Tents, shopping carts and other belongings poked out of the snow on the railroad tracks below Washington Street in Bangor on Wednesday, the morning after the first snowstorm of the season.
A growing number of people have been camping here in recent months, and the city estimates about 40 to 50 now live in the area that has become the city’s largest homeless encampment.
“I don’t want to spend the whole winter out here,” said Jennifer Marshall, who’s been living in the encampment for about two months.
The city will clear the encampment by Dec. 19, it announced in late November while citing safety concerns about its proximity to the railroad.
Without shelter space, affordable housing and support infrastructure that could keep the area’s most vulnerable people off the streets, the camp’s residents are unlikely to all find a place to live after the camp is cleared.
The planned closure is the latest example of Bangor’s failure to create a long-term strategy to solve the city’s homelessness crisis. It will be the third major encampment to be forcibly closed in Bangor in less than three years, following the Valley Ave. and Tent City camps. After each closure, a new encampment has formed elsewhere in the city.
The railroad encampment has grown in recent months, becoming home to a group of people spread relatively far apart near the tracks beside the Penobscot River.
There were about five or six other tents when she first started camping there, Marshall said. By the time city staff began notifying residents Nov. 25 of the impending deadline to leave, they counted 37 tent sites in the area, City Manager Carollynn Lear said at the latest City Council committee meeting.
Trains passing through pose a safety risk to both the people living there and the first responders and city staff who visit the site to provide services and help in emergencies, Lear said about why Bangor is clearing the camp. As it gets colder and snowier, safely getting in and out of the area would become more and more difficult.
Business owners at the nearby Penobscot Plaza have also expressed concerns about the encampment’s location.
“I certainly have sympathy for the situation, but the police allowing them to be there certainly isn’t helping my business,” Jason Drake, who owns Diversified Ink in the complex, said during public comment at a November City Council meeting.
City staff have been working with encampment residents to connect them with services, and Lear said in the Monday meeting that many of them are in touch with support workers and have housing vouchers.
Not everyone living in the encampment will be housed by Dec. 19, the deadline the city has set for them to clear out.
Storing people’s belongings, availability of space where people can go during the day, pets, and transportation between daytime and nighttime warming centers will all pose logistical issues when the encampment is closed, Lear noted in a November committee meeting.
The city chose the deadline because The Well, a daytime warming center, is set to open Dec. 15.
Marshall, 43, said she lived in the Valley Ave. encampment before it was shut down in spring 2023. She and her boyfriend, Alex Emery, secured housing for a year after that, but their landlord didn’t allow them to stay after the lease was up, and they’ve been homeless again since.
“They kinda set us up for failure,” she said of the city’s efforts to find the couple sustainable housing. “I’m hoping this time they actually follow through.”
Emery has a voucher and Marshall is working on getting her paperwork done so she can get one too. They will go to a warming center if they can’t get housing by the encampment clearing deadline, Marshall said.
“I’m hoping this is the last time we’re gonna have to do the living in a tent camping thing,” she said, noting that she has lung-related health issues that make it difficult to work and to live outside in the cold.
Some residents have housing vouchers and may be able to move into permanent housing, and some will begin spending nights in warming centers, for which the city recently allocated emergency funding, according to Bangor’s public health director, Jennifer Gunderman.
“And then there’s a group of people who aren’t ready for either and who are going to decide that they want to continue living outside, for many different reasons,” she said Monday.
One encampment resident, Dustin, said Wednesday that some people living there have been kicked out of shelters before or struggle to stay sheltered due to mental health issues. Dustin said he has a job with Needlepoint Sanctuary, a local harm reduction organization, but he only works a few hours per week and is struggling to get resources like a housing voucher because he doesn’t have an ID.
Dustin was living in Tent City when it was shut down earlier this year. He stayed with a friend for a few months after that, but was forced back on the streets when the friend was evicted.
Asked about his plans once the city closes the railroad encampment, Dustin replied, “you know, it’s just gonna be another day, so just pick up, move to another spot, honestly.”
Community members have pushed back against the encampment clearing, with some planning to protest at the City Council’s upcoming Monday meeting.
“We understand that the current location is not safe for many reasons. However, we would strongly, strongly urge the council to put a pause on this date until we have a better plan,” Shane Boyes, vice chair of Bangor’s Advisory Committee on Racial Equity, Inclusion and Human Rights, said at Monday’s committee meeting.
Amy Clark, board chair of the Maine Recovery Action Project, also said during the meeting that her organization opposed the city’s plan, in part because of its timing during an ongoing HIV outbreak in Penobscot County.
Scott Pardy, who owns numerous recovery homes in the area and serves on several city boards, similarly urged the city to reconsider its plan in an email Monday to councilors.
The councilors at this week’s committee meeting all seemed to agree that their efforts to address homelessness in recent years haven’t done enough and weren’t guided by any real long-term plan — a pattern that has plagued the city for years.
As a more short-term solution, councilors raised the possibility of establishing a “sanctioned” location where encampment residents would be allowed to go after being forced out of the railroad area.
“Maybe a city-controlled encampment, but we have rules and guidelines,” City Councilor Carolyn Fish said. “I’m just kind of throwing out wild and crazy ideas, but we have to start thinking how we can get more control, and I think right now we’re controlled by crisis management and reaction instead of strategic planning.”
Councilors planned to talk more about that possibility at their next meeting on Monday, and Councilor Joe Leonard requested that city staff identify some potential sites for councilors to discuss.
To further complicate the city’s efforts, its homeless response manager, Jena Jones, recently left her position a year and a half after its creation.
Councilors said Monday they want to work on establishing a formal strategic plan to address homelessness, which may include creating an advisory committee with local experts.
“I don’t want to see the mistake that we did before, multiple times, and to do a sweep, a displacement only to see another encampment form,” Leonard said.
“This is just insanity over and over and over again.”
