When people in the Portland area tell veteran surfer Joe Conway that they’re interested in learning the sport, he says, “Oh yeah? Go to Higgins Beach.” Located in the town of Scarborough an easy 15 minutes south of Conway’s home in Portland, Higgins Beach stretches for seven tenths of a mile along Saco Bay.
Conway loves how “friendly” the beach is, a word he uses to refer to both the constant supply of gentle waves and the exceptional camaraderie among the surfers. Surfers often discourage beginners, but everybody cheers for each other at Higgins Beach. “It’s really refreshing,” he says. In the peak summer months, surfing is forbidden from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. when the beach is usually full of families and young people in their 20s.
In the winter, it is possible to park right near the beach for free. The beach’s two inns are closed, and The Higgins Beach Market-the only store in the neighborhood-is shut down, but Conway says that surfers still jump at the opportunity to live there, and they aren’t the only ones.
Higgins Beach has been a vacation spot for over 100 years. But in the winter, a different community emerges. It’s difficult to get hard numbers on the exact size of the beach’s winter population as many residents don’t stay for the entire off-season, but the community has become increasingly popular as a place to live in the off-season.
Rod Laughton, the owner of The Breakers Inn, an establishment that has been in his family for generations, grew up on Higgins Beach in the 1960s and remembers the winters being very quiet. “When I was a kid,” he says, “Maybe a quarter of the houses on each street were occupied.” Now, almost all the homes are used to some extent in the off-season, he says.
Most of the 350 cottages in the neighborhood abutting the beach are simple structures with weathered clapboard siding and names like “Spindrift” and “Green Bean,” but even modest beachfront real estate is still quite expensive so close to Portland.
Renting the cottages in the winter months, says Scott Townsend, a local real estate agent and former Higgins Beach resident, provides an opportunity to stay in oceanfront homes for about $1,000 per month.
Townsend says that living at Higgins Beach in the winter works well for many people relocating to southern Maine or going through transitions in their lives as well as young people looking for a temporary and relatively cheap place to live. In addition, the area has become a popular place for the owners of the cottages to retire.
Although the winter community has grown, it’s still not uncommon for winter rates to be less than a sixth of what they are in the summer, and Townsend says that finding off-season tenants is not usually a top priority for the homeowners. “Winter rentals,” he says, “are more a function of having somebody in there to look after the property and pay the heat.”
Although off-season tenants might stay for as much as eight months out of the year, they aren’t likely to do so more than a few times. The people who rent the houses in the summer, on the other hand, might only stay for a couple of weeks, but Townsend says that they are the ones who are “coming back here year after year and building memories and family histories.”
As she served hot coffee in Styrofoam cups at one of the Higgins Beach Association’s weekly community breakfasts, Priscilla Reising described some of the history she has seen unfold on the beach since her family first brought her there as a baby 62 years ago.
Although Higgins Beach had been subdivided for development as far back as the end of the 19th century, when Reising’s family bought their first plot of land in 1946, the roads were not fully paved. Local farmers and shopkeepers like Reising’s grandfather, who ran a dairy in Scarborough, could acquire lots for a few hundred dollars and build small summer cottages.
As Reising’s family moved on and taxes on the property increased, her family began coming down in June to fix up the cottage and then renting it out during July and August before returning in September to close it out. Over the last few years, Reising and her sister Deedee have been able to spend more time in their houses on Higgins Beach, and Deedee has chosen to make her cottage her primary year-round residence.
Although she spends several months of the year in Florida, Deedee no longer rents her cottage. “I don’t want to,” she says, “It’s my personal place. It’s my home.”
Other families have not been as fortunate. Families used to pass their cottages down to their kids, explains Sue Thompson, an established resident. “Today,” she says, “The kids can’t afford it. The taxes are so big.” Thompson says that for decades there were almost no houses for sale in the neighborhood, but that’s changed in recent years, and newcomers have started paying “ridiculous” prices to move in. Thompson tries hard to be welcoming to everyone, but she says that social expectations are changing as the new neighbors put increasing resources into fixing up and landscaping their properties. “It’s just different than what it was when we were kids,” she says. “It was very loosey goosey. People just went to the beach. They didn’t really fuss much.”
In that way, Higgins Beach is like just about every other beachfront community in Maine. But, in the winter, “you can still live within view of the ocean and be a normal person, not a doctor or a lawyer or anything like that,” says Joe Conway, the surfer. “It is an amazing thing to take advantage of.”