these challenges, a new statewide
coalition is stepping in to bring more attention to the issue. In
early November, the Maine State Chamber of Commerce unveiled a new
pro-housing campaign highlighting the need to build homes to support
workforce growth.
The Build Homes, Build Community coalition, which they formed along
with the Portland Regional Chamber of Commerce, the Maine Affordable
Housing Coalition and the Maine Real Estate and Development
Association, is aiming to educate communities on Maine’s critical
need to develop housing.
“Housing is not a housing issue anymore. It is an economic issue,”
said Maine State Chamber of Commerce President Patrick Woodcock at
the Nov. 5 campaign kickoff event, describing how the state’s
housing challenges are making it difficult for businesses to
operate.
The group cited the state’s economic forecast as a reason for
concern. In 2024, employment grew by one percent. This year, that
number was down to .02 percent, and is projected to drop to .01
percent in 2026, according to a bi-annual economic forecast report
from the Maine Consensus Economic Forecasting Commission released
this month.
Leisure and hospitality, which accounted for about 10 percent of
Maine jobs in 2025, is expected to see a slight drop in numbers.
Employment in the field was up 4.5 percent last year, but is
projected to stagnate and begin declining through 2029, according to
the report.
While building is ultimately the best long-term solution to escape
the housing crisis, Myall from the Maine Center for Economic Policy
said policy changes can help alleviate the burden of housing costs
in the short term.
He pointed to raising the minimum wage, as Portland just did, as one
option, which he said isn’t likely to result in job losses unless
it’s raised too high, too fast. Policies like the Eviction
Prevention Program also can play a big role.
“Some of those programs that help people pay rent can be useful,
especially if they’re particularly targeted at groups that might be
especially vulnerable,” Myall said, such as low-income workers in
tourist areas where second homes have become more popular.
Workforce housing projects throughout the state have met community
opposition, something that Woodcock says is fueling the housing
crisis in a bigger way than people realize: people who oppose
housing projects and argue they are trying to protect the character
of their community may not always connect the development with the
role it could play in lowering housing costs.
“We’re trying to make that connection because it is so easy to make
an opposite argument that the impact of this specific thing will
have on this specific community,” Woodcock said. “The collective
benefits of all of us saying yes to housing swamps all of the
concerns that we hear.”
He said the need for more housing is stark.
“We simply cannot grow if we have people moving away and (are) not
attracting people into our workforce,” he said.
All contents © copyright 2025 Associated Press. All rights reserved
 |
