A 41-unit permanent housing facility intended to combat homelessness in Bangor is finally opening nearly six months after its ribbon-cutting ceremony.
Tenants will start moving into Theresa’s Place next week, according to the nonprofit that’s been overseeing the project.
“They’re going to be moving in new residents imminently,” City Manager Carollynn Lear said in a City Council workshop Monday, adding that move-ins will be staggered over the next few weeks.
The long-awaited opening of Theresa’s Place means 30 people will be able to move into the facility amid an affordable housing shortage that has made it difficult to find solutions for people facing housing instability.
Penquis CAP, a Bangor nonprofit, initially planned to open the building by the end of 2024. Bangor delayed closing the city’s largest homeless encampment, often referred to as Camp Hope or Tent City, by two months partly in hopes that some of its residents would be able to move into Theresa’s Place, but delays related to construction and inspections kept the facility from welcoming residents until now.
The 30 people who have been allocated a unit so far were approved from a pool of more than 100 applicants, said Peter Malia, the housing development operations manager for Penquis. He expects that the building will be fully leased sometime this fall.
The housing project, located at the former Pine Tree Inn at 22 Cleveland St., will offer some in-house services such as life skills and employment help for residents of its one-bedroom and efficiency apartments.
Those services have been pared down from initial plans, which had included all-day support and treatment services for people dealing with substance use disorders or mental illness.
“This project isn’t necessarily as robust as we were hoping that it was going to be for the population that we’re trying to serve,” Jena Jones, the city’s homelessness response manager, said at a City Council workshop last month.
Jones added that some people interested in becoming residents had found the application process to be quite rigorous, which raised questions about to what extent the facility would support people coming from a background of chronic homelessness.
“By design, every resident of Theresa’s Place will be someone who lacked stable housing before moving in, whether they were in a shelter, a vehicle, an encampment, or cycling through other unsafe or temporary conditions,” according to Penquis Community Relations Manager Renae Muscatell.
Applications for Theresa’s Place are selected based on a waitlist. To get on that waitlist, “individuals must meet the federally defined criteria of homelessness or risk of homelessness,” Muscatell said.
Getting affordable housing units leased can be a difficult process, Malia said, especially since people who have been homeless sometimes have trouble getting all the documents they need to get a housing voucher and prove that they’re eligible.
“It’s a barrier that just exists with all affordable housing, unfortunately,” he said.
He added that the Theresa’s Place units are “affordable to extremely low income households” because they’re priced based on 30 percent of the area median income — lower than most affordable housing.
“Theresa’s Place doesn’t end homelessness in Bangor, but for its residents, it will offer a real chance to prevent it or leave it behind,” said Penquis CEO Kara Hay.
Hay has also previously said that the opening of Theresa’s Place will free up space in nearby shelters and other housing units, which could have a ripple effect for a larger pool of people struggling with housing in the area.
Area shelters have been slammed with demand for beds, especially in the last few months.
Hope House, Bangor’s only low-barrier emergency shelter, is full every night to the point that it consistently needs to turn people away, a spokesperson for the organization that operates the shelter told the Bangor Daily News earlier this month.
“Theresa’s Place is a much-needed addition to our community’s housing landscape,” Muscatell said.