Providing services that address homelessness has never been considered an easy task. But in the last year, organizations doing this work in the Bangor area have been facing an increasingly uphill battle.
The city’s only low-barrier emergency shelter nearly shut down last year before another nonprofit stepped in to take it over. One of Bangor’s largest organizations serving people experiencing homelessness, substance use disorder and HIV collapsed and ultimately closed this spring. Local organizations are losing funding and cutting back on services.
“The provider network at this point in time is really facing a reckoning,” said Jena Jones, the city’s homelessness response manager.
Experts agree that these types of organizations have never had enough funding or resources to truly solve the problem of homelessness. But rising costs amid increases in demand for services are making it even harder to provide services — and while these challenges are affecting providers nationwide, it can be even more difficult to stay afloat in a smaller city like Bangor.
“We’ve been playing catch up for a really long time,” Jones said, “but we’re also facing all of these new challenges that have made it particularly difficult for providers to keep their doors open.”
Part of the reason why providers are strapped has to do with increasing levels of chronic and unsheltered homelessness.
Maine saw a small drop in the number of people who were homeless this year, but that decrease has mostly been attributed to the state moving away from COVID-era strategies like using motels as emergency shelters, as reported in the Portland Press Herald. But even as the official count of homeless people overall in the state has gone down, certain types of homelessness have become more common.
Unsheltered homelessness, which refers to people living outside or in places not meant for human habitation, increased statewide this year. Chronic homelessness, which the federal government defines as having been homeless for at least a year or having four episodes of homelessness in the last three years, increased more than 11 percent.
“Folks are continuing to enter experiences of homelessness faster than we can exit them into permanent housing,” Jones said.
These increases in the most severe types of homelessness are playing out across the country. Marcy Thompson, the vice president for programs and policy at the National Alliance to End Homelessness, said she’s seen many communities struggle as the number of people becoming homeless continues to outpace service organizations’ ability to house people.
In Bangor, shelters are frequently at capacity and housing in general is in short supply — a common story across the United States. “There literally are not places for people to go,” Thompson said.
As demand has grown, the amount of funding and resources available to address homelessness has not, and rising costs make it difficult even to continue providing existing services.
“From a baseline, this sector, homeless services, has never been funded at the level required to effectively respond to the challenges that we’re facing,” Jones said.
Communities all over the state are encountering these issues. But the smaller, grassroots nonprofits that make up a large part of the Bangor area’s homeless response system may be more at risk amid widespread cutbacks to federal funding for public and social services.
“There isn’t necessarily in Bangor the same infrastructure that’s been able to exist in Portland given that it’s a larger city with a larger population,” said Brittney Dunham, the senior director of social work for Preble Street, a Portland-based social services organization. Dunham oversaw the transition when Preble Street took over operations at Hope House, Bangor’s low-barrier emergency shelter.
Without a more robust system in place, oftentimes programs that are not explicitly homeless service agencies have stepped in to help with “pseudo case management or pseudo social work,” Dunham said, “which is huge for the community, but also I just think speaks volumes to the gaps that we’re seeing.”
Both Dunham and Jones mentioned the Bangor Public Library, as well as the faith-based organizations that offer overnight warming centers in the winter, as examples.
“We are in some ways attempting to cobble together portions of this response system when better investments would certainly make a profound difference,” Jones said.
This patchwork-like system made up of smaller organizations is doing essential work, but Bangor does not have enough infrastructure to fully support people entering the homeless response system, Dunham said.
“The Bangor community is working really hard to get people connected to housing vouchers and to get people connected to housing,” she said.
But many people who have been living outside for a long time or have co-occurring issues like mental illness or substance use disorder can have trouble adapting to permanent housing without extra support, creating a risk that they’ll end up back on the streets.
Bangor’s public health director, Jennifer Gunderman, suggested that the state could help with building more robust case management. “We don’t have the structure to provide that intensive support when people get housed. We’re seeing people get housed for short periods of time and then becoming unhoused again,” she said.
“The sort of continuum of housing that needs to exist for a community to be successful just doesn’t exist in Bangor,” Dunham said — although she and others involved with homelessness services have big hopes for a new permanent supportive housing facility expected to open in Bangor in the next few years.
“Sometimes we put so much effort into managing the crisis and what we see with our eyes throughout the city that we sometimes lose sight of what is that upstream investment we need to make,” Gunderman said.
