Portland’s City Council will soon vote on a resolution providing policy guidance for the city’s single-adult shelter services. The resolution is clear and strong and has been lauded by national expert Robert Pulster of the U.S. Interagency Council on Homelessness.

At a January City Council workshop, Pulster confirmed that Portland is moving in the right direction by creating a single central shelter with meals and essential services on site. He confirmed that its location on Riverside Street is not problematic and that the new facility will allow staff to implement best practices they are unable to employ at the current building.

The council resolution includes 14 points of policy guidance for this facility and its services. Most significantly, it encourages city staff to continue their award-winning housing work while focusing more resources on diversion and prevention tactics to keep people from ever entering the shelter system. It also calls out the need for greater involvement from other municipalities, state and federal entities, community partners and the private sector as we work to address the regional problem of homelessness together.

The resolution seeks to involve these partners both philosophically and financially to ensure that the entire region is working together to address this challenge and fund its solutions. Indeed, to prevent and end homelessness, we must all pitch in.

Further, the resolution offers guidance on the capacity of the new facility, advising that it be built large enough to handle our known, current numbers – an annual average of about 200 individuals per night – as well as the overflow we sometimes experience, particularly during cold or extreme weather.

This is appropriate, wise and fiscally prudent.

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If we build a shelter that can’t handle our current numbers, we will neither save money nor decrease homelessness. Instead, we will set ourselves up for failure from the start.

As we know all too well from past experience, it is difficult and ineffective to scale up a too-small facility. Doing so leads to costly inefficiencies and an overreliance on emergency services, which is detrimental to the city both financially and sociologically.

Furthermore, a combination of state and federal laws requires us, as a municipality, to provide shelter for individuals who are homeless in our community and intend to remain here. If we build a facility too small to address our current numbers, it will not remove our obligation to provide shelter for those in our city who need it.

Instead, with the shelter full or capped, we would be forced to meet our obligation by creating additional overflow spaces or putting people up in hotel and motel rooms. These options are not only more expensive per person, but also tend to result in longer stays in homelessness, because of the lack of professional staff and services available at remote sites.

Building a facility that can accommodate our current numbers is the fiscally and philosophically responsible choice. With a model that allows our staff to employ best practices efficiently and effectively while actively pursuing true regional collaboration, we will see our numbers decrease over time. And when they do, we can spread those beds a little further apart and repurpose any extra space for additional programming.

If, on the other hand, we design a facility that is too small on day one, we will find ourselves very quickly in dire straits with many of the same challenges we face at our current facility and far less money, having expended funds to construct a building utterly unsuited to its purposes and goals.

The path forward is clear. We must pass the policy resolution with the current capacity guidance intact, move forward on the new facility and achieve greater regional involvement so that together, as a state, we can work together to prevent and end homelessness in Maine.


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