WATERVILLE, Maine — Long-growing homeless encampments in some of Maine’s largest cities are shrinking with cold weather setting in, but it doesn’t mean people sleeping outside are finding stable housing.
The phenomenon is part of a normal but temporary drop in homelessness around the holidays, when shelter managers from Portland to Bangor say that “natural supports” for people without homes kick in — when friends and family take them in temporarily.
“We are nowhere near out of the woods,” said Henry Myer, the director of Portland-based Preble Street’s low-barrier homeless shelter and street outreach initiative. “Many of those folks are not suddenly housed in independent housing. They are in marginalized, unstable situations.”
After a year marked by sharp increases in homelessness across the state, people in Portland are finding shelter beds or beds in now-opened warming centers. A new, 179-bed shelter opened last week for asylum seekers in Maine’s largest city, something that largely accounts for the 80 fewer tents staked in the city between Nov. 1 and this week, according to city data.
There are fewer tents staked at a Waterville encampment near the Two Cent Bridge than there were before this week’s snowstorm. One person wrote on Facebook that they had been living outside at that encampment, but that a friend took them in this week as the weather worsened.
“Folks take care of their own, and when it’s dangerously cold like it has been for the past couple of days, nobody wants to see their friends and their relatives suffer and put their lives at risk,” said Katie Spencer White, the CEO of the Mid-Maine Homeless Shelter in Waterville. “So very often, folks cobble together some respite from the outdoors.”
Family and friends of a loved one without a home often can’t house them year-round for a “wide gamut” of reasons that might include their struggling with acute mental illness or substance use disorder, said Tyler Morrison, who manages Bangor’s low-barrier homeless shelter.
Another barrier comes if the friend or family member of a homeless person lives in public housing, which can bar them from having guests over for prolonged periods of time, Spencer White said.
“Families and friends will do that cost benefit analysis, and where you can’t take the risk and nobody’s going to die if they stay outside in July, where we’re at this week, it’s a different calculation,” she said.
As homelessness becomes less visible in the wintertime, with warming centers opening and natural supports kicking in, advocates said there is often a public misconception that the problem is going away or that people might be moving to warmer weather. That almost never happens, managers said.
“For a lot of these folks, their safety is in their routine,” Myer said. “They get their food at this place in the morning. They go to that place during the day to stay warm, and then they go to this place at night to sleep. They’re not going to just, like, get on a bus and go to warm Florida.”
