Portland, Maine: Free-range drug addicts and the mentally ill are displaced by illegal aliens, who've been given priority for the limited free housing available
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eviction day on downtown portland’s bayside trail
Portland, ME, has been inviting Somalian and other African economic migrants to their city for over a decade now, with the result that it now has gangs, overwhelmed and violent schools, and “temporary” housing in the city’s sports/concert arena. The effects have been exactly what you’d expect.
… Scarcity of resources
…. Portland is currently housing about 1,200 people each night in one of the three city-run shelters or in hotels. Between 70-80 percent of individuals at the 208-bed Homeless Services Center are asylum seekers. The city’s family shelter is almost all asylum seekers as well, city staff said at a meeting Thursday. And the third shelter, a 300-bed temporary shelter at the Portland Expo, was opened in April specifically to serve asylees.
“It’s just the extra pressure of the asylum-seeking folks coming here,” Jeff Logan, the executive director and co-pastor of Grace-Street Ministry, said Tuesday on the Bayside Trail. “There’s just nothing. There’s no room at the inn for anybody.”
“I think the system is set up pretty well for the numbers of people who experience homelessness traditionally here, to meet their needs and actually decrease that number markedly. But it’s really hard for that to happen when the system is overwhelmed with a sudden population,” Ryan said in an interview earlier this month.
…. The shelters at the Portland Expo and Salvation Army were set up with “focused wrap-around services for newly arriving asylum-seeking families. The Homeless Services Center was built to house single individuals with available services focused on those who are circumstantially and chronically unhoused,” City of Portland spokesperson Jessica Grondin said in an email.
“We have reached capacity at all of our facilities. This is why we are advocating heavily for more transitional housing options for both families and individuals. … Having more transitional housing facilities for asylum seekers would open up more beds at the HSC for those who need the kind of wrap-around services that facility was designed to offer,” she said.
Housing at a shelter is offered on a first-come, first-served basis, Grondin said. Once an individual or a family is deemed eligible for general assistance and meets with social services staff, they are “offered a bed when one is available.”
To clear the Bayside encampment while city shelters are largely filled with people who are part of a different community is rubbing salt in the wound, some unhoused people and advocates said.
But when a person applies for general assistance, “(the city is) not looking at them as an asylum seeker, they are looking at them as a person,” Mufalo Chitam, the executive director of the Maine Immigrants’ Rights Coalition, said Wednesday.
…. “They’re not titles or identities. They are just a human being who is needing that (help).”
With how the situation in Portland has played out, however, asylum seekers are “being looked at as the boot that’s to (homeless people’s) faces,” Chitam said.
“Creating situations where people are forced to compete for scarce resources only serves to promote disunity,” Chitam said, quoting board president and Bates College professor Val Carnegie from a meeting the day before.
Chitam’s organization, among others, have [sic] strongly advocated for more resources for the city’s homeless population, including placing a 30-day moratorium on clearing the Bayside encampment, as members of the Portland Emergency Shelter Assessment Committee.
“We have to look at the foundation of even this discussion, of you know, ‘them against us’ because there is a scarcity of housing,” Chitam said.
“We have to look at (it in) a much broader way. What got us here? Which system got us here?”