Bitter cold worsens homelessness

BANGOR – Each day, 46-year-old William Gordius leaves the warmth and relative comfort of the Acadia Recovery Community shelter, sometimes hunting for a subsidized apartment to call his own, many times rummaging through garbage to find enough bottles, cans and throwaways to pay for tobacco and two or three 40-ounce beers.

With record-setting, bone-chilling temperatures continuing statewide, Gordius said he doesn’t think he’d be able to survive on his own.

“I’d be in a snowbank somewhere,” Gordius said Tuesday, while rolling a cigarette by his bed in a dormitory room at the shelter.

He’s not alone.

Increasingly, Acadia Recovery Community, part of Eastern Maine Health Care, is finding the shelter on Indiana Avenue crowded with people trying to escape the bitter cold while coping with personal, physical, mental and financial difficulties.

The low temperatures are exacerbating a growing problem – too few resources and opportunities for these often-ignored and overlooked people, according to shelter officials.

For many homeless, the shelter is the “last house at the dead-end street,” said Stephen James, the facility’s project director.

Some people who can’t get into other shelters because of behavior, lack of space or because they’ve been drinking, often wind up at Acadia; some directed there by the other shelters or the police, staff members said.

All of this has led to a space crunch at the shelter.

Licensed as an emergency shelter with 37 beds, it regularly exceeds capacity, especially in winter. Blankets and mattresses turn any available space into makeshift beds.

Downtown, at the Bangor Area Homeless Shelter on Main Street, the 32-bed facility is near capacity regularly, although director Dennis Marble said he thinks the weather has little to do with it.

The downtown shelter has been full in August, when you might expect some homeless people would sleep outside.

“The freezing weather doesn’t create more demand,” Marble said. There isn’t enough affordable housing, support and jobs for the homeless, he said.

Some of those people at the Acadia shelter are like Gordius: they have substance abuse histories. Others are unable to find affordable housing and decent-paying jobs that would let them get by.

At Acadia, James said he’s seeing more young people using the shelter.

Derrick Purdy, 21, was sharing a room with Gordius and two other men Tuesday night. He said he’s willing to work, but needs to come up with a way to replace his eyeglasses. Last year, Purdy worked as a road flagger, sleeping in his boss’ van overnight. He said he hopes for better prospects once he gets his glasses.

Although men continue to be a majority of shelter users, the number of women is on the rise.

In the past, James said he has see one or two women each winter. Women now regularly fill the eight available beds – and then some.

Although Mainers may get a reprieve from the bitter cold that set record-low temperatures Tuesday, the problem of dealing with Maine’s homeless will likely worsen before it improves.

Shifts in the economy have made it more difficult to find jobs with low-skill requirements, and minimum-wage jobs can’t cut it for many people, James said.

A tighter job market combined with a lack of appropriate housing is increasingly squeezing people out, he said.

“More and more people are being marginalized,” James said.