PORTLAND, Maine — Army veteran Natasha Kendall and her two children were eight days from homelessness in 2019. The rent on her Searsport apartment, which had started out at $900 per month two years earlier, was going up to $1,000, and Kendall couldn’t pay — even working three jobs.
“There was nowhere for us to go. Half my stuff was already in boxes,” she said. “I was panicking.”
That’s when she contacted the Portland-based organization Preble Street and its veterans services program. Preble Street helped Kendall obtain a federal housing voucher for veterans that helps her with the rent.
Kendall and her family have avoided homelessness, for now, but not all veterans are so lucky.
Nationwide, the number of homeless veterans has been cut in half since 2010. In just the past two years, it’s fallen by 11 percent.
But not in Maine.
Here, the number of veterans without permanent housing has doubled since 2020.
The rising numbers are not due to veterans becoming homeless at a faster rate than before but because of a severe and statewide lack of affordable housing, experts said. Vets who find themselves without a roof are staying that way for two or three times longer than before the pandemic.
In 2020, most homeless veterans in Maine were off the street and in stable housing within 90 days of making contact with his services, said Dan Hodgkins, veteran housing services senior director at Preble Street.
“Now it’s six or nine months, on average, to get vets into housing,” Hodgkins said.
Each year, homeless advocates conduct a statewide “point-in-time” census of people experiencing homelessness, including unsheltered people living on the street or in tents, and those in shelters and temporary hotel accommodations.
In 2020, 103 unhoused veterans were located in Maine. By January this year, counters found 197. That’s a 91 percent increase.
Nationally, the Department of Veterans Affairs reported 33,136 homeless vets in 2022, which was down from 36,781 in 2020.
Due to the pandemic, no complete count was conducted in 2021.
Maine’s increase in unhoused veterans reflects a general rise in the state’s homeless population. In 2020, the point-in-time count found 1,297 Mainers without permanent housing. This year, the number shot up to 3,455 — a whopping 167 percent increase.
Part of Maine’s startling, general increase is due to those sheltering in motels being counted for the first time and a recent influx of asylum seekers from Africa and Central America.
The surge in homeless veterans isn’t limited to southern Maine, said Keri Dunton, a Preble Street outreach specialist based in Bangor.
“Unhoused people come to Bangor daily on the bus and the shelter is already full,” Dunton said.
She adds that she regularly helps veterans living in cars, tents and sheds. Dunton even found stable housing for one veteran who was living in a treehouse in Dexter.
But, Dunton said, with market rental rates rising faster than housing vouchers, it’s getting harder to help all the time.
“The vouchers just don’t cover the rent,” she said.
Dunton said it’s not unusual for vouchers to expire before they’re ever used. That time period can range anywhere from three months to a year-and-a-half.
“We get some landlords to lower the rent for veterans, but it would be nice if there were a few more,” she said.
Preble Street runs a special program called Landlords Help to help connect landlords to Mainers with housing vouchers.
With no relief for Maine’s housing shortage anywhere on the horizon, Dunton thinks there’s only one solution, albeit a temporary fix.
“In my opinion, long-term housing would be great, but what we need now is more shelter beds,” she said. “People — including veterans — are out in the cold, waiting for housing.”
As for Kendall, who has anxiety and post-traumatic stress from her three-year stint in the U.S. Army, where she said she suffered multiple sexual assaults, she’s OK for now.
But the future is uncertain. Her housing voucher covers roughly half her now $1,400 monthly rent, but it runs out in 11 months.
“I don’t know what the next year will bring,” she said, “God forbid the rent goes up again.”