Public housing should be an affordable lifeline for people doing their best to get by, not a gateway to prolonged housing insecurity. Public housing should help insulate Mainers from the whims of an often inaccessible private housing market, and provide a critical safety valve for people to keep a roof over their heads despite the many challenges that life can throw at us.
And for many people, public housing can be and is just that.
As the heartbreaking and enraging story of Linda Gallagher-Garcia’s housing gauntlet shows, however, sometimes public housing rules and the way public housing authorities are left out of other assistance programs can actually create a barrier for people as they try to keep from slipping into homelessness.
Gallagher-Garcia’s housing journey, as told by BDN investigative reporter Sawyer Loftus working under ProPublica’s Local Reporting Network, is sadly not unique. She is one of around 1,300 public housing authority residents in Maine to face eviction proceedings since 2019; for comparison, public housing authorities had a combined 3,299 units last year.
This prevalence of public housing eviction proceedings is an alarming trend, both in Maine and across the country, and Gallagher-Garcia’s journey from homelessness to housing and back to homelessness is a particularly alarming example of that trend. It requires attention and action at both the state and federal levels.
We’ll focus today on state action — not because it should supplant federal action to make sure public housing authority rules, resources and practices fulfill the mission to keep people housed in affordable settings — but because state lawmakers are nearing a deadline in the next few weeks to submit legislation for the upcoming session.
That session must include debate and action centered around this issue. Lawmakers should reassess elements of the well-intended and needed pilot program to help Maine people pay rent and stave off evictions. That program, called the Stable Home Fund, currently excludes people living in public housing authority units based on an assumption that people in public housing already have affordable housing (an assumption that this editorial board may have made, too, at the onset of the program, for the record). Loftus’ reporting highlights a clear need to reconsider that assumption, and to allow housing authority residents to access this new program as well.
Yes, there is already a waiting list for the new program’s aid. And yes, expanding the program’s accessibility would likely require expanding the program’s funding as well. This waiting list and this reporting should further highlight the acute need across Maine for housing support.
Another crucial element of this conversation is the way that rules set by each housing authority can actually perpetuate a cycle of homelessness. Maine public housing authorities’ rules often prevent evicted tenants from returning to public housing for several years, or at all if they continue to owe a debt. Those rules can also prevent evicted tenants from receiving other benefits that could help them relocate.
One eviction from public housing should not amount to a long-term ban from other public housing units or other public housing benefits. That is a self-defeating and progress-defeating measure that can lock people in a spiral of homelessness, sometimes ensuring that they pay in perpetuity for one mistake, misunderstanding or personal challenge. Action to allow a pathway for evicted tenants to return to public housing may ultimately be a change better suited for federal housing regulations, but Maine lawmakers should also consider changing state law to end this inflexible and counterproductive policy.
Linda Gallagher-Garcia’s experience in Presque Isle is not unique, but it is outrageous. She has lost her husband, worked as a home health aide, battled cancer and struggled with housing insecurity. People in situations like hers should be able to depend on public housing — not fall through its cracks and then be left out in the cold by inflexible rules. State lawmakers must quickly give attention to her plight, and the plight of other Mainers, and follow that attention with action to improve needed protections against eviction.
