Jennifer Libby is part of a population that is invisible to most people living in Westbrook – the mother of two children, Libby is homeless.
Although homeless people live in Westbrook and other communities around Portland, they are nowhere near as visible as they are in a city like Portland, where all one has to do is drive by the Preble Street Resource Center to see a crowd of homeless people.
In Westbrook, they are seen, for the most part, by those who assist them – people like Rene Daniel, who works at the Westbrook Housing Authority, where he runs the city’s general assistance program, or Jeannie Rielly, who runs the Westbrook Food Pantry.
That doesn’t mean, however, that they do not exist or that they can or should be ignored by Westbrook or any other community around Portland. While it’s unreasonable to think every community can afford to have a homeless shelter, all of these communities should be working together with Portland to provide resources homeless people need to once again become contributing members of society, because, ultimately, the cost of ignoring the problem is much greater.
Like Westbrook, many communities have discontinued the practice of putting people up at local hotels temporarily. Westbrook stopped doing it in the spring of 2004 because it was an expensive and imperfect solution. The problem is nothing has replaced that service since it was eliminated.
Like many homeless people, Libby is not simply a victim of circumstance. She is partly to blame for the situation she has found herself in. Up until a year ago, she was a heroin addict, despite the fact that she had to care for two young children.
Libby even had a home recently in Section 8 housing. She gave it up to move to Presque Isle and failed to give 30 days notice in the process, forfeiting her opportunity to qualify for Section 8 housing.
Because Libby has made mistakes in her life, some might argue she should be the one to live with the consequences. However, she is not the only one dealing with them. Her children live with them, and, ultimately, we all live with them.
As long as people remain dependent on the rest of society to provide things for them, those people will be a problem for everyone. And, the longer we leave people in vulnerable places without the help they need to recover and become self-sustaining, the more likely we are to continually see a perpetual cycle of homelessness, hunger, deprivation, drug use and crime. All of those things cost us. They cost us money. They cost us a sense of safety. They cost us people who could be contributing members of the work force. And, they cost us all a bit of dignity as a society.
The cycle we perpetually see goes something like this: The longer Libby remains homeless the more likely she is to seek shelter wherever she can find it. That could eventually be one of her old friends who is still using heroin, an environment that could make it difficult for Libby to remain clean, as she says she has for the last year.
It would also be a dangerous and unstable place for her children, whose lives have already been far too hard. The more stable their upbringing is, the more likely they are to become contributing members of society someday.
That’s why this problem should matter to all of us. Communities around this state have been talking about offering services regionally, rather than locally, for years now. Because homeless people are often transient, this type of problem presents the perfect opportunity for communities to work together to solve this problem. All it takes is the will and desire.
Brendan Moran, editor
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