SCARBOROUGH – Two years after Barabara and Vin Bombaci were married in 1958, they bought a cottage in the Higgins Beach community, on Pearl Street.

“We didn’t have a house, we didn’t have anything, our parents thought we were insane,” said Barbara Bombaci on Friday, with a laugh.

“We had a friend that said, you know, if you want your kids to go to college, you ought to have some property to provide a rental income,” said Vin Bombaci. “We were stupid enough to do it, but it turns out we were really ahead of the game.”

The Bombacis looked at the cottage with a real estate agent in February 1960, with the snow flying they remember. At the time, fewer than a dozen of the neighborhood’s 350-plus homes were occupied year-round, making it a veritable ghost town. Most of the buildings were summer camps, built and handed down by middle-class families from Portland, Lewiston, Augusta and other points north. The Higgins neighborhood, which sprouted up in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was, right up until the Bombacis bought it, the equivalent of going “upta camp.” Far from post-and-beam construction, most of the cottages, set up on cinderblock foundations, were of the studs-and-shingle variety. Insulation was unheard of.

“Out-of-towners didn’t rent like the do now,” said Barbara Bombaci. “Working-class people would come to their own cottages here whenever they could. That’s what it was all about.”

But in the past 20 years, a combination of trendiness and redevelopment have begun to change the face of Higgins Beach. The buildings are getting taller and more enviable, the license plates boast occupants from farther away, and property values have climbed through the roof. Like many longtime property owners, the Bombacis say they could never afford to buy their rental today, even though they are retirees far more financially stable than the starry-eyed youngsters, “no bank would touch.”

But more and more, they say, the original middle-class families are getting squeezed out of Higgins Beach, replaced by more affluent families better equipped to shoulder the ever-mounting cost of building maintenance and taxes.

Barbara Bombaci, a Scarborough native, met her future husband while attending college in Massachusetts. The couple remained there, eventually buying a permanent home to go with their rental and founding a “mom-and-pop” advertising shop. In 1986, they were able to buy a second cottage on Higgins Beach for themselves, just across Bayview Avenue from the shore.

Despite its prime location, the cottage was as rustic as any in the area. Barbara Bombaci remembers being able to peer easily through the boards between floors. With the money they made producing newspaper ads, direct-mail fliers and promotional items, the Bombacis were able to renovate the cottage, again setting the pace for future trends.

But it’s not the increased building value, now $191,000, that concerns the couple. It’s the assessment of the lot, which shot up 20 percent last year alone, bringing the total taxable value of the property to $827,800. Even their original rental on Pearl Street has escalated from the few thousand they spent 53 years ago to $581,200. The Bombacis are among 42 homeowners hit with the 20-percent reassessment hike last year, and like most of the others, have filed an appeal.

A wave of appeals board hearings are expected soon and, according to Town Councilor Ed Blaise. Most will probably end up in court.

Prices like that, they say, explain why many of their neighbors rent out their homes when they’re away. Some who live in what has increasingly become a year-round community actually leave, staying with families or in motels, in order to rent their homes out to strangers.

“We know of several people who do that, or are thinking of doing it I won’t mention any names and it’s just to pay the taxes,” said Vin Bombaci.

“Our friend and neighbor two houses back from us, she inherited the house from her aunt in the 1970s,” said Barbara Bombaci. “Three years she had to sell it and move and take a house in Casco, because they just couldn’t afford to live here anymore. They loved the beach, but the taxes in their new home were less than half what they paid here.”

Blaise, who lives nearby on Forest Street, has a home assessed at $820,300, 70 percent of which, $574,000, is the land value of the lot, less than a quarter-acre in size. His property tax bill last year was more than $11,000. This year, spending in Scarborough, primarily at the school department, is driving taxes up 7.23 percent. Blaise’s bill will grow $810.

“All of my Social Security goes to pay my taxes,” he said. “Once it starts eating into my savings, I would have an awful hard time staying here.”

Blaise originally came to Higgins Beach on annual visits to a friend who owned one of the cottages.

“Every time we came over here we liked the community more and more and hoped we’d have an opportunity some day to buy our own place here,” he said.

That day came in 1991, when Blaise and his wife paid $135,000 for one of the original cottages. After he retired from IBM in 1998, the Blaises relocated to Maine permanently from Vermont, tearing down the old cottage and bringing in a new, modular home.

Today, every house save one on Blaise’s street is owned by a non-Mainer, while almost all of the buildings have been torn down and rebuilt.

“Largely, the rebuilding is a function of the fact that the people who buy these places, because the value goes up, have the money to rebuild,” he said.

Blaise attributes the wave of teardowns to a zoning change made about a decade ago. He was on the board of appeals at the time and recalls that while he had room enough to rebuild on his small lot, many parcels in Higgins Beach, measuring no more than 50-by-100 feet, did not meet the setback requirements enacted a century after they were created. However, the new practical difficulty rule allowed Higgins homeowners to tear down and rebuild on the same footprint.

“People wanted to rebuild down here, some needed to, and I think the town realized they were losing out on a lot of money,” said Blaise.

Since that change, the pace of change has certainly accelerated.

“You only have to look at the appeals applications over the last decade to see what’s going on,” said Town Manager Tom Hall.

Still, much of the change came as much from need as want. Two doors down from Blaise is the home owned by sisters Katherine Mercier and Jane Rabbitt. They grew up on the lot, moving in as one of Higgins’ first year-round families in 1963 when Rabbitt was 14 and Mercier 11.

The sisters’ parents bought the property for $6,000 a few years before winterizing it. Today, the .34-acre lot is assessed at $634,400 and the annual property tax bill is more than double the original purchase price.

The home the sisters had built in 2011 is amazing enough that it is featured spread in the current issue of American Dream Cottages, on newsstands now. Still, the update was done only after an attempt to fix the old home’s swayback roof turned up trouble.

“It was just a classic cottage, just studs with no inside walls,” said Rabbitt, noting that family legend says the building was actually an old camp trucked to the site from another location. The new roof had to be built to modern codes and, as it turned out, the walls would not support the weight of all that regulation.

“That’s what everything down here was like once, just old, shoddy construction,” said Rabbitt.

A more recent example is the home at 3 Shipwreck Road, on the far end of Higgins Beach from Forest Street. The property was purchased by Patrick and Kerry Dimick in January 2012 for $705,000 about $90,000 more than its assessed value. But the tiny 730-square-foot cottage built in 1930 has not stood the test of time. Salt air and sand have eaten away at the foundation over time, causing the support beams to rot away. The building now leans slightly to one side and the brick chimney is in danger of collapse.

On July 10, the board of appeals considered a practical difficulty variance, allowing reconstruction with a 30-percent increase in building size. However, as the building must stay on its original footprint on the .11-acre lot, the only place to grow is up. Like the buildings on either side of it, the Dimick property will soon sport a new profile, with a partial second floor.

“And that’s how it is,” said Vin Bombaci. “Everything that sells down here is a teardown.”

In essence, he said, it’s a continuing cycle. Properties sell to people who can afford the recent hikes in value, or are willing to pay more than the assessed price in order to get a beachfront home. The original cottage is then razed due to its age and condition and a new one built. That increases the property value of that lot and, consequently, all those around it. Then, original owners get priced out of the market and the cycle begins again.

“I think that’s why there are so many more owners from out of state than there used to be,” said Mercier. “Growing up, there would be the occasional person from Rhode Island, or Massachusetts, but you’d never see California and Texas.”

“Growing up it was the same people,” said Rabbitt. “You didn’t have the transients. People just moved in the summer from the local home out here.”

“Often, it was the wives and kids that stayed through the summer, while the husbands would commute to and from work, or come out on the weekends,” said Mercier.

Still, the sisters say the basic character of Higgins Beach remains unchanged from their youth. Rabbitt cleaned rooms and waited tables as a teenager at the nearby Breakers Inn. Today, she lives in Massachusetts and summers in Maine, but says she continues to run into people she served decades ago, or their children.

The question, however, is how many more cycles of reassessments and tax increases she can take before there’s a danger that she and her sister have to sell, says Rabbitt. She and her husband, she says, are trying to save enough money to pass on to their children with the cottage, so that they can keep it for at least five years after inheriting it.

But she and Mercier agree, that while the owners and the buildings are changing, the character of the community remains the same.

“So far, almost everyone who buys has had some connection to the community,” said Mercier. “Either they grew up here, or had family who owned a cottage here, or else they rented in the summers and wanted to own a place of their own.”

But when that thread breaks, they say, when the prices get so high that new owners have no historical bonds to Higgins Beach, that’s when the real change will come.

This new home is under construction on Virdap Street at Higgins Beach. It a three-story building, unusual for the area, and dwarfs a more traditional-style cottage next door. The look of the community’s beachfront homes is changing due to a variety of pressures, including increased taxes. At left, Vin and Barbara Bombaci, summer residents from Massachusetts, on the porch of their renovated cottage at 22 Bayview St. They fear rising taxes may eventually force them out.Traditional style cottage on Higgins Beach.

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