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You might not know it from the tenor of the conversation this week in Bradford, but it is worth emphasizing that people experiencing homelessness are more likely to be victims of a violent crime rather than perpetrators.
As many Bradford residents clamored against an early proposal to create a sort of homeless commune in their town, an unfortunate and unhelpful narrative about unhoused people seemed to take hold in their reported objections. Those objections, in some cases, appeared to cast homeless people as some sort of threat to the community requiring increased law enforcement presence — and maybe even the action of local gun owners.
People who are experiencing homelessness are not a monolith and they are not some sort of outside menace to our communities. They are part of our communities, and they have unique reasons for their circumstances. Yes, they are often facing challenges involving mental health and substance use. But we as fellow community members, in all communities, need to help meet those challenges with services and support, not scorn.
Can you imagine if communities across the state harnessed all the energy spent on opposing individual projects and instead dedicated it to addressing underlying problems together? A lot more good would probably get done. This isn’t just about access to housing; it’s also about access to things like recovery services, such as those that unfortunately met opposition in Dover-Foxcroft last year.
The interconnected challenges of homelessness are not for larger cities like Bangor or Portland to solve alone, just as homeless individuals in these cities are not all from there originally. These are people from all over the state, and the challenges require statewide — and creative — solutions. And it requires individual communities not rushing to say no each time there’s an opportunity to help.
That is not to say this particular project, a relatively undefined proposal to turn 35 acres in Bradford into a sort of RV or tiny home commune, is a good one. We have more questions than answers right now, at what seems to be a very early planning stage. And comments from the man leading the effort certainly don’t inspire confidence that he’s adequately thought through important considerations like transportation for potential residents. We can understand why local residents have questions and concerns.
However, that is not a reason for community members, or professionals who work closely with unhoused people, to immediately dismiss this or other out-of-the-box ideas. And it certainly is not a reason to talk about some of Maine’s most vulnerable people as if they’re a dehumanized entity being shuttled from one place to another.
As previous BDN reporting has highlighted, unhoused people find themselves without a home through various circumstances. Some of them have been evicted and can’t find somewhere else to live amid an ongoing housing crisis. Some of them go to work every day. Their experiences and stories are “all of the above,” and the potential solutions to tackling the converging crises of housing and homelessness must be “all of the above” too.
Beyond community opposition and skepticism from experts, here’s the perspective we want to hear more of: Do people facing some sort of housing insecurity want this commune idea to be a potential option? Could it help them find more stability? Is the distance from services found in a larger city like Bangor a concern?
When we look at the way Bangor’s homelessness crisis has mounted, requiring the assistance of a federal disaster relief team, it’s not hard to reach the conclusion that what we’ve been doing as a region and as a state has not been working. Some of that is about the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. Some of that is about available funding, including the local failure to deploy more available resources more quickly. Some of that is about gaps in data, a situation which is hopefully improving. And some of it is about needing to try new and creative approaches, like the idea of shelter villages proposed here in Bangor and elsewhere.
Collectively, we’re not going to solve the complex problems involved in homelessness by just sending people to Bangor, or to Bradford. And we’re not going to solve the problems by thinking and communicating about unhoused people as some sort of monolithic, faceless, even dangerous, group. These are people, with different stories, different needs, and different paths to stability. And the rest of us need to think differently about how we welcome and support them.
