An encampment near the Casco Bay Bridge in Portland in January 2024. (Evan Popp/ Maine Morning Star)
The point in time count of people experiencing homelessness in Maine on January 23, 2024, included 1,031 fewer people compared with the previous year.
However, the reduced count does not necessarily mean that fewer people are actually facing homelessness or housing crises, according to MaineHousing, which administers programs to support renters and develop more affordable housing.
“It is the result of changes in program availability,” MaineHousing concluded in the annual report released Thursday. “The overall reduction is more than accounted for by the decreased count in emergency motel rooms, for which pandemic-related funding is no longer available.”
This year’s point in time count documented 2,695 unhoused people across Maine. Within this overall count, 273 people were unsheltered, 1,342 were in shelters, 732 were in transitional housing, and 348 were in emergency motels.
Last year, the count documented 3,726 unhoused people — but the majority were in emergency motels. Last year, 1,954 people were counted in emergency motels, 1,214 were in shelters, 259 were in transitional housing, and 299 were unsheltered.
Emergency motels excluded, counts for each of the other situations remain elevated compared to years past. The number of people in shelters increased significantly starting in 2022, which MaineHousing attributes both to increasing homelessness and the emergency relief available under numerous COVID-19 response programs.
“Those relief programs made access to no-cost shelter in motels available to individuals and families who would otherwise have relied on informal solutions to their housing needs, such as doubling up with a friend or couch surfing,” the report reads.
Stories from groups working on the ground in the state demonstrate continued reliance on these informal solutions. For example, Maine Needs, a volunteer-run group that collects donations to distribute to communities in need, can’t keep up with the daily need for tents, which the group thinks could be linked to people living in hotels and motels starting to be unable to afford summer prices and becoming homeless.
While staying in motels paid for by emergency relief programs is classified as experiencing homelessness by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, informal arrangements such as staying in hotels outside such programs or couch surfing are not.
HUD requires that each group of service providers who collaborate to develop programs that address homelessness, also called a continuum of care, conduct an annual point in time count within the last ten days of January. These counts from all 50 states are then used as a primary data source for the Annual Homeless Assessment Report.
HUD’s 2024 report is not yet available, but based on 2023 data, homelessness rates in the U.S. had risen sharply, with federal officials attributing the increase to a range of factors, such as expired pandemic-era assistance and limited affordable housing.
However, a point in time count is just that — only a snapshot of homelessness on one night of the year, based on local volunteers and nonprofits being able to locate where unhoused people are staying and otherwise information collected through Maine’s Homeless Management Information System and other surveys.
Just before the latest point in time count in Maine this year, the state and city of Portland conducted several sweeps of encampments of unhoused people during the fall and early winter, changing where many unhoused people were previously staying.
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