PORTLAND, Maine — On Sunday, local outreach workers passed out clothes, food, blankets, and more to help support people experiencing homelessness at Portland's Park and Ride encampment on Marginal Way.
It's been four days since Portland city crews shut down the encampment at the Fore River bike trail, and the city plans to target the Marginal Way encampment in the coming weeks. That's also where many of the displaced unhoused people from Fore River moved to last week.
"You know how tired we are living out of bags and not having a sense of home?" Desirae Rowe, an unhoused person living in the Park and Ride encampment, said. "What are we to do? Do you understand how much PTSD that pops up for people to constantly get shimmied off to the next spot?"
The city said it's taking this next week to figure out how to bring its Encampment Crisis Response Team to new encampments throughout the city. The goal of the Encampment Crisis Response Team is to get unhoused people living in encampments into shelters before shutting down the encampments they're living in.
"You can run the people out all day, you can sweep the encampments all day, but that's not going to fix the problem. That's not going to have a solution," outreach worker and former unhoused person, Shay Dufour, said.
As the city closed the Fore River encampment last week, it said it offered 170 total bed spaces to people experiencing homelessness. The city said only 18 people accepted the offer.
Meanwhile, advocates like Dufour said city shelters don't work for many people because, for example, people in city shelters are banned from drug use and male and female couples must be separate during sleeping hours.