Neighbors adjust to group home Bangor officials estimate doubling of such facilities in past decade

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BANGOR – The sprawling white-sided house at the end of Summit Avenue doesn’t look appreciably different from the rest of the homes in this upscale east-side neighborhood.

Outside the 1960s-era single-story house, leaves are raked into piles on the side of the street. A basketball sits beneath a hoop in the recently paved driveway.

Inside, a teen-ager lounges on a comfortable couch and watches MTV while the adults in the house talk on the phone and decide whose turn it is to make dinner, which tonight is homemade pizza, according to the menu posted on the bulletin board in the kitchen.

It sounds so typical – and in many ways it is; but not in every way.

Unlike the other well-kept homes in this community of retired doctors and young professionals, the neat, ranch-style house on this dead-end street near Eastern Maine Medical Center has one director, 15 staff members, five teen-agers – and a host of watchful neighbors.

Summit View, a group home for homeless youth, landed in the quiet neighborhood off Garland Street three years ago and sparked a firestorm of debate among local residents wary of the influx of traffic, potentially unstable teen-agers and – perhaps even more troubling – the unknown.

Some of those questions have been answered during the past three years, and while there were some rough patches at the beginning, neighbors’ nightmares of juvenile delinquents roaming the streets at all hours haven’t become reality.

“In the final analysis, I’d have to give them pretty good marks for keeping a low profile in the neighborhood,” said neighbor Steve Cook, who after being one of the home’s most vocal critics in 1998 took his two boys trick-or-treating there for the first time this Halloween.

Summit View, run by the Concord, N.H.-based NFI North, is one of about 80 group homes now in the city, according to Bangor officials. They have seen the number nearly double during the past five years with the downsizing of Bangor Mental Health Institute. This local example illustrates the nationwide trend toward community-based care.

While Summit View is not a result of BMHI downsizing, it is reflective of the trend that has caused smaller group homes to pop up in neighborhoods throughout the city during the past decade. The vast majority of those homes serve the mentally or physically disabled, or mentally ill adults.

And as the Summit Avenue neighbors found out, there’s little or nothing local residents can do under federal and state fair housing laws to derail the placement of a group home in a specific neighborhood.

Fair housing

An amendment to the federal Fair Housing Act of 1968 specifically bans discrimination based on any kind of physical or mental disability. Essentially, a group home – while subject to strict scrutiny in order to receive state funds – can be treated no differently from a large family looking to move into any neighborhood.

While comfortable with the current Summit View program, that historically broad interpretation of the housing act still troubles Cook. He wondered aloud what the reaction would be if, say, a home for convicted sex offenders looked to move into a residential neighborhood.

“What happens then?” asked Cook over a cup of coffee at his Bellevue Avenue home. “I think the current situation is probably as far as this neighborhood would be willing to go.”

But just as neighbors were wary of the Summit Avenue home, its young residents had their own misgivings about being plopped down in a community where they weren’t entirely welcome.

“In the beginning, the most the neighbors would do is to let us pet their dogs, but that’s about it,” said Elizabeth Smith, a 20-year-old who was one of the first residents in the home. “But we tried to make a point of saying hello, and they’d say hello back.”

Smith, who said her family problems led her to Summit View, now works at a local department store and lives in an apartment as part of the agency’s transitional program, which subsidizes six apartments in the city for its former residents, who can range in age from 16 to 20.

In the heat of the 1998 debate, NFI officials stressed that they had high expectations for those residents, who would have to be accepted into the program and sign a contract to follow house rules.

“People are getting used to the idea that these kids aren’t any different from anybody else,” said the program’s 31-year-old director, Scott DuFour. He added that the staff has looked to address residents’ concerns, which have ranged from the teens smoking on the corner to the center’s tendency to produce more trash each week than the average household. “I think we’re becoming more a part of the neighborhood.”

Police calls to the home have been few, according to Bangor Police Chief Donald Winslow, who said officers have been to the house nine times in three years for minor situations.

As a rule, Winslow said, group homes, depending on the clientele, sometimes require more services – such as ambulance calls – but his department is rarely called to the homes.

“They haven’t appeared to have that much of an impact on neighborhoods in that way,” Winslow said.

Next-door neighbor Melvin Brown said that he, too, has had no problems with the residents at Summit View, only with the amount of traffic the home generates with staff coming and going throughout the day.

“It’s horrendous,” he said.

And while the house is otherwise quiet and the residents respectful, the retired doctor said he wasn’t likely to go over and borrow a cup of sugar from the folks next door.

“It’s not a neighbor in that sense,” Brown said recently. “There’s really no interchange at all, they’re just a bunch of kids and you lose a good neighbor from a nice home.”

Good neighbors

Winning over a neighborhood is important, said Sandra Noble, co-owner of the Brewer-based Always Housing, which runs nine group homes for mentally retarded adults in Brewer and Bangor.

“We go in with the attitude that this is a home and we want to be part of the neighborhood,” said Noble, whose agency is in the process of moving one of its group homes to Bangor, where services such as public transportation are more readily available. “We make a point of getting to know the neighbors and giving them cards and asking them to contact us with any concerns.”

Concerns generally have included the effect of a group home on neighboring property values. Bangor City Assessor Ben Birch said there’s no indication that surrounding property values decrease as a result and that the loss of tax revenue when the homes become nonprofit is “minimal” to the city.

But because federal and state laws do not require neighborhood notification – although it’s becoming more common among agencies looking to allay concerns – it’s uncertain whether residents would even know if a group home was moving in.

City officials are prevented from keeping a list of group homes, and Portland, on the advice of its attorney, this summer stopped notifying neighbors of the arrival of group homes in their area.

Bangor officials, under those same restrictions, provided estimates on the number of group homes for this story based on anecdotal knowledge and the number of homes that have installed such required amenities as hard-wired fire alarm systems or handicapped access.

In Bangor, the number of group homes is only likely to increase, city officials say, with the trend toward community care.

That’s fine with Cook, who said a home’s leadership, such as that displayed thus far at Summit View, has much to do with a successful integration to the neighborhood.

“I think that the people running it need to tell the residents that this is their neighborhood, but it’s our neighborhood, too.”