Bangor officials are planning a targeted sweep of the city’s largest homeless encampment, which is located behind the Hope House Health and Living Center, according to notices distributed throughout the camp and communications between city officials obtained by the Bangor Daily News.
On Monday, outreach workers walked through the encampment and attempted to distribute notices to people who have “refused” to accept services, according to an email city manager Debbie Laurie sent to councilors on Tuesday.
Notices that were posted on trees throughout the encampment, not on specific structures, said people who have not engaged with services will be required to leave by Friday, Oct. 20, or they will be considered to be criminally trespassing.
However it is unclear how many people will be targeted by the sweep, and people living in the encampment — which is on land owned by the city — told the BDN they don’t understand what is happening.
The city does not know for sure how many people will be removed but estimates it could be between 10 to 20.
Some people said they thought the X’s meant they would be removed from the site; they even scraped them off their tents. Other people thought that if their belongings had X’s, it meant they could stay.
In an email to the BDN, Laurie said the sweep will be targeted to people who are putting others in the encampment at “great risk,” and will not impact those who are engaging with services.
“As a result of this situation, the decision was made to require these specific individuals to leave the encampment effective Friday, October 20,” she said.
In Laurie’s email to city councilors, she said the plan is to target specific people who have “blatantly refused to engage” with outreach workers and are linked to violent behavior and drug production and distribution. She said outreach workers have a list of people who will not be kicked off the property Friday.
Outreach workers attempted to hand deliver the notices to individual people in the encampment Monday, but they were not able to, so they resorted to posting them on trees, Laurie’s email said.
Ma, a three-year resident of the encampment, got an X placed on her trailer. But what it means wasn’t made clear despite multiple attempts to clarify, she said. Ma pointed to some structures in the encampment that house people who do regularly interact with services but that did not receive an X, adding more confusion to what is going on, she said.
If the X does mean she gets to stay, she wonders how much longer that will be. So far, no one has been able to provide her answers, Ma said.
The notices left others, such as James, who has also lived in the encampment for three years, unsure of what Friday will bring.
James’ tent didn’t have an X on it, and he said he doesn’t engage with outreach workers because he doesn’t trust that they will actually help him. In the past, he said, outreach workers will give him and others housing vouchers that landlords won’t accept. For people who do get into housing, it is often drug-free, which doesn’t work for many people in the encampment, he said.
“We’re a family,” James said. “We stick together.”
For Chris, who has lived in the encampment off and on for about two years, he hasn’t accepted services offered by the outreach workers because he doesn’t want his name added to a list and then used for something other than services, he said.
He worries about police using the list to find people who may have warrants out for small things such as unpaid fines, he said.
Bangor has a history of clearing out its homeless encampments. Most recently, in April, it cleared its second-largest encampment that was located off of Valley Avenue. Although the city attempted to permanently house everyone, a Bangor Daily News investigation found it didn’t. What’s more, city officials said they didn’t know if any of the people who were housed in that process have remained off the streets.
In November 2021, the city cleared out an encampment under the Interstate 395 bridge that spans Bangor and Brewer. Shortly after the deadline to leave that encampment, Dec. 1, 2021, three homeless men died in a fire that consumed a condemned home on Union Street.
Research has shown that clearing or sweeping encampments of homeless people often comes with negative consequences.
A study published in April in The Journal of the American Medical Association, a peer-reviewed medical journal, found that moving homeless people involuntarily is likely to worsen overdoses and hospitalizations, decrease the number of people who start a treatment program, and contribute to more deaths.
In her email to the city council, Laurie said outreach workers will continue to connect with people about the upcoming sweep.
“Our desire is for everyone to be actively engaged in their own journey to housing and/or services,” she said. “We do not want to arrest anyone and that is what we will work towards, at this time our direction will be to shelters (we are working with both shelters on availability and
space).”
