This fall, some leaders of groups that provide support to people who are homeless in the area were cautiously on board with Bangor’s efforts to clear the city’s largest homeless encampment — as long as the city can connect the people living there with other housing and services. We have cautiously felt the same way.
As discussed in a Bangor City Council meeting this week, the city’s ongoing efforts have led to 15 people from that encampment moving into permanent housing. This progress is encouraging and commendable.
But with less than a month until what had been a Dec. 31 deadline to close the encampment, and with approximately 50 people still there, it appears that the good work might need more time. Councilors Joseph Leonard and Michael Beck applauded the progress that outreach workers have made thus far, but suggested that the deadline should be removed and that encampment closure should instead be based on when the people residing there can be successfully connected to other housing.
We agree that the Dec. 31 deadline should be extended, and we welcome a city memo released on Friday outlining a proposal to extend that date to Feb. 28. The memo, from City Manager Debbie Laurie, cited the delay of a new housing project and the resulting impact on efforts to house people from the encampment.
The city is doing good work and seeing results, and an arbitrary deadline at the end of the year could have ended those efforts prematurely and left some of our neighbors even more out in the cold than they already are.
Winter is here, at least functionally if not technically, and the people living in the encampment are already dealing with the harsh realities that come with this season in Maine. A man died in a tent fire at the encampment in November, as one tragic example. The effort to connect people with safer and more stable housing is an urgent one, and its conclusion should be based on actually finding those alternatives.
“There’s no reason for us to have a hard, fixed date,” Leonard said. “We’re doing a lot of good work right now and I don’t want to see that flushed down the drain. I will be completely furious if we close down this encampment and another one pops up again.”
That fury would be justified. The years-long cycle of shuttering one encampment just for another to emerge elsewhere isn’t good for the unhoused people just trying to survive and isn’t good for other members of the community either.
Yes, this is a complicated situation. Housing insecurity can happen to many different people, for many different reasons and at many different times. As the city manager said earlier this week, there are likely to always be people experiencing homelessness in the city for one reason or another. But she has also stressed that ongoing efforts to help people in the encampment have changed minds, bolstered hope and even defied some expectations.
“We’ve gotten some people into a shelter who some thought would never enter a shelter, so those were big wins,” Laurie said.
We applaud the city for those wins, and applaud the local organizations helping in this effort. Extending the deadline is the right path forward, not in perpetuity, but in recognition that more progress can and should be made before closing the encampment.
If the city is just now formally accepting a MaineHousing grant to help aid the work keeping people from the encampment housed, then officials should also allow more time for this work to proceed in the right way. We are glad to see the city’s proposal to extend the Dec. 31 deadline so that this critical work can continue.