The dramatic shortage of affordable housing in Maine cannot be bridged overnight.
While work on bridging that wide gap continues – ideally with carefully researched and courageous policymaking, new demands for public funding, and zoning and development rule changes that can contribute to a rising tide for the housing market – the shortfall must be addressed, community by community, with an interest in the common good at its core.
Braiding government, nonprofit and charitable efforts can yield valuable near-term results. In this year of immense need, with fall and winter months looming on the horizon, this is – mercifully – a reality that seems to be catching on statewide.
Last week, Maine saw a prime example of such nimble collaboration unfolding in Portland, where the city is working with a number of well-placed partners to create a home-share program for asylum seekers; the city of Portland will pay residents to house people in spare or vacant space starting in August. It is also interested in hearing from people with available space outside the city.
It’s a revival of a successful program from 2019 with the addition of payment (funded by General Assistance in Portland), or payment in kind, as a new element. People interested in participating may offer everything from a spare room to a second home.
Hosts are being asked to commit to a minimum of one year, longer than the three-month minimum in 2019. “The housing crisis is such that we can’t kick off a program that’s only three months long,” explained Victoria Morales, executive director of the Quality Housing Coalition, one of the nonprofits working with the city.
This type of outreach is already going on around Portland and around Maine, most often very quietly. The benefit of formalizing it like this is twofold: There’s the compensation, which rightly recognizes the commitment and makes it feasible for a greater cross-section of residents, but it also highlights the opportunity to those to whom it may not yet have occurred.
Housing First, the model that offers site-based services and supports to residents who were once chronically homeless, is another compelling example of public-private partnership resulting in accommodation tailored to the people who need it. Gov. Mills’ support for the model this year has brought new public awareness, as well as project developers’ confidence in the upcoming availability of state money for new sites.
For any braided solution, community buy-in is a condition for progress.
Not-in-my-backyard, or NIMBY, opposition scuttles any hope of pulling out of this crisis. Some of the administrative back-and-forth over a proposed homeless shelter in downtown Lewiston earlier this year – a three-way collaboration – exemplified the obstacles of moving forward with even short-term solutions. A critical deadline for state funding was ultimately missed.
Indeed, opposition to shelter space has been a feature of almost every proposal for a shelter to come to pass in Maine in recent years. And support for increased shelter space is what is desperately needed.
A bill sponsored by Brunswick state Rep. Poppy Arford (carried over to the next legislative session) would allow Maine’s full-time emergency shelters, where people live temporarily, to apply for grants for renovation or expansion by acquisition. Gesturing at the benefit of – and need for – support beyond what can be provided the state alone, for requests above $100,000, the bill was amended to require shelters to find matching funding from a source other than the state.
“The scale of this isn’t going to move the needle a lot right now, but the creation of this channel is important moving ahead,” Andrew Lardie, executive director of Tedford Housing, which runs the Midcoast’s only emergency shelter, said last week.
Moving the needle a lot has proven extremely challenging in a very short space of time. Secure in that knowledge, every Mainer and every municipality can roll up their sleeves, setting aside stigma and fear, with a view to moving it a little. That’s how lasting change for the better comes about.
In an op-ed on housing policy progress published by the Press Herald last week, the co-chairs of the state’s Joint Select Committee on Housing, Sen. Teresa Pierce of Falmouth and Rep. Traci Gere of Kennebunkport, summed it up with the right spirit:
“Finding long-term solutions will require continued collaboration with communities across our great state – we all have a role to play in making sure people can live good lives in Maine.”
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