The state’s quasi-public housing authority is making progress toward developing a new system that proponents say will allow advocates to better understand — and solve — the state’s homeless issue.

Currently, Maine, like other states, employs a point-in-time count method wherein unsheltered people are counted on a specific night in January. Despite being the principal statewide measurement, advocates, including officials at MaineHousing, say the count does not accurately represent the scope of the problem.

Last year, the state formed a new partnership that advocates and officials hope will produce more accurate data and help solve the problem of chronic homelessness.

To evaluate how Maine responds to the needs of its homeless, MaineHousing conducted a yearlong study starting in June 2020 with the Corporation for Supportive Housing. Following that work, MaineHousing announced a new partnership in February 2022 with Community Solutions, a New York-based national nonprofit dedicated to a project called Built for Zero. 

The project’s website indicates it has already worked with more than 100 cities and counties nationwide, and describes homelessness as a “solvable” problem. The website indicates a community or state can “solve” homelessness by improving assistance programs and services to ensure “homelessness is rare and brief for that population.” 

Erin Healy, the state strategy lead at Community Solutions that is working with Maine officials, said the ultimate goal is to see to it that anyone in Maine who finds themselves without a fixed address won’t have to stay that way longer than 30 days.

“Are we saying that people will never lose their housing? No, we’re not saying that, it’s that if they have a housing crisis, they won’t cross into an existence called ‘homelessness’ which will last for years and years,” she said.

Healy said Built for Zero is based on the idea that programs, grants, shelters and related services to help a state’s homeless population already exist, but because they are in disparate pockets statewide, they don’t work together. If a series of coordinators, chosen from local homeless advocacy groups, can connect all those pockets together, she said, they can address the problem more easily and efficiently.

“We’re trying to help people work as a team to do it, and accelerate it,” she said.

Healy said at least 14 individual communities have used the Built for Zero model to combat homelessness. So far, the model is being used on a statewide level in Colorado, the first to implement the concept on such a large scale. Efforts there began three years ago and so far, she said, the state has reduced homelessness among its veteran communities by 31% statewide. The state has nearly completed setting up a hub coordinator network for data collection and coordination of services.

MaineHousing spokesperson Scott Thistle said MaineHousing wants to make sure that, by 2025, no veteran is homeless for more than 30 days statewide. He said the Built for Zero model will be instrumental in realizing that goal. 

The partnership’s first step is nearly complete, he said, with the state hiring contractors on a local level to act as coordinators. Thistle said the state has hired seven out of the nine required, all from organizations that have worked on the local level to address homelessness for years. 

Once in place, the nine coordinators will collect local data individually, and share that data both with each other and state officials, Thistle said, making it possible to count the homeless more accurately, and more often than once a year.

“It’s really about building a new, robust data system,” he said.

The system, Thistle said, should be in place by late summer. 

‘YOU NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU’RE GOING TO GET.’

Right now, the only existing statewide metric for documenting the number of homeless living in Maine is the point-in-time count, an annual survey conducted by MaineHousing for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. 

According to MaineHousing data, the point-in-time count showed 871 homeless people in 2009. By 2019, that number had grown to 1,215, and in 2020, the number stood at 1,297 people. The number dipped to 1,097 in 2021 (advocates think the pandemic made it harder to conduct the typical count that year), but last year, the count showed 3,455 homeless people.

MaineHousing and its partner organizations took a snapshot of the number of homeless living on the streets and in shelters in January while conducting 2023’s count last week. 

The count, which was supposed to happen on a single day on Tuesday, was disrupted by winter storms that battered the state, forcing local organizations to stagger their work throughout the week.

Carter Friend, executive director of York County Community Action, said the count typically involves surveying established shelters, along with getting a head count outdoors where the homeless are known to congregate, as well as public buildings such as libraries. 

On Friday morning, at North Parish Congregational United Church of Christ on Main Street in downtown Sanford, office administrator Becky Brown sat in the basement at a table with a volunteer, waiting. 

Unhoused people would be asked to provide personal information and other details such as where they last spent the night. 

By noon Friday, no one had come in, but in previous years as many as 25 people were counted.

“It’ll be sporadic,” she said. “You never know what you’re going to get.”

Brown said word circulates about the count through social media, other churches and service centers and via local police departments, which visit homeless camps and offer to take them to the church. 

Brown said visitors get a hot meal, along with access to the “free store,” the church’s collection of donated clothing, toiletries and other essentials.

In the meantime, Friend said he and York County Community Action are eagerly awaiting the establishment of the new network.

“The hub model, and the Built for Zero model, is going to be a really big step in moving us in the right direction,” Friend said.

Church officials said there were fewer than five walk-ins on Friday. Brown said her church has been offering free meals and clothing to the homeless for the past 10 years, but added it’s easy to feel isolated from others doing similar work. As to having a regional coordinator, like what Built for Zero suggests, Brown said, “It definitely would help me.”

Note: This article has been corrected to clarify comments by MaineHousing.