The number of veterans experiencing homelessness in Maine nearly quadrupled from 2021 to 2022, and remains at levels higher than the previous seven years, according to a report from the Maine State Housing Authority (MaineHousing) published this summer.
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In June, MaineHousing, a quasi-governmental agency, released their annual Point-in-Time Report for 2024, which represents a count of homeless individuals living in the state — both sheltered and unsheltered — conducted on Jan. 23, 2024.
Point-in-time counts must be reported by each state annually under federal requirements, as part of the federal government’s determination of funding allocation for combatting homelessness.
Per the MaineHousing data, the number of homeless veterans in Maine increased from 52 in 2021, to 196 in 2022 — a nearly fourfold increase.
While the number of homeless veterans decreased in the following years, down to 123 in 2023 and 115 in 2024, the point-in-time count of veterans experiencing homelessness in the last two years has remained higher than any year between 2015 and 2021.
The 2024 point-in-time count also revealed a large racial disproportionality in Maine’s homeless population.
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Out of a total 2,695 individuals experiencing homelessness counted in the 2024 point-in-time survey, 1,141 were Black or African American — meaning that despite making up approximately 1.5 percent of Maine’s total population, Black or African American individuals accounted for roughly 42 percent of the state’s homeless population.
The surge in homelessness in Maine in 2022 was not limited to veterans, but occurred alongside a simultaneous increase in the total number of homeless individuals in the state reported in the annual point-in-time count.
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From 2021 to 2022, the total number of people experiencing homelessness in Maine soared from 1,097 to 3,455, and grew again in 2023 by 271 people.
The large number of individuals sheltered in emergency motels (pictured in yellow in the chart below) includes some veterans, but the vast majority of those individuals were illegal aliens, affirmative asylum applicants, or defensive asylum applicants from Angola, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Haiti.
According to MaineHousing, the surge in homelessness reported among both veterans and other populations around 2021 and 2022 can be attributed at least in part to pandemic-related relief programs and the way the federal government defines homelessness.
Two massive spending bills — one passed under former Republican President Donald Trump, a second under Democratic President Joe Biden — created and funded the Emergency Rental Assistance programs, which provided two large tranches of funding to help anyone living in the U.S. pay for rent. While some states elected to impose residency or citizenship requirements on eligibility for these state-administered programs, Maine did not.
“Looking back to 2022 and 2023, we observed a significant increase in the count of Persons in Shelter, which in the above figure we have separated by Persons in Shelter and Persons in Emergency Motels,” the MaineHousing report states.
“Although that increase may indicate increasing homelessness, it is also a byproduct of the emergency relief available under the myriad of COVID-19 response programs,” the report states.
Those pandemic-era relief programs resulted in individuals who may have otherwise been in “informal arrangements” for their housing needs, such as couch surfing or staying with a friend, to stay in emergency motels.
“Importantly, such informal arrangements are not classified by [the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)] as experiencing homelessness,” the report states. “In contrast, staying in motels paid for by emergency relief programs is classified as experiencing homelessness.”
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The waning of funding for those pandemic-era relief programs also account for the relative decrease in Maine’s homeless population by about a 1,000 people reported in the 2023 point-in-time survey, as the state relied less on the use of motel rooms for emergency housing, according to MaineHousing.
“In the 2024 report, we pulled apart the sheltered count to distinguish between those in conventional shelter settings and those in motels that were mostly paid for by COVID-19 relief programs,” said MaineHousing Director of Planning and Research Jonny Kurzfeld in a June press release.
“By making this distinction, we observe that the increased 2022 and 2023 counts were a byproduct of the sudden increase in availability of low-barrier, no-cost shelter options,” Kurzfeld said. “It is only due to those programs no longer being available that we see a decrease in the total count for 2024.”
