An evidence-based, actionable roadmap to a bright future for everyone in the Queen City
This document is a work in progress. Please contribute your thoughts and suggestions!
Like many places around the country, Bangor has been facing a combination of challenges with homelessness, substance use, mental health, and an HIV outbreak.
People across the board are frustrated and want to see more action — but what people want to see differs a lot depending on who you ask.
This is an attempt to create a plan to address these issues.
The Bangor Plan is a living document — a foundation for ongoing conversation, not a rigid blueprint.
It's guided by five principles:
To contribute your thoughts, use the "Suggest / Comment" feature on any section of this document, or email feedback@thebangorplan.com. When you do, please keep the plan's principles in mind.
This is not an official plan of the City of Bangor or any regional organization. It is a starting point; it's an attempt to build a shared foundation for moving forward.
I'm Justin, a Bangor resident, business owner, and community member for over 40 years. I don't work directly on these issues, but through my involvement with local organizations, initiatives, and businesses, I see their impact firsthand.
My passion is turning ideas into plans and plans into action; it's what I do every day in my work. I want to do what I can to help Bangor move forward.
I don't have all the answers. This plan is intended to start a conversation about actionable steps we can take to make progress on these issues instead of resorting to performative actions and inconsequential arguing. I'm sure I'll learn a lot about the landscape in place and the work people are already doing through feedback to this plan, but my hope is that these conversations will help us build a roadmap that is both effective and attainable.
In short, I love Bangor, and I want this city to be its best for everyone who lives here, works here, or visits our great city.
Bangor is the health and social services hub for northern and eastern Maine. That creates real pressure — on shelter capacity, emergency services, and public spaces. It also creates an opportunity: Bangor can demonstrate a response that works, and that other communities in Maine can build on.
There's clear evidence from other locations that have made substantial progress on the issues we face in the Queen City. This plan is built on a simple premise: we know what works. The goal is to follow the evidence rather than guess.
Bangor already has meaningful assets to build on:
Communities of all sizes have faced similar challenges to Bangor. And while Bangor is unique in many ways, learning from the lessons of what's worked (and what hasn't) in locations around the country provides the best chance of success for our region. It ensures we aren't spending taxpayer money on programs that have proven to be ineffective (or even made problems worse) in the past.
There are a few common threads across cities that have seen progress on the issues Bangor is facing.
What distinguishes successful cities is not that they found a way to make these issues disappear quickly. It is that they maintained a consistent, evidence-based approach across multiple budget cycles and political administrations.
Houston is often cited as the standard of success for progress on homelessness and related issues. Other cities have also made progress by implementing programs that bridge populations with services.
Before outlining what new work should begin, it is worth being clear about what is already working and should be maintained.
The Bangor Community Assistance Team is already producing results and should be expanded, not replaced. Its model of responding to non-emergency welfare checks and quality-of-life calls and connecting people to services rather than defaulting to arrest is consistent with what has worked nationally. The plan's aims to build directly on this foundation, expanding to 24/7 coverage with embedded behavioral health clinicians.
Hope House, now operated by Preble Street, provides shelter without requiring sobriety or program compliance as conditions of entry. The evidence from Houston and other cities is consistent: low-barrier shelter, combined with housing navigation and on-site services, produces better outcomes than high-barrier models that turn people away during crisis. Maintaining and expanding low-barrier capacity is a core commitment of this plan.
The Housing/Resource Support Navigator, funded through a grant expiring in early 2027, has been identified in Maine's statewide research as among the most impactful single roles in the homeless services system. The 2019 MaineHousing gaps analysis described housing navigators as "a game changer" for helping people obtain and keep housing. Securing this position beyond its current grant cycle is one of the plan's early priorities.
Needlepoint Sanctuary and Wabanaki Public Health and Wellness are essential infrastructure for the HIV outbreak response and must be maintained with stable, consistent access, which includes physical locations.
A common objection is that programs should require a strict 1:1 exchange. The US CDC considers needs-based distribution to be best practice because it decreases injection risk behaviors and reduces disease transmission. Strict 1:1 requirements discourage participation, particularly from people who are unsheltered or newly in crisis, without improving collection rates.
In early 2025, Bangor's SSP landscape was significantly disrupted: a major provider was decertified, local policy shifts limited where programs could operate, and Needlepoint Sanctuary temporarily closed while navigating zoning compliance. Maine CDC's 2025 report identifies this disruption as a contributing factor in the ongoing outbreak. Protecting stable access to these programs, including consistent physical locations, is a direct public health intervention in an active outbreak.
Bangor serves as northern and eastern Maine's hub for health and social services. It's a role that creates real strain and real costs. It's important to build a regional strategy – not just a Bangor strategy – that addresses the issue our region faces, both to increase the likelihood of success and to ensure Bangor isn't bearing those costs alone.
There's a cost associated with every person who cycles through Bangor's emergency room, jail, and shelter without stable housing, and those costs are most often paid by taxpayers across the county or the state. The regional strategy builds the political and fiscal case for distributing those costs fairly, through:
Before building anything new, Bangor needs a current, specific picture of where the system breaks down. Much of the groundwork is already in place; the goal is to update and focus it, not start over.
In 2019, MaineHousing commissioned a comprehensive statewide gaps and needs analysis that documented shelter capacity, housing barriers, and service gaps across all of Maine, including Penobscot County. That work identified many of the same issues Bangor faces today: too few low-barrier shelter beds, people discharged from hospitals and jails into homelessness, and the outsized impact of housing navigators.
Some of the Bangor Plan's first steps update that analysis for Bangor's current situation, focusing on what has changed since 2019, what specific points in the local system are breaking down, and where people are falling through the cracks.
Several current programs depend on grant cycles with near-term expiration dates. A key early priority is securing longer-term funding commitments — particularly for the Housing Navigator, whose grant ends January 2027 — so that later work is not built on a foundation that crumbles with time.
This process should also include a thorough, first-hand data collection survey of the unhoused population, similar to MaineHousing's annual point-in-time reports. Ideally, this would serve as a foundation for a by-name list that can be used in future efforts.
The survey should at a minimum attempt to collect the following information for each individual experiencing homelessness:
Importantly, this data collection should complement, not replace, any information already collected by the Maine Continuum of Care and Maine Statewide Homeless Council.
The aggregated collected data from this and other efforts will allow the roadmap to be guided by actual data, not assumptions or hearsay.
There's currently very little publicly available information about the status of existing initiatives beyond high-level point in time counts. While there are very good reasons to keep some data internal to the network of support programs (privacy, complexity, etc.), the lack of public information makes it seem like data isn't being collected at all and that there's no accountability for programs.
A public-facing dashboard updated quarterly gives residents a way to evaluate progress rather than relying on anecdote and isolated experiences, and it also gives the Bangor's Homelessness Advisory Committee a shared set of facts to work from. The committee, along with coordinating programs, should identify key metrics to share; examples may include the number of unsheltered individuals (point-in-time count), BCAT contacts resulting in a service placement, citations resolved through service pathways, tiny home and PSH units occupied, new HIV cases in Penobscot County, ER visits for psychiatric conditions, and regional funding contributions proportional to utilization. Some of these metrics are already available, but centralizing them in a single dashboard allows a clear, high-level picture of progress.
It's genuinely difficult to define a single metric of success for many of the scenarios involved here, especially since it often takes more than one success to stabilize an individual's situation. With that in mind the dashboard focuses on metrics that are easier to concretely define and, in many cases, are often already available.
To decrease the amount of time to launch the dashboard, the city or county should attempt to use platforms with existing software licenses in order to prevent a new bid process. The dashboard won't be perfect from the start, but it should use a "something is better than nothing" approach so that data can start being presented as soon as possible.
It's important to approach the dashboard with the understanding that some members of the broader community may not be satisfied with the types or granularity of data presented on it. Community members may understandably be frustrated if they continue to see signs of the issues despite investment in initiatives to tackle them. The point of the dashboard should be to give an indication of the impact made at a high level.
Formally requesting a state public health emergency designation for Penobscot County and pursuing outbreak-specific federal funding triggers faster funding mechanisms and creates political urgency that social service debates alone do not.
Addressing homelessness and increasing downtown vitality are not separate problems. A downtown with more foot traffic, more activity, and more diverse uses is one where the relatively small homeless population is less disproportionately prominent, and it's also more economically resilient.
In addition, the artist community in the region is desperately looking for new ways to showcase their work and sell their goods.
Revising current policies is a win-win for parties on both sides, and it makes sense to start with two low-cost, high-impact changes.
Bangor's Cultural Commission and/or the Downtown Bangor Partnership are the natural coordinating bodies for both programs, starting with initial pilot zones and expanding based on usage and feedback.
In July 2024, Bangor-area artists petitioned the city to allow local creators to sell their work on designated sidewalks without a fee — inspired directly by Portland's First Friday Art Walk, which brings more than 3,000 people downtown each month. Currently, selling goods on a Bangor sidewalk requires a paid license under the city's peddling ordinance, a barrier that artists say makes events inaccessible to low-income and emerging creators.
The change needed is narrow:
This change is a natural activation of public space similar to outdoor dining, which has proven to be a popular and successful addition to downtown over the last decade.
Bangor currently has no clear permit pathway for buskers and street performers, which means both performers and city staff operate in a gray area. US courts have consistently held that street performance for donations is protected expressive activity under the First Amendment — cities can regulate where and how it happens, but not whether it can happen at all in public spaces.
Consistent with how Nashville and Denver handle it, Bangor's framework would:
Before any citation system or managed space policy can work, there have to be real, accessible places for people to go. The majority of enforcement changes should wait until these components are operational.
A lot of the conversation around implementing new programs focuses on funding and costs. While those factors are important to keep in mind, it's similarly critical to consider the costs associated with homelessness without any interventions. Research indicates that due to emergency healthcare, substance treatment, law enforcement interactions, and encampment clearings, chronically homeless individuals can have a cost burden of between $35,578 and $48,792 each year, and the average cost to incarcerate an individual in Maine is around $42,000. In addition, Bangor funds a number of programs to manage the issues at play here (including Streetplus, which cost the Downtown Bangor Partnership $289,780 for FY26). Inaction has a cost of its own.
Bangor needs to build on the Bangor Community Assistance Team by expanding to 24/7 coverage and embedding behavioral health clinicians directly in each team, not as a separate referral. Co-responders can make same-day assessments and direct placements, eliminating a point of referral friction on the path to place an individual. Every BCAT contact should result in either a placement, a scheduled appointment with transportation provided, or a documented reason neither was possible. Outcomes should be tracked and reported at 30, 90, and 180 days.
Some individuals in Bangor's unhoused population may have support systems (family, friends, etc.) in other locations. For those individuals, the city should have the flexibility to connect the individual with those resources and/or identify if the location has sufficient resources to support the individual.
This approach is intended solely for those who have a support system in other locations. Research consistently shows that 70% or more of homeless individuals come from the same general area where they are currently living. A revolving door policy of sending individuals to more rural spots in Maine would likely end up with them returning to Bangor due to the fact that their original home probably does not have the services they need. Any program along this line should also consider that some individuals may not want to return to their past situation out of safety or other concerns.
The $2 million in federal funding Bangor secured for a tiny home village is the most immediate opportunity to change outcomes. Operated on a Housing First model, with no sobriety requirement and no ID requirement as a barrier to entry, it gives BCAT and the Housing Navigator somewhere concrete to connect people. From there, the village could offer embedded services that handle ID assistance, connections with support services, and more.
A second phase of permanent supportive housing should begin permitting and community engagement while the tiny home village is being constructed. Additional tiny home villages or motel conversions like the recent Theresa's Place / Pine Tree Inn project, if available, are likely the most cost effective options.
If the city is interested in a bigger-picture solution, it may consider a program combining supportive housing and affordable housing using a revolving housing production fund as seen in places like Montgomery County, Maryland.
Bangor's version of Portland's Opportunity Crew would hire people experiencing homelessness to address the issues that generate the most resident complaints: cleaning parks, maintaining trails, removing graffiti, collecting litter. Participation should be genuinely accessible, with mobile signup, transportation provided, and flexible hours. Participants of the Brigade wear crew vests and are publicly recognized as contributors helping to improve Bangor.
The efforts of the Brigade could also reduce the amount of work for public works, parks & recreation, and Streetplus, saving the city and the Downtown Bangor Partnership money.
Once off-ramps have been established, the Bunyan Brigade also serves as an alternate disciplinary pathway for low-level offenses instead of steering individuals to the Penobscot County Jail.
Those with a history of substance use or homelessness often have difficulty finding stable employment for a number of reasons: criminal records due to drug usage, a lack of transportation, or even a requirement to provide a permanent address when applying for a job.
Government and social organizations should aim to work with area employers to limit these barriers wherever possible to increase the likelihood that individuals can find employment opportunities beyond the Bunyan Brigade. There should also be a renewed focus to find drivers for the Community Connector transit system and expand hours to nights and weekends to accommodate those with evening or weekend shifts at work.
The city should negotiate designated bed reservations with Wellspring, Acadia Hospital, and other regional providers rather than placing people on waitlists that stretch for months. This would allow an accessible resolution within 24–48 hours of a BCAT contact. This should also include a real-time bed availability dashboard that is accessible to BCAT, Hope House staff, and the Housing Navigator.
The city should also designate a small bridge housing fund to cover the gap between a BCAT contact and a placement at an overflow location like a motel to ensure that individuals don't drop off due to a lack of availability.
With services and housing pathways in place, Bangor can establish a clearer framework for responding to specific harmful behaviors in public spaces without criminalizing homelessness itself. Every element of this section is designed backward from the question: what can a person realistically do to resolve this?
Rather than arresting people for low-level violations like littering, trespassing, disorderly conduct, and open containers, civil citations offer real alternatives: community service, service enrollment, or program engagement in place of a criminal record.
A citation program simultaneously respects that the city and state have laws in place while also addressing the fact that traditional criminal justice pathways are often detrimental for an individual's long-term success.
To accomplish these goals, the citation program features:
Once in place, this program could be applied outside of the homeless community, too, leading to a more consistent enforcement approach across the city's full population.
While it's important to hold people accountable for their actions, incarceration hits those who have experienced homelessness and substance use particularly hard — and doesn't seem particularly effective. Having a criminal record is a barrier to employment in many cases, making it tougher for those attempting to escape homelessness or on their recovery journey to find long-term success. In addition, research has shown that there's a 68% 3-year recidivism rate for inmates with a history of substance use and those experiencing homelessness experienced a 35% and 44% increase in recidivism risk.
A managed, sanctioned space with clear, enforced rules is more effective, more defensible to neighbors and businesses, and less costly to taxpayers than either an unmanaged encampment or a policy of repeated dispersal. Creating a structured framework reduces the likelihood of conflict across the city and provides opportunities to connect individuals with housing, recovery, and public health resources.
A draft CDC note reportedly cites that the closure of an encampment contributed to the growth of the HIV outbreak in Bangor.
The sanctioned space would include posted rules (no weapons, no dealing, no harassment, no open fire), structured and proportionate violation responses, on-site peer navigator presence, and direct contact numbers and committed response times for businesses and neighbors within 500 feet.
Individuals who violate the rules of the space would face civil citation or other disciplinary pathways.
The population of the sanctioned space is intended to decline over time as people are connected and placed in permanent housing.
For a small subset of people (those with severe untreated mental illness or addiction who have declined every voluntary service offer after repeated contacts) court-ordered treatment plans offer a final option short of incarceration. Programs modeled on California's CARE Court provide structured treatment plans for up to 24 months, with legal representation from day one, judicial oversight, and clear exit criteria. This is reserved for situations where every other tool has been exhausted, with strict eligibility requirements reviewed annually.
In the vast majority of cases, court-ordered treatment means Assertive Community Treatment (ACT), which are multidisciplinary teams of clinicians, peer support specialists, and case managers who deliver psychiatric care, medication management, and housing support directly in the community. Compared with standard case management, ACT clients experience 37% greater reductions in homelessness and significantly fewer psychiatric hospitalizations and emergency room visits. Maine has ACT teams, and they are the intended primary destination for this pathway.
In rare cases where someone poses a genuine, documented risk that cannot safely be managed in the community, civil commitment to Dorothea Dix Psychiatric Center (Maine's only state psychiatric hospital, with 92 beds serving the entire state) may be the outcome. This represents the far end of a spectrum, not a routine one, due to the fact that there is an extensive process for admission, a high legal standard for committal, and chronic underfunding of the facility as it stands. In addition, as referenced in MaineHousing's 2019 report, those discharged from inpatient mental health care frequently return to homelessness because of a fragile and underfunded post-discharge support system.
The most important ask attached to this pathway is ensuring that the regional ACT provider has enough funded capacity to accept referrals. Without that, the structured intervention pathway leads nowhere.
Cities that have made lasting progress on homelessness have done so across multiple administrations, budget cycles, and changes in leadership. The governance structure is what makes that possible.
In May 2026, the Bangor City Council appointed nine members to the Advisory Committee on Homelessness, established in March 2026. The committee's charge is to create a data-driven, evidence-informed strategic plan and provide ongoing oversight of the city's response, including regional coordination, gap identification, recommending sustainable funding strategies, reviewing state legislative proposals, and ongoing community engagement.
This committee provides the oversight and strategic accountability structure that makes long-term progress possible. To function effectively, it needs operational support including:
Evidence-based work requires adapting to what the evidence shows. The governance structure includes formal annual review points, not just to report progress, but to honestly evaluate what is not working and why. CARE Court eligibility criteria are reviewed annually; if the pathway is being used more broadly than intended, it is narrowed.
| Phase / Track | Focus | Timeline | Key Output |
|---|---|---|---|
| Regional Strategy | Political & fiscal work | Month 1 onward — runs throughout | Coalition; cost-sharing framework; state legislative strategy |
| Phase 1: Map & stabilize | Evidence base & program stability | Months 1–6 | Updated gap analysis; public dashboard; HIV emergency designation; funding secured |
| Phase 2: Build the off-ramp | Housing and service infrastructure | Months 6–18 | 24/7 BCAT with clinicians; tiny home village open; community service crew; committed beds |
| Phase 3: Enforcement & infrastructure | Enforcement reform | Months 12–24 | Civil citation system; sanctioned space policy; structured intervention pathway |
| Phase 4: Governance & ongoing accountability | Institutional stability | Month 18 onward | Advisory Committee supported; annual review cycle |
The sequencing is deliberate. The regional strategy and Phase 1 begin immediately. Phase 2 builds the infrastructure that makes enforcement meaningful. Phase 3 does not launch until Phase 2 components are operational. Phase 4 ensures the work survives beyond any single administration.
Phase 3 does not launch until BCAT is at 24/7 coverage, the Bunyan Brigade exists, and committed beds are available within 48 hours.
Houston's 63% reduction in homelessness took a decade of sustained commitment across multiple mayoral administrations. The temptation in any political environment is to start with what is most visible — enforcement, managed spaces, citation systems — before the service infrastructure that makes those tools work is in place. That sequencing has failed in city after city.
The structure of this roadmap is not bureaucratic caution. It is the lesson of every city that has made durable progress: build the off-ramp before you redirect traffic onto it. The Bunyan Brigade, the committed beds, the expanded BCAT — these are the prerequisites. Enforcement is only effective with a stable, proven support system in place.
Bangor has something many cities lack at the start: existing infrastructure, a recent federal funding win, an active Advisory Committee, and a public health emergency that creates genuine political urgency. The foundation is there. The question is whether the sustained political will to build on it — across administrations, budget cycles, and community opposition — can be maintained.
That is ultimately not a policy question. It is a question about what kind of city Bangor decides to be.
Last revised June 8, 2026