Maine must seek state solutions to homelessness | Opinion

Rep. Grayson Lookner, D-Portland, represents House District 113 in the Maine Legislature.

There was a sharp rise in panhandling in Maine in the years following the financial crisis of 2008. Back then, it wasn’t controversial to chalk it up to the hard times we all were having.

There was broad recognition that for all of the conditions that may lead to an individual becoming homeless, the trend was primarily due to economic and financial conditions largely beyond those individuals’ control.

That’s changed, especially in cities that have traditionally been generous in their approach to helping people experiencing homelessness, like Portland. One need only to open a local Reddit thread or scan a newspaper’s opinion section to hear the latest upsetting episodes of people feeling unsafe around those who are struggling with extreme unmet needs in public.

People are demanding solutions, as they should.

When things become as heated as they are in an election year, it can be hard to look at the bigger picture, but we need to.

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As with many of the problems we currently have, the roots of today’s homelessness crisis can be traced to the Reagan era. Back then, “deinstitutionalization” was having a moment, and it was a good and necessary idea. Many voters alive today (myself included) are not old enough to remember the horror stories of the thousands of people with mental illness being put into faceless institutions for years on end to languish in neglect and sometimes to face unspeakable abuse.

The idea behind deinstitutionalization was that we would close the big asylum-style hospitals and replace them with robust community-based supports for housing, employment and ongoing treatment — methods that were more effective at restoring people to social functioning and more humane. The problem was that we fulfilled the first half of that equation without fully committing to the second, and the community-based supports we have today are wholly inadequate for the scale of our crisis.

That — coupled with the ongoing divestment from public housing since that time — has helped to create the situation today where we have crises that exacerbate and magnify each other.

That is not to say that solutions don’t exist. At the beginning of the pandemic, the federal government instituted a national Emergency Rental Assistance (ERA) program to keep people housed when they couldn’t work. Much of this funding was spent on housing people who were experiencing homelessness in hotels. The program lasted for several years, and worked brilliantly for its intended purpose.

During that time, many advocates in Maine understood that although there was a light and the end of the tunnel concerning the pandemic, in regards to homelessness that light was an oncoming train. They foresaw that when ERA expired, there were going to be huge homeless encampments if no alternatives were put in place, and planned accordingly.

I introduced a bill to establish an ERA program for Maine in 2021 that would have extended the federal program. That bill was seen as too radical at the time, but the Legislature finally did establish a small eviction prevention program. Not insignificant, but also not nearly enough to address the scale of the problem.

Between the Department of Corrections and counties’ budgets for jails, we are spending nearly $400 million a year on jails and prisons in Maine. The county jails describe themselves as the de facto homelessness and mental health providers in our state.

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We could drastically reduce the roughly 2,000 Mainers we incarcerate annually at a cost of roughly $100,000 per individual if we only had alternative systems. Nobody was complaining about visible homelessness and needle waste between 2020 and 2022 not because it didn’t exist, but because it didn’t exist in public due to the ERA program.

There are many solutions that we could pursue as well that would be equally effective if we could muster funding on par with spending on jails and prisons. Since the federal government has abandoned its role to create effective national solutions to homelessness, like ERA and public housing, the state has to create alternative systems.

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Otherwise, our cities will be left holding the bag, and our institutions will swell with people who might have been helped in our communities.

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