
How Many People in Maine Are Dealing With Homelessness?
When I was a kid, I always thought of homelessness as being something that only happened in the country's biggest cities.
Growing up in Aroostook County, there did not appear to be any people dealing with housing issues.
Of course, as a tight-knit community, it is likely that anyone who was dealing with homelessness was able to find a couch to sleep on. Occasionally, we'd see the homeless pop up on TV shows, but those shows were always set in New York or Los Angeles.
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As an adult who has lived in several places across the Northeast I learned that, sadly, homelessness was not just a problem in the country's biggest cities. There are unhoused people everywhere.
This is true even in Maine.
How Many Unhoused People Live in Maine?
Each year, the State of Maine government does a census (poll? survey?) to determine the number of people living in Maine who are dealing with a lack of housing.
According to a January 2024 press release from the Maine State Housing Authority, as of January 23, 2024, there were 2,695 people in Maine dealing with housing issues.
The press release breaks down the situations those people are experiencing and details that 348 people were living in emergency hotels, 1,342 were people living in shelters, 732 people were in transitional housing, and 273 people were unsheltered.
While these statistics are tragic, the really sickening part is that 364 'households' had at least one child.
There does seem to be a light at the end of the tunnel, though. The numbers seem to be on the decline. The number was down from January of 2023 when there were 3,726 unhoused people in Maine.
Unfortunately, these numbers are still higher than they were prior to 2022. Between January of 2015 and January of 2021, Maine averaged about 1,000 unhoused people each year.