Homeless

It’s cram time at Portland’s shelters

By Tony Giampetruzzi

As Portland creeps into December, the nights continue to get colder, and area homeless shelters begin their annual swell. Last winter, Mark Swann, the executive director of the Preble Street Resource Center wasn’t optimistic — a doomsday contingency plan to handle shelter overflow was never utilized, but resources, including both food and space, were tapped. And the situation this year?

“Worse. We are servicing at least 20 percent more people already this year than we were last year at this time,” says Swann. “The city shelters have expanded their bed counts again, they are over capacity, and we’re already putting mats on the floor.”

According to Swann, the situation can be directly attributed to Portland’s airtight housing market. Many of the folks in the shelters aren’t your typical indigent drifters; they are workers who simply can’t find an affordable apartment.

“It’s taking people months to find a place to live and, as yet, there has been absolutely no development,” says Swann. But Swann concedes that, for the first time since he began his work at the shelter 10 years ago, he sees light at the end of the tunnel. Portland has broken ground on a housing project at Bayside and private investors and developers are stepping up to the plate to begin projects of their own. Swann says that there has even been some interest in developing a Single Room Occupancy structure.

“SRO used to be a dirty word among affordable-housing advocates,” explains Swann. “But, now that the population of single adults without housing continues to grow, it’s the kind of housing that works.”

It sounds like Portland has finally gotten smart when it comes to remedying the housing problem, but it’s winter and none of the buildings will be popping up tomorrow. So what’s in store for this winter?

“We don’t want to have to rely on contingency plans. We’ve turned storage areas and day rooms into sleeping quarters,” says Swann. “We’re monitoring the situation very closely.”