BDN reporters help make the Bangor region a better place by holding officials accountable and shining a light. Your donation can help raise $60,000 this spring to support our reporting. Make a donation now.
For years, Bangor has lacked a comprehensive plan for how it intends to address a homelessness crisis that continues to grow.
After months of discussion and planning, the City Council appointed a nine-member advisory committee on homelessness last month. The group hasn’t met yet, but it will be tasked with devising a strategy to combat homelessness.
The committee could consider looking to other cities for inspiration.
The Bangor Daily News identified five strategies that other communities across the country have tried that achieved meaningful progress, and spoke with experts from other states as well as people who have experience working with homeless people in Bangor to see if any of them might work here.
The ideas range from something as simple as bulking up the resources offered to people who are transitioning into housing, to more elaborate plans like the city renting out an entire block of apartments. Some of these strategies are under consideration in Bangor, but none have been fully executed.
Do you have an idea that Bangor’s advisory committee on homelessness should consider? Let us know in the comments below.
Providing support services with housing
Permanent supportive housing — a model where homeless people are placed in housing with services such as mental health, substance abuse and job-related assistance available to help their transitions — is backed by years of research.
Cities like Houston have made progress on homelessness using similar ideas, and Denver worked with private investors to fund permanent supportive housing with a social impact bond.
Bangor is slated to get its own permanent supportive housing facility next year, a project being managed by Bangor Housing and funded by the state housing authority, but the city doesn’t need to wait until then to provide wraparound services to people who are entering housing after a period of living on the streets.
“Supportive housing doesn’t require a physical site,” Beth Shinn, a homelessness expert and Vanderbilt University professor, said, adding that there are many advantages to a “scattered site” model that ties services to a person rather than a particular housing site.
A program that uses this model to house people with HIV in New York City places people in apartments and has dedicated staff that visit them bimonthly to make sure they’re getting the healthcare, benefits and food they need.
Bruce Hews, Bangor’s homelessness response coordinator, believes creating a system to get people ready to live indoors and match them with the right type of housing can be more successful in addressing the city’s crisis than just adding more housing alone.
Convene all the city’s service providers
Houston is seen as a leader among American cities after reducing homelessness by 63% after more than 10 years of focus on supportive housing.
A key part of Houston’s success was convincing more than 100 unrelated organizations that worked on homelessness issues — county and city agencies, service providers, religious groups, and others — to unite under one umbrella and work toward a set of shared goals. The coalition began its work in 2012 and has housed more than 32,000 people.
“There has not been an adequate sense of an integrated vision,” former city councilor Jonathan Sprague said of Bangor’s approach to homelessness and what he sees as a lack of coordination between all the groups working to address it. He believes the city hasn’t provided meaningful leadership to get all of these groups to commit to pooling resources and using a shared plan.
Service providers have told the BDN that Bangor’s homeless response system is more of a patchwork made up of smaller organizations doing what they can, compared with more robust systems in large cities. This network also includes groups that weren’t built to address those issues, like churches or the Bangor Public Library.
Many regions, including Maine, coordinate federal funding for homelessness through regional planning bodies called “continuums of care,” but Houston’s collaboration was more unified than other cities that have been less successful in reducing homelessness, the New York Times reported. Service providers could focus their energy on one particular service, instead of trying to do everything, which was burdensome and risked duplicating services.
Once the public started seeing results, the city was also able to get corporate supporters on board to provide more funding.
Low-cost temporary housing
Permanent housing takes time to build, and with Bangor shelters frequently at capacity, homeless residents often have nowhere to go.
In California, building quick, low-cost interim housing units has gotten thousands of people off the streets.
“At least getting everyone indoors is so doable,” Elizabeth Funk, founder of the San Francisco-based nonprofit DignityMoves, said. Her group focuses on ending unsheltered homelessness by placing mass-produced cabin structures on borrowed vacant land.
The model stems from the idea that the longer someone is living outside, the harder — and more expensive — it is for them to integrate back into society, Funk said. Getting homeless people into a private, indoor space can help them become more stable and eventually transition into permanent housing. The group’s housing sites typically have shared bathroom and kitchen facilities but offer more privacy than fully congregate shelters, Funk said.
Her group served 1,940 people at 11 supportive housing sites in California last year. Those California sites were operated with more than $100 million in both private and public funding, but Funk believes smaller cities like Bangor have an opportunity to end unsheltered homelessness much more easily. She estimated that building an interim housing site breaks down to about $50,000 per room, and that Maine would need 200 interim housing beds. That’s about $10 million to get the state’s entire unsheltered population off the streets.
“Maine has the capability, for very small dollars, to be a state that has finally solved one of the most unacceptable humanitarian failures in our lifetimes,” Funk said.
She added that the organization is looking to expand anywhere across the country.
Start with a small population
Sprague, who drafted a long-term homelessness plan in 2023 that the city never adopted, also suggested that Bangor could start by focusing on a sub-population, such as students in Bangor schools struggling with homelessness.
Together, the City Council and School Committee could make a commitment that “no child is going to go unsheltered,” and build on work already being done within the school department to provide food and healthcare to students who need it, he said.
Other communities have had success using a sub-group of homeless people as a starting point.
For example, Abilene, Texas, focused on effectively ending veteran homelessness before expanding its vision to address chronic homelessness more broadly. Abilene’s mayor set an official goal for local organizations to house all 30 of the city’s homeless veterans in 100 days, and the city — roughly four times the size of Bangor — quickly reached functional zero for veteran homelessness, meaning it reached certain benchmarks to ensure homelessness for those people was rare and brief.
There were 22 homeless veterans in Penobscot and Pisquataquis counties as of April, according to data collected by the state’s homeless planning system.
Master leasing
Some bigger cities, such as Los Angeles and New York, have utilized a strategy called “master leasing” where a city government or local nonprofit rents out a block of apartments and subleases them to people who need affordable housing.
The landlord typically takes on the responsibility for maintaining the units, and the system helps bypass barriers for homeless people seeking housing, including those who may have been previously evicted or have trouble finding a landlord who would accept their voucher.
Los Angeles’s homelessness agency has struggled to execute the strategy fully, but master leasing plans there housed more than 100 people in less than a year.
Hews said that while a master leasing system would take a lot of time and work to implement in Bangor, he thinks it’s worth looking into.