Maine does many things very well — lobster rolls, summer, and maple syrup come to mind, and that’s just three from list as long as your arm.

One thing it gets very wrong is responding to homelessness.

We all have our theories about why there seems to be more people experiencing homelessness today than a few decades ago, but facts matter. And the fact of the matter is the cost of housing has gone up as supply has gone down. It’s not that we have more people becoming homeless — there were more people homeless on any given night in 2014 than in 2024 — but that people are staying homeless, not by days longer than before, but by months longer.

In 2019, for example, the average length of stay for a guest at Mid-Maine Homeless Shelter & Services was 37 days. Today it is well over 100 days. When you can’t move people out of the shelter and into housing, there is nowhere for the person who has just become homeless to go except into a tent.

May 1 was the final night of our winter warming shelter, a seasonal program during which we turn no one away. Operating between the 1st of November and the 30th of April, we are the only shelter provider in the state to make such a commitment. We do it because our staff and our board feel it is a moral imperative. During a Maine winter, we don’t leave anyone outside.

That’s the way life should be.

We also operate a 55-bed year-round shelter that, at present, serves 62 year-round guests because we determined that seven of our warming center guests were too ill or too disabled to be returned to unsheltered homelessness. We provide those extra seven beds for free — no funder is paying for them. Sadly, we did turn away 22 individuals, a gut-wrenching decision driven by lack of revenue and years of underfunding.

The day after our warming center closed, York County Shelter Program announced the closure of its year-round 37-bed adult shelter. Homeless Services of Aroostook is also on the brink, and we are not far behind, saved only by money secured last year from opioid relief funding and temporary funding included in Gov. Mills’ budget. But for that two-year lifeline, we would have closed our shelter last year.

According to a study by MaineHousing published earlier this year, on average, it costs $102 per diem to operate a shelter bed. This includes housing navigation, case management and other supportive services to return people to housing and help them stay there. Current levels of state funding contribute just $7.16 per bed.

The Legislature is currently debating LD 698, a funding bill that would provide $5 million to sustain shelters across the state, the first non-pandemic era funding increase for Maine’s shelters since 2016. LD 698 would increase that contribution to about $19 per bed. It’s only a fraction of the cost, but if we don’t want to lose another shelter bed this year, we need bipartisan support for LD 698.

The loss of a homeless shelter is devastating to all of us, not only because of the human suffering that results from it, but because the problem of homelessness doesn’t go away.

It simply relocates.

No one wants that, least of all the person experiencing homelessness who desperately wants to stay near their friends and family in a community they know. Nor do service center towns want to carry the weight of serving homeless people from across Maine. Towns like Brunswick, Waterville and Presque Isle — which all have a shelter — carry water for every other town which has neither a shelter or even a plan to take care of their homeless community members.

That’s not fair — not to the person who must leave their community, and not to the taxpayers in the town where people end up because they have nowhere else to go.

We can do better.