BRUNSWICK

Tedford Shelter Executive Director Craig Phillips has reviewed the annual homeless Point in Time count, but he didn’t need a piece of paper to tell him homelessness is on the rise in the Midcoast.

“There’s a backlog at our shelters,” Phillips said.

That’s mainly due to a lack of apartments, especially affordable apartments, in the area.

Homelessness is also affecting people of all ages, he said.

“I’ve heard stories of students who are living in tents and that type of thing,” Phillips said.

They’re stories he hears from those who work at the shelters — a woman living in her car in Damariscotta with diabetes, a student living in a tent in Westport attending school in Brunswick. The number of sheltered and unsheltered homeless are on the rise, and organizations like Tedford are finding themselves turning people away.

“The resources are very tough to come by in terms of permanent, stable housing,” Phillips said.

Tedford is now having to place families in a local motel, Phillips said. Since November, the organization has been providing emergency shelter for 11 families — a phenomenon Phillips said he hasn’t seen in his five years with Tedford.

One family in particular has been staying at the motel for three months. Phillips said he now has three families at the shelter who are moving out, so that will make room for a few more families to move into a more stable situation. Still, not everyone can receive help.

“From January 2015 to June 2015, we received 106 different, unique calls from families that are seeking shelter. So again, a lot of families we are not able to serve as we would prefer to,” Phillips said.

Philips said the family and adult shelters are at capacity and that the organization turns away 20 to 25 calls for help per month.

Complicating matters is that those staying in shelters have been staying longer.

“The length of stays at the shelter are increasing because they’re not able to find that next open apartment. It’s just the occupancy rates of apartments in the Midcoast is fairly high. People have the resources they need to move out of the shelters, but they just can’t find that empty apartment in the area,” Phillips said.

Of those Tedford serves, Phillips said that 75 to 80 percent are from the Midcoast.

In the annual count, the number of unsheltered homeless was only four — a number that can be deceiving, Phillips said, because of the amount of energy a community can put into counting a population that is living in the woods, cars, or constantly on the streets.

Phillip Allen, program coordinator at Preble Street, an organization in Portland that provides homeless services, noted that finding volunteers and even staff members to participate in the count presents challenges each year.

“To say that you’re going to dedicate staff to cover an area is a commitment,” he said. “You’re taking your staff away from doing services and providing assistance to the case loads that they already have to prioritize … to make sure that we’re getting an accurate count.”

This year, Allen had sent some of his staff to do some minimal outreach in Sagadahoc County, with a focus in the Bath community. Out of the two individuals identified through the survey, only one was willing to participate fully, he said.

In prior years, local Bath resident Betty King had been in charge of organizing the count in the community before she passed away last year.

“It wasn’t nearly exhaustive as it could have been,” Allen said on Thursday. “But I think it was because as late as two weeks out, we didn’t have any identified lead. With Betty passing away, she had done a lot of work in the past and that ball kind of got dropped.”

Sagadahoc is among a few other counties that do not have identified leaders for the survey, said Allen.

“For next year, we’re going to have to work, either … putting a better effort forward to cover (the Sagadahoc) area, or trying to identify (a lead),” he said.

Between the Tedford’s family and adult shelters, the organization is housing 35 individuals including six family households, in addition to 11 families housed in a motel.

Of the four unsheltered individuals, they are listed as all living with post traumatic stress disorder, two with substance abuse issues, three with a physical disability and three that have indicated a past of physical, sexual or emotional abuse. There were no veterans among the unsheltered count.

One of the identified unsheltered homeless was a parent with a 5-year-old child.

“It’s a very cruel existence, but unfortunately the capacity is just not there to house everybody every night,” Phillips said.

dmcintire@timesrecord.com, dkim@timesrecord.com