Winter is coming, and activists are worried that homeless people in Rockland will not have a warm place to stay overnight.
In Maine, the number of people experiencing homelessness tripled from 2021 to 2022, according to state data. It’s not just a growing problem in bigger cities. Three-fourths of Rockland renters can’t afford median rent, and homelessness in Rockland has quadrupled since 2019, the Knox County Homeless Coalition said.
Now, winter is approaching. Rockland has long had several designated warming centers, including the Rockland Public Library and City Hall. But these locations are only open as warming centers during regular hours. The city doesn’t have an official overnight warming center, and advocates are scrambling to set one up with some support from local officials but no promise of city help.
“The challenge really is that there is still something of a mentality that we don’t have a homeless problem in Maine,” Rockland City Councilor Sarah Austin said. “Maybe you can imagine that everyone can just go off into the woods and find a little bit of land to buy and build themselves a little cabin, but that’s not the reality.”
In recent years, the Crossroads Church of the Nazarene has been opening the church doors to host people overnight, but Michelle Thompson, whose husband is the pastor, said it’s getting too much for her and her husband to handle.
The top option that activists and the city are looking at now is the publicly owned Flanagan Community Center in downtown Rockland. Over the weekend of Hurricane Lee, the building was opened as a warming center to host those who needed it. A few people stayed overnight.
But the battle to get that center open for the weekend was a tough one, said Amy Files, a local activist. Files said she sent an email on Wednesday requesting that the Flanagan Center be opened as part of an ongoing effort by advocates. It wasn’t approved as a warming center for the hurricane until 12:30 p.m. Friday. A team of volunteers got it running in four hours.
The community stepped up, bringing supplies like blankets, pillows and water bottles, Files said. Activists are planning to discuss how the weekend warming center went and how it can be applied to using the Flanagan Center as a more permanent location, she added.
Getting the Flanagan Center up and running this winter would be simple aside from problems with staffing, Molly Feeney, the coalition’s chief program officer, said. It would need trained staff to ensure safety, but those people are hard to find, and the group already has its hands full with the hundreds it assists per day. The housing crisis also makes it difficult to find staff.
“Our services expanded so many ways in the last four years that I think it’s a challenge for us to say, in this moment, that we could put a staffing model together,” Feeney said.
The coalition wants a firm commitment from the city council, including money and help training staff for the overnight warming shelter. Time is running out before it starts to get cold, they said, and changes need to happen.
There are skeptics in city government. Mayor Louise MacLellan-Ruf said while the Flanagan Center is a good option, helping with staffing is out of the councilors’ hands. She said they can move the budget around a bit, but there’s not much room to help with the warming center.
“We always have general assistance,” she said. “… But at this point, I mean, our budget is so stretched thin as it is, you know, we don’t have millions laying around to do appropriate housing.”
But activists are still talking with city councilors and other members of the community to get the warming center set up for this winter. They may still be able to do it, Becca Gildred, the homeless coalition’s executive director, said.
“We’re at the point where we need to divide and conquer and get it done,” she said.
