In 2024, I campaigned for a Portland City Council seat and lost. The experience was incredible.

In pursuit of understanding homelessness, I heard: “Housing First is a great idea, it’s supposed to help people get back on their feet and stabilized, moved into permanent housing. It doesn’t work that way.” I also heard that no one leaves the local Housing First places “except in a body bag.” That caught my attention.

What about this thing I heard, I asked the vice president of social work at Preble Street, which runs the city’s Housing First projects. Is that true? He said he had reviewed the statistics and seen that about 70% of “exits” from their Housing First residences had been by death.

These residents did not die on the street. But can’t we do better than that?

I learned that most of the homeless people on the street around Elena’s Way, a Preble Street ultra-low barrier shelter, had already been housed at some point and had lost their housing. The people who have helped and continue to work in this field encounter many failures and many deaths. It is devastating work.

I bring these words to you not to blame anyone, not to judge, but instead to ask us all not to blame and not to judge.

We must acknowledge we face an intractable problem. Surely if we start there, if we acknowledge that the risk of death continues with housing, and if we share a deeper understanding of the sometimes ungovernable problems of the homeless, we would be less impatient. After all, addiction and mental illness have no on/off switch.

And having ceased to blame, having come to realize the endless work of Portland Police to help people with no inclination to live in a shelter, for instance, we might better help them respond. Having acknowledged the attraction of disorder, we can share the burden of cleaning it up and not blame the man who is housing Section 8 voucher recipients in the middle of it.

Can we be more intelligent in how we apportion services? The city will fund a day space with opioid lawsuit settlement funding sometime next year. How can we serve the homeless who will go there best?

We can listen to people like Brian Burns, in the Behavioral Health Unit of the Portland Police. He told me we need to have a shared understanding of the true nature of the problem. In my mind, one aspect of the nature of the problem is the sense of being at a dead end or trapped. This is a personal nightmare for the homeless and their families and their friends, who may have learned painfully that nothing they can offer disrupts the black hole of substance use.

But homeless people can remember their inspirational dreams. They all deserve our support.

They deserve our support even as we encounter a 5-by-5 empty camp site in Deering Oaks scattered with a hundred used needles, or pass by a tent on a sidewalk, another pile of discarded clothes and food containers, or find human excrement in our doorway. We can share the difficulty without blame.

It may be possible to do better and keep a few more fathers, sisters, brothers, sons, alive, if we acknowledge the risk of death together, if together we shoulder the social contract as a relative, a family, a neighborhood, a city, a state, a country.

And one other thing: just one third of the 65 new intakes at the Portland Homeless Services Center in October were from Portland. Let’s praise the work of our city and its nonprofits in caring for the poor strangers among us, from the rest of Maine and around the country. It is such difficult work, but we feel and must show compassion.

We are dependent on state support to help care for all the Mainers and others who arrive here, one way or another, and need everyone’s help. Augusta, don’t let us down.