Southern Maine Towns Pool Nearly $200,000 for Taxpayer-Funded ‘Campus Style’ Migrant Housing

Several towns in Southern Maine have “donated” a total of nearly $200,000 in support of a project to build a 200-unit “campus style” housing complex for migrants spearheaded by the Greater Portland Council of Governments (GPCOG).

The project, called “Safe in Maine,” is aiming to raise a total of $2 million for the migrant housing complex, and has so far received $212,000 in donations — almost all of which has come from taxpayer-funded grants from town governments.

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On the Safe in Maine Facebook page, the organization boasts that over the past two years, it has received $25,000 from the Town of Falmouth, $50,000 from Westbrook, $50,000 from Scarborough and $50,000 from Cape Elizabeth — a total of $175,000.

The project is being overseen by the Center for Regional Prosperity, the non-profit arm of GPCOG.

The Center for Regional Prosperity previously received a $4.3 million grant from the Maine State Housing Authority to fund Portland’s new 179-bed shelter focused exclusively on housing single asylum-seeking migrants that opened last November.

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Belinda Ray, Director of Strategic Partnerships at GPCOG, uploaded a presentation outlining the proposed migrant housing complex in early June.

According to Ray, the Safe in Maine project seeks to provide a more long-term solution to housing migrants, compared to cities paying for migrants to be put up in hotels or shelters for months before moving into permanent housing.

Ray described the proposed housing complex as “campus style.”

“The idea here is that you would have 200 units of housing with community space,” Ray said in her presentation. “And that is a place where people could live, they would have their own kitchens — because another thing in the hotels is that there are not kitchens and the food becomes very expensive as well.”

The campus-style housing would, Ray said, provide a central location where migrants can better access other taxpayer-funded services. It’s unclear what share of the rental costs the migrants would be expected to pay — if any.

“So people would live in the transitional housing and they would have the community space where services could be provided,” she continued. “It would make it so much easier for service providers to find folks that need the services, get them in one place — it’s just an economy of scale that it creates.”

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A “concept design” of the proposed housing complex shows multiple arrays of housing units, with open spaces to be used for “Soccer and futsol fields, walking trails, community gardens, and playgrounds.”

Ray said that due to the funding the project has already received, the organization has been able to review prospective parcels of land on which the complex could be constructed.