I grew up in Brunswick in a family that had been poor for generations. I started working very young, from shoveling snow and picking berries to delivering newspapers and working as a convenience store clerk and a restaurant worker.

Eventually, work became more important for my survival than school. As a teenager, I spent several years living on the streets of Brunswick, not knowing where I was going to sleep at night. Years later, I became a single mother seeking quality, affordable housing for my children.

As a single mother with young children, housing stability was a must. I needed a home at that moment – I could not wait for new housing to be built. However, finding housing that would accept rental assistance was extremely difficult. That was more than 30 years ago. Sadly, the same is true for the tens of thousands of Mainers today who are struggling to find a stable place to live. We should have addressed this issue long ago.

The current situation for many renters here in Maine is dire. Over a third of Mainers are paying more than 30% of their income on housing, and of those, folks who have extremely low incomes are hit even harder. Nearly 60% of them are paying more than half their income on rent. These are primarily working people, older Mainers and people with disabilities.

These conditions are putting more of our friends, neighbors and family members at risk for homelessness, which is heartbreaking. While the Legislature is working hard on building more affordable housing that is desperately needed, that will take time, and thousands of Mainers need help today. We need to ensure that, as we build housing for the future, we’re also taking care of the most vulnerable members of our community today.

Mainers with very low incomes are most at risk, and we urgently need to ensure that they can find and stay in stable homes. But renters who make around 30% of the area median income – about $21,000 per year for a family of three – are not able to afford even housing that we have designed to be affordable without rental assistance.

This needs to change. No adult or child should have to experience the trauma of housing insecurity, let alone homelessness. I ran for office with a promise to work on our state’s housing crisis. As a member of the Legislature’s new Joint Select Committee on Housing, I can proudly say that we are working on solutions to help move several things forward. But what we are still missing is rent relief for those who make 30% of the area median income or less.

This legislative session, I’ve introduced a bill, L.D. 1710, to establish a state rental assistance program to close the affordability gap for Maine’s lowest-income renters. This bill has been carried over into next year, and I’m looking forward to working on it more then. But renters today are at the mercy of Maine’s overheated housing market and can’t wait for support. They’re at risk of eviction or homelessness right now.

With this in mind, I am urging my fellow legislators to fund immediate relief for Maine renters in the supplemental budget, which the Legislature will be considering in the coming weeks. In addition to the important investments being made in developing new housing, we must also ensure that people struggling with high rents right now are safe and stable. This will have a dramatic impact on the lives of Maine families – the kind of impact so many of us ran for office to make.

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