Unhoused Lewiston. Maine, residents huddle for the evening at the city’s new warming center. (Photo by Eesha Pendharkar/Maine Morning Star)
This is the third in a three-part series.
With restaurants shut down during the pandemic, Brian Arborio found himself unemployed, unable to pay his rising rent, and eventually evicted.
He lived on the streets of Portland, Maine, for about 10 months but left after an encounter with police. His next stop was Westbrook, then the woods of Scarborough and Old Orchard Beach.
Arborio said law enforcement had him on their radar because he had broken into empty buildings to avoid the cold. One snowy night, as the soles of his shoes were peeling away, he said he returned to his tent to find it slashed and his sleeping bag pepper sprayed.
Also in this series:
What he thought would be three months of camping outdoors and couch surfing turned into almost three years of homelessness.
He landed in a Portland-area hospital and found housing through Section 8, the federal government’s housing assistance program. But even now, as the weather gets colder and he passes people living on the streets, it’s hard not to flash back to his experience.
“You’re not considered a citizen when you’re homeless. You’re subhuman. That’s how you’re treated,” said Arborio, who now advocates for policy to help people experiencing homelessness.
“Being chased away constantly is the most inhumane aspect. You are not welcome indoors anywhere anyway, and you have no place to sit down and rest outside. And these are meant to be public places.”
Backed by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling in an Oregon case that local governments can legally impose criminal penalties for public camping bans, police across the country are enforcing ordinances that advocates say threaten to worsen homelessness and further deplete their limited resources to help.
“As long as we’re using our resources — whether it be our human resources, our public forums, our financial resources — to chase and police, surveil, punish, and hide unhoused people, that’s taking away from how we could invest into actual solutions,’’ said Heather Zimmerman, a legal fellow with the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine.
Advocates and officials say they could benefit from a coordinated approach to share information and resources among municipalities.
Some Maine cities are considering adding camping bans, while those with laws are ramping up enforcement, according to the ACLU.
The organization found 10 municipalities with loitering bans. Six ban solicitation, begging, or panhandling. At least 12 have “constructive” camping bans, which means they use other ordinances such as loitering prohibitions and park regulations to enforce a camping ban in public spaces.
Every ban is worded differently. Lewiston explicitly prohibits sleeping or camping in public places. Portland bans public camping as long as there is available shelter space. But even in municipalities such as Bangor, which, according to a city spokesperson, does not have a camping ban, police routinely sweep encampments and ask unhoused people to leave public property.
Maine tracks homelessness through point-in-time counts, which record the number of unhoused people on one day, typically in January. This year’s count recorded 2,695 people experiencing homelessness. While the number is lower than the past two years, the number of unsheltered people — those not housed temporarily in shelters, motels or transitional housing — has been increasing, with 299 in 2023 and 273 in 2024, compared with 95 unsheltered people counted five years ago.
People without shelter might be another reason municipalities are again enforcing camping bans, according to Katie Spencer White, president and CEO of Mid-Maine Homeless Shelter in Waterville.
“We had a lot of folks experiencing homelessness, but what we didn’t have is a lot of unsheltered homelessness, where people couldn’t find a place in a bed,” she said.
“So that’s where many municipalities like, if they’re like Waterville, they’re now reposting these signs and enforcing something that’s already on the books, or some municipalities are creating new ordinances where they didn’t already have one.”
According to the ACLU, at least two cities — Sanford in southern Maine and Presque Isle in northern Maine — have considered camping bans since the Supreme Court ruling.
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Shelters as solutions to camping bans
City leaders and advocates both believe homeless shelters can be a short-term solution to camping ban enforcement, since most agree that being outside, especially in Maine winters, is the worst-case scenario.
MaineHousing, the state agency that oversees distribution of federal and state funding for affordable housing and homelessness solutions, has allocated more than $60 million in emergency housing assistance since 2020.
But that funding is not enough to provide adequate resources to help people find beds or safe places to sleep, Spencer White said.
“We want to be the solution to the camping ban,” she said. “It’s hard to do that when you’re paid $18 a night for a product that costs almost $100 a night.”
In early December, 33 people needed shelter from freezing temperatures at Waterville’s warming center, but its funding can only support 25. Without financial support for staffing and operational costs, shelters can’t keep operating to meet the increasing demand, Spencer White said.
Often, municipalities are left to find their own solutions. In cities with shelters, they are overcrowded or have restrictions that ban pets, require sobriety, or separate residents by gender. A majority of cities in Maine don’t have permanent shelters, and their expansion is often met with resistance from city government or local business owners, according to council meetings and media reports.
In 2022, the Lewiston City Council imposed a six-month moratorium on building any new shelters, despite the lack of low-barrier shelters in Maine’s second largest city. Three city council members who had opposed a shelter expansion lost re-election and the new council is now building partnerships to expand services, according to Scott Harriman, who has served on the council since 2021.
“One of their arguments was that, basically, if you build it, they will come,” Harriman said, explaining the previous council’s opposition to shelters. “So, they’re concerned that if we just open up more shelters, we just attract more people here to use them.”
Because of the political shift, nonprofit Kaydenz Kitchen recently received approval and funding from MaineHousing to build the city’s first low-barrier homeless shelter.
In other cities, pushback to shelters is being led by business owners. After the Mid-Maine Homeless Shelter in Waterville received $700,000 to build a new permanent shelter and expand its capacity, some business owners asked the city to consider a six-month pause on any expansion.
Municipal leaders said bans allow them to strike a necessary balance between the interests of residents and business owners who complain to the city about tents or encampments.
“From a city perspective, we have to manage both sides of the issue,” said Jessica Grondin, Portland’s spokesperson. “We’ve got residents and business owners who are saying we don’t want people outside in tents on our property, leaving behind trash and going to the bathroom on my doorway, combined with the fact that we do provide shelter for 600 people a night; there’s no other municipality around who’s stepping up in the way that we already are.”
Portland Mayor Mark Dion said the city keeps shelter beds open in case people want them, but they can’t force everyone to use the shelter.
The city has removed 809 tents in the past year, and law enforcement and park rangers regularly sweep for encampments, but by providing notice, Grondin said.
But data have shown that removing tents does not necessarily result in unhoused people going to shelters. Often, they move to a different part of the city or another town.
“There are no more large encampments in the city of Portland, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t unsheltered people all over the city,” Zimmerman said.
Lack of coordinated state response
While the state has helped with funding for shelters and affordable housing initiatives, it has not weighed in on policy decisions, including camping bans.
“Many who work in the field believe homelessness in Maine can be solved — made rare and brief — but we have to all want to solve for it and we have to do it together and in collaboration across many sectors, governments, nonprofits and individuals,” said Scott Thistle, a spokesperson for MaineHousing.
“But MaineHousing does not endeavor to tell local elected officials what the best solution is for their community is or should be … we support them in finding and funding those solutions.”
“Nobody wants to take full responsibility. Municipalities don’t want to say this is for us to fix, the state doesn’t want to say it. Everybody’s pointing somewhere else,” said Spencer White of the Mid-Maine shelter.
“There’s ways that we could leverage the existing resources at our disposal, but what we lack is coordinated and committed leadership, leadership that will actually bring the municipalities to the table and work through the issues.”
Ahead of the coming session, the Maine Legislature recently amended committees to break up Labor and Housing and make a permanent committee focused on housing and economic development. Maine Morning Star reached out to several legislators focused on housing issues but didn’t hear back by publication. A spokesperson for the Governor’s Office of Policy Innovation and the Future did not answer questions related to the state’s role.
Dion said there’s a statewide council of mayors, where city leaders discuss solutions to homelessness, but without coordination, there’s no opportunity to share resources between municipalities.
“Having somebody facilitating data on resources and demand, that’s a state responsibility,” he said.
“What I’m looking for is a dedicated office and staff to help us. At the front end of the problem, I mean, they could stand up some shelter space, and especially at the back end in terms of securing housing.”
Supreme Court ruling paves way for heightened enforcement
Though Lewiston’s City Council now supports the establishment of a permanent shelter, the city’s camping ban is still on the books.
Several unsheltered Lewiston residents said police are still giving out warnings when tents are reported, although a new warming center also operated by Kaydenz Kitchen that opened last month is the only legal place for them to stay.
“We literally got asked to move our tent with all our stuff in it because we had it set up under a bridge and someone called the cops on us,” said Linda Chagnon, who was at the warming center on a snowy December night with her husband.
After the warning, her family will soon have to move the tent if they want to keep their belongings, since taking everything with them from a day center to the public library to the warming center overnight isn’t possible, she said.
Like the experiences of both Chagnon and Arborio, the constant moving and fear of interacting with law enforcement can be among the most challenging aspects of homelessness.
Arborio traveled to Washington, D.C., earlier this year with the ACLU to speak against the Grants Pass, Oregon, ruling. Since then, Grants Pass officials have limited where about 600 homeless people can pitch a tent or sleep to just two locations in the city of 39,000.
Grants Pass officials have been publicly chastised for the ordinance. During an August council meeting, City Manager Aaron Cubic met withering criticism after he said the city was not legally obligated to provide water at city-designated spots.
“There is no legal requirement the city do anything more than designate a place to rest or a place to camp,” he said at the meeting, adding that other services and amenities could include water and shade.
The city has provided portable toilets and handwashing stations, though not water. Mayor Sara Bristol said that balance is necessary to avoid the perception the city is encouraging people to come there.
Maine advocate Arborio said the impact of a camping ban is hard to understand without experiencing the despair and lack of hope and support unhoused people live with daily.
“If the shelters are full and there’s no warming center, you have to let them at least have a chance outdoors,” he said.
“People in warm city halls don’t understand the impact of these policies, the trauma of marching somebody around all day long in this weather.”
Ben Botkin of Oregon Capital Chronicle, which like Maine Morning Star is part of the States Newsroom network, contributed to this report.
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