File photo / Peter Van Allen
A Portland homeless encampment that has since been cleared.
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Strategies to address homelessness are underway, but there’s more to do
Screenshot / Courtesy Preble Street
Mark Swann, executive director of Preble Street, spoke recently at the organization’s conference on homelessness
Not long ago, it was “extremely rare” to see someone sleeping outside in Maine. Today, Maine has more than 4,000 people experiencing homelessness.
“The change was maybe six or seven years ago,” Mark Swann, executive director of Preble Street, Portland's largest homeless shelter. He made his remarks at the organization’s recent conference on homelessness.
The conference hosted a panel of speakers from across the country who outlined what has and has not worked in their communities and how those strategies might be applied in Maine.
Some 300 people attended, including representatives from state and local government, nonprofits, municipalities, faith organizations, business and people with lived experience of homelessness.
Complex factors
The crisis — in Maine and around the country — is driven by a range of complex factors, speakers said.
That includes lack of affordable housing and accessible emergency shelter, minimal shelter funding, an increase in unsheltered individuals and rising numbers of people needing support for managing substance use disorders and behavioral health issues.
Strategies underway to address the problem include bringing together service providers to develop collaborative care systems and “site-based housing first” models, speakers said.
The "housing first" approach was a contrast to a “treatment first” model once prevalent in federal programs, many of which had no housing component and was shown to lack relative effectiveness, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Modern homelessness
The early 1980s marked the beginning of “what could be considered the ‘modern era of homelessness,’” when severe recessions at the start of the decade, persistent inflation, an economic shift and widespread deinstitutionalization of individuals experiencing mental illness hit many central cities hard, HUD said. Other factors included prohibitions on boarding houses and single-room occupancy buildings, rising property values made them redevelopment targets and rising rents.
In 1992, an organization called Pathways to Housing was in New York City to allow individuals experiencing homelessness to access scattered-site housing and assertive community treatment services without requiring commitments to sobriety or treatment. “The alternative to the treatment first approach was found to be more effective by several studies,” said HUD. “As the model evolved and gained popularity, it came to be known as Housing First.”
Between 2005 and 2007, Housing First principles contributed to a 30% reduction in homelessness rates in the U.S.
The federal Homeless Emergency Assistance and Rapid Transition to Housing Act of 2009 further entrenched Housing First principles in federal policy, expanding the availability of permanent housing to families, youth and nondisabled single adults and authorizing rapid rehousing assistance.
A national strategic plan to end homelessness was released in 2010. Since the, Housing First principles have been guiding federal homeless response programs.
The approach is designed to quickly connect individuals and families experiencing homelessness to permanent housing without preconditions and barriers to entry, such as sobriety, treatment or service participation requirements. Supportive services are offered to maximize housing stability and prevent returns to homelessness, as opposed to addressing predetermined treatment goals prior to permanent housing entry.
‘Demonstrable success’
Preble Street opened its first housing-first program, Logan Place, in Portland 20 years ago. Since then, it’s opened two more, Florence House and Huston Commons. Combined, the programs provide permanent, supportive, affordable housing to 85 people.
In 2022 at Preble Street’s first conference, Greg Payne, the state’s senior advisor on housing policy, called for the adoption of more such programs.
“I think that the question should become less about anticipating the fifth Housing First project in Maine in 2030, but instead focusing on opening the next 10, 11 or 12 housing-first properties in the next five or six years,” Payne said at the time.
A year later, Gov. Janet Mills signed into law a budget package that contained funding for a food security hub, emergency shelters, affordable housing and housing-first initiatives.
The housing-first model has proved beneficial, Swann said. When Logan House opened 20 years ago, “it was an immediate and demonstrable success” and shelter numbers went down in Portland, said Swann, adding that a lack of funding stalled programs.
In recent years, service providers have worked across sectors, disciplines and geographic boundaries to create a new funding stream that supports 24/7 social services at Maine’s existing housing-first developments and to open at least a dozen more.
“That’s what makes me optimistic,” Swann said.
The program provides affordable housing and 24-hour support services. Staff monitor the buildings, assist in developing and enhancing life skills, help with activities such as household management, shopping, use of transportation and meal preparation, and facilitate access to community resources such as health clinics and mental health and substance use disorder services.
Preble Street’s other programs include veteran housing, teen housing and rapid rehousing.
In the past year, through partnerships with landlords, over 270 veterans have been housed; rapid rehousing has served 99 people and stably housed 47 people; and Preble Street received a $348,000 MaineHousing grant to expand its First Place Transitional Living Program, part of its teen housing-services programming.
Additional positive signs, he said, include Tedford Housing’s push to expand its shelter facility in Brunswick and affordable housing projects underway across Maine.
“There’s great work underway,” said Swann. “Having said that, we need to do better.”
National movement
“You are part of a much large movement around the country,” Jeff Olivet, executive director of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness, told the gathering.
The council is an independent federal agency within the U.S. executive branch that leads the implementation of the federal strategic plan to prevent and end homelessness.
In 1971, Olivet said, the nation had a surplus of affordable housing. Today, there’s a deficit of millions of units of affordable housing.
“What that says to me is that it hasn’t always been this way,” said Olivet. “It doesn’t have to be this way and we can find our way out of this mess.”
Housing first is often not enough; many people need social services support, said Olivet.
Olivet said there’s been “tremendous progress” across the country, with some municipalities seeing reductions of homelessness due to initiatives like housing first. It works for most clients, but not all, he continued. Additional interventions are needed.
“We believe this is an all-hands-on-deck response,” noted Olivet.
Incremental change
Noah Fay, senior housing director for the Downtown Emergency Services Center in Seattle, said his city has invested in housing first and operates a number of sites.
“This work is harder now than ever before,” said Fay.
Homeward in Richmond, Va., works to build a collaborative infrastructure with homeless service providers, local governments, persons with lived experience, private funders and more, said Kelly King Horne, the nonprofit’s executive director. That includes a HIPAA-compliant online database used to link households experiencing homelessness to resources; to better understand client demographics, service needs, service usage and trends; and to facilitate community planning to reduce homelessness.
Hannah Sims, crisis system manager at Housing Forward in Dallas, Texas, said that city has begun to see decreases in homelessness. Its two primary tools are a coordinated outreach model with over 100 organizations, aligning staffing, outreach and funding; and a street-to-home encampment response. Since 2021, the model has resulted in a 24% reduction of chronic unsheltered homelessness, Sims said. The city recently pulled off one of its most successful street-to-home initiatives, housing over 100 people in less than 100 days through an initiative that involved over 17 organizations.
“In a lot of ways, we have come light years, but that is slow, incremental change,” said Sims.
Not there yet
The need is exacerbated by a substance and mental health crisis that accelerated with the pandemic, when resources became increasingly unavailable as needs became more pronounced and profound, speakers said.
“We continue to deal with the fallout,” said Fay.
Additionally, there’s no cookie-cutter solution, said Swann: Different places have different realties, such as Maine’s rural nature, small-town nature and geographic spread,.
“We have a lot to learn from each other across the country,” said Swann. “Many communities are doing a lot of things right and nobody is doing it perfectly and we need to be in conversations like this.”
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