State, city clear homeless camps along Portland's Marginal Way

Nov. 1—Early Wednesday morning the scene at the Marginal Way park & ride was relatively calm.

As city and state bulldozers lined up around the encampment, a U-Haul truck idled in the center of the camp as people loaded up their things.

The truck had been rented by Bill Higgins, the executive director of Homeless Advocacy for All. He wrote on Facebook the night before that he had rented the truck for two days and would be helping move people from Marginal Way and Somerset Street to the encampment under the Casco Bay Bridge.

Outreach workers from Preble Street and the city handed out coffees and snacks while others helped carry tarps, fans and bins of clothes from tents into the truck.

As state employees with the Department of Transportation worked to clear dozens of tents at its park & ride lot on Marginal Way, just a few blocks away city crews were clearing a smaller encampment on Somerset Street. The sweeps are working to clear the largest concentration of homeless camps in the city.

People have been camping at the park & ride lot for months. In August, the state blocked off half of it so that commuters could continue to park on one side while campers were allowed on the other.

The encampment grew exponentially after the city cleared an encampment along the nearby Bayside Trail this spring. As of Wednesday's morning, the city's homelessness dashboard showed there were 55 tents on state property near the park & ride lot, another 64 were on city property in that area and seven on private property.

The city's Encampment Crisis Response Team, created in the wake of the Bayside Trail sweep, has tried to connect outreach workers with those living at the camps to find them more permanent shelter, or at least get them into the city's Homeless Services Center in Riverside. The team had struggled to convince people to go into the city shelter, and the number of tents in the city has continued to climb, but over the last few weeks the city has said more people from the encampments are going to the shelter.

Paul Cann, who had been camping on Somerset Street, said he didn't know where he would go but he thought he'd likely end up under the Casco Bay Bridge. As he walked along the sidewalk outside Noyes Storage cleaning up used needles, he said he felt "betrayed" by the city.

"Everybody has to go to the bridge if they want to camp, I guess they think out of sight out of mind, people can't see us so much under the bridge," he said.

Cann has lived in Portland since 2000 and has been homeless on and off for about 15 years. He says he's had trouble finding housing because he has been charged with assault in the past and he says landlords don't want to rent to him because of it.

He said he was cleared from the Deering Oaks encampment last year and then stayed at the Marginal Way encampment for a few months before moving to Somerset Street. He said he left Marginal Way because conditions at that encampment were stressful, people fought and stole each others things. He attributes this to difficult living conditions, mental health struggles and drug use.

"A lot of these people are doing drugs not because they want to get high but because they need to cope with these conditions, it's unbelievable conditions out here," said Cann.

He worries that things are going to get worse "with everybody crammed in one spot under the bridge."

This story will be updated.