Homelessness solutions are ‘years away.’ For now, advocates say, meet people where they are

She used to be a nurse. But when her son died nearly two years ago, leaving her and her husband penniless, everything changed. 

Since then, the woman, who declined to provide her name, has been living in an encampment of unhoused people in Bangor. Like many other Mainers, she’s been caught in a vicious cycle of inadequate resources, skyrocketing housing costs and a response from officials that advocates and unhoused people say has often been heavy-handed and ineffective.    

As temperatures drop, the woman is hoping she won’t have to stay in the Bangor encampment when it gets cold. Asked what it’s like to be there during the winter, she gave a simple reply.

“Excruciating.”

Over the long-term, experts know what solutions are needed: More affordable housing, resources for substance use disorder and caring for people’s mental health. 

But all of those steps could take a while.

“The vast majority of things that are going to fix this are years away,” said Joseph McNally, director of homeless services for Milestone Recovery in Portland.

Given that, advocates believe there needs to be a stopgap — measures to meet people who are unsheltered where they are now. Addressing the homelessness crisis is clouded by dollar signs and logistics, but people — our neighbors — are really at the center of this conversation, and like one unhoused resident told the Portland City Council in September, they need help and love. 

While each person has their own set of circumstances that led to homelessness, cumulatively there’s been a “perfect storm,” as McNally put it, pointing to the pandemic and inflation. But no matter how we got to this point, it is undoubtedly a statewide crisis.

And even though “all of the solutions seem inadequate when you start saying them outloud,” Brian Townsend, executive director of Commonspace (formerly Amistad), said, the people supporting the unhoused community wake up every day and “recommit to the people they are doing this for.”

But those advocates, along with people directly affected, say there are right ways — and wrong ones — to address the issue of homelessness.

Advocates and unhoused say cities must stop sweeps

As encampments of unhoused people have grown seemingly exponentially, Bangor and Portland have used sweeps as one solution. But they have drawn pushback from advocates and legal experts who see them as a risk to the safety and constitutional rights of unsheltered residents, as well as from unhoused people themselves. 

ACLU of Maine says encampment sweeps may be unconstitutional. Data shows they may not even work

“Foolishness.”

“It’s not right.” 

“I don’t know where to go.” 

Those were some of the reactions from unhoused people in Bangor several days after officials’ Oct. 20 sweep of a homeless encampment near the Hope House shelter on the outskirts of the city. 

Officials said they were removing 10 to 20 people who refused help from social service workers and created safety risks. But those at the encampment estimated that the number of people forced to leave was greater than that and criticized the city’s use of sweeps. 

“I feel like it’s doing bad. They should be helping people rather than throwing them out,” Scott Michaels, a resident of the camp who was allowed to stay, told Maine Morning Star. 

Michaels and other unhoused Bangor residents, some of whom declined to be named in this story, said officials should focus on less disruptive short-term solutions, such as providing assistance to clean up the camp and increasing sanitation services.

Bangor City Manager Debbie Laurie did not respond to a request for comment on unhoused people’s criticisms of the sweeps and what officials are doing to keep those without homes safe as winter approaches. 

Other critics also say the sweeps often cause more harm than good. 

“These sweeps erode people’s trust and drive people who are already vulnerable further to the margins,” said Heather Zimmerman, a legal fellow with the ACLU of Maine. 

And without trust, Zimmerman said any attempt at long-term solutions won’t work. So the first step should be ending sweeps, she argued. 

Another opponent of the sweeps is Rep. Grayson Lookner (D-Portland), who along with Rep. Ambureen Rana (D-Bangor) is introducing a bill to end the tactic statewide.

Lookner pointed to research showing that encampment sweeps and similar policies have led to a significant rise in the number of deaths, overdoses and hospitalizations among unhoused people who use drugs. The model developed by the study estimated that sweeps and other such tactics could “contribute to 15-25% of deaths among the unsheltered population over 10 years.” 

McNally also pointed out that stopping the sweeps would allow caseworkers to keep in contact with unhoused residents and connect them with a shelter bed or possible housing opportunity. 

For Rory Spring, who has been at the Bangor encampment since March, the evidence of the ineffectiveness of sweeps is clear. He noted that in the past, he’s seen many people who are forced to leave simply return to the homeless encampment after a period of time. 

“They’ll go and then spend a week away and then come back,” he said. 

Instead, Spring said he would like to see city officials do more to provide residents with the tools and resources to clean up the camp themselves to make it a safer place. 

Michaels, who is working with a social worker to try to obtain permanent housing after attempting to get sheltered at the Hope House, which he said is often full, suggested that the city tap into existing resources to get people housed before the approaching winter, such as using motels that have vacancies or turning the now-closed Pine Tree Inn into a shelter, an idea that is under consideration. 

Find beds for the winter and beyond

In the near term, McNally said the focus should be on finding beds for people in the winter.

Milestone has a 36-bed shelter in Portland for people who identify as male and have substance use disorder, but it’s almost always full. Last winter, McNally said, the shelter was turning away about 150 people a night because it just didn’t have enough room.

“Homelessness has gotten significantly worse in the last few years but our number of beds has stayed the same,” he told Maine Morning Star.

Portland is scheduled to open a new shelter later this year that will serve asylum-seekers in the city. It’ll have the added benefit of opening up some of the more than 200 beds at the Homeless Services Center, which sits on the outskirts of the city on Riverside Street. 

While HSC isn’t seen as a viable option for some residents because of restrictions placed on guests, Townsend said some folks may be more inclined to take a bed there to escape the elements. 

There have been failed attempts to expand the number of beds at HSC, but if the city could move forward with adding 50 more beds and opening the asylum-seeker shelter, Townsend said Portland could be “somewhere in the neighborhood of having the right amount of beds” for the winter.

Lookner said another part of the equation is where shelters are, saying ideally such facilities would be small and dispersed throughout a city. And he added that shelters should be prevalent across all of the state’s major municipalities, citing Lewiston’s six-month moratorium on new homeless shelters as an unhelpful policy approach.  

Overall, Courtney Gary-Allen, organizing director of Maine Recovery Advocacy Project and Augusta at-large city councilor, said it’s frustrating that the conversation around “What do we do for the winter?” has become an annual one. 

“Why are we always in crisis mode on this?” she asked. 

There need to be efforts to create more long-term solutions, because “we’re not going to build enough housing in the next year,” she said.

Acknowledge and support recovery needs

Another piece of the puzzle is addressing the substance use issues that so often intersect with homelessness.

Milestone, which specializes in serving people who are unhoused and struggling with substance use, is expanding its detox services from 16 to 30 beds. 

McNally hopes that will have a “significant impact,” because right now they can only accept about three out of every 10 people who request detox services. 

“That means 70% of these folks that are willing to make a change are unable to,” he said.

Resources exist, they just aren’t enough to support the level of need. However, Gary-Allen and Townsend said there is one solution that could support people who use drugs but hasn’t gained enough traction. 

Gary-Allen said that once there’s an acknowledgement that people use drugs, the question becomes how to make that safer for them and the community around them. One answer could be overdose prevention centers, or places where people can safely use drugs and find a pathway to recovery resources when they are ready to seek them. 

Centers like these, Gary-Allen said, “are able to meet [people who use drugs] in the moment when they are ready to stop using drugs.”

Townsend described it as a “more thoughtful, public-health oriented” approach.

A legislative effort to authorize the creation of overdose prevention centers — also known as safe consumption sites or harm reduction health centers — fell short by two votes in the state Senate earlier this year. Instead, the legislature approved a bill to study how those facilities can prevent opioid overdose deaths.

A statewide issue

Along with efforts to tackle substance use, there is state-level work being done to help people who are homeless, such as the Statewide Homeless Council, as well as a Housing First plan that was funded last legislative session. But Townsend said he’d still like to see the crisis framed as a statewide situation, instead of a municipal challenge.

Townsend wants to find “a way that feels right and makes sense for the state and the various communities around the state to really tackle this together,” he said.

Lookner agreed that more state resources are needed to help cities dealing with issues related to homelessness. 

“Places like Portland and Bangor are doing work that the entire state should be doing in terms of creating the housing solutions and shelter space and services that are necessary to house our neighbors,” he said.