PORTLAND, Maine — With winter looming — and two people dead after tent fires in southern Maine over the weekend — city workers and volunteers from across Cumberland County were hurrying to put finishing touches on a new city homeless shelter Monday morning.
The $4.5 million, 20,000 square-foot, 179-bed shelter is coming together inside a former beverage distribution building on Riverside Industrial Parkway. It’s about a mile from a separate $24 million, 208-bed, wraparound homeless services facility and shelter on Riverside Street, which opened in March.
The new facility is expected to open on Dec. 1 and will nearly double Portland’s short-term, single-person homeless accommodations at a time when officials count at least 230 tents pitched on private and city property around the city.
Portland also operates another 146-bed shelter just for families.
“We still need more permanent solutions for people that are experiencing homelessness,” said Greater Portland Council of Governments Executive Director Kristina Egan, emerging from the future men’s restroom and shower facility, spray bottle and squeegee in hand, while cleaning. “At least this is a place where people can be safe.”
On Monday, Egan’s organization helped coordinate dozens of volunteers, in two shifts, from around Cumberland County to help with cleaning, groundskeeping and bunk bed assembly at the new shelter.
There, two officials from Standish — Town Manager Tasha Pinkham and Councilor Sarah Gaba — unboxed bed components and said they felt like it was their responsibility to pitch in because Portland is the de facto homeless service center for neighboring communities, including theirs.
“In Standish, we don’t have a hotel or facility where we can put up unhoused residents in need,” Pinkham said. “This isn’t a permanent solution, but at least it’s a step in the right direction.”
Gaba agreed and said it was hard to imagine people trying to live outdoors through a long, cold Maine winter.
“I mean, people can’t be safe in a tent with a propane heater,” she said.
Funding for the new facility came from a state emergency housing and energy bill passed in Augusta earlier this year. The building was purchased and renovated by Designers Collaborative, which also developed the city’s Riverside Street homeless services center. The city has no plans to own the building and expects to run its newest shelter only for about the first 18 months before handing daily operations off to the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition.
That’s because the new shelter is expected to house mostly single asylum seekers without families.
According to the city, more than 1,600 people have arrived in Portland seeking asylum this year. Over the summer, the city housed hundreds of them at an emergency shelter inside the Expo building on Park Avenue. That facility closed in August, with the city finding temporary accommodations for some 200 unhoused asylum seekers at motels in southern Maine and Lewiston.
Originally, the city hoped to develop the new shelter on Blueberry Road, off outer Congress Street, but the plan fell apart amid objections from nearby businesses. The city then approved the new shelter location on Riverside Industrial Parkway in June with a lopsided 8-1 vote. Only City Councilor Mark Dion, who represents the Riverton neighborhood where the new shelter is located, voted against it. Dion was elected mayor in November.
Egan said she understands the new Riverside Industrial Parkway shelter is a temporary fix, at best, for a much larger, ongoing problem in and around Portland. That’s why a nonprofit wing of her organization started the “Safe in Maine Fund” in September, she said, with a goal of building or leasing longer-term, transitional housing for homeless asylum seekers as they wait for employment permissions from the federal government.
According to the fund’s website, it hopes to raise $500,000 — of an overall $2 million goal — before the end of the year. So far, municipalities who have contributed to the fund are: Cape Elizabeth ($50,000); Westbrook ($50,000); Scarborough ($50,000); Yarmouth ($20,000); and Falmouth ($25,000).
Including private donations, the fund had $211,252.42 as of Monday.