Fund the Eviction Prevention Program and keep Maine kids at home | Opinion

Home is supposed to be the place where kids’ lives make sense: the same bedroom, the same bus stop, the same friends down the street. When families can afford the essentials, like safe homes, children have the best chance to thrive. 

Evictions shatter that safety and stability. Losing a home means stress that can damage child development, health and opportunity. Rents, like single-family home prices, have increased drastically in the last few years in Maine. Too many families are one missed paycheck or one medical emergency away from losing their homes.

As a foster parent, and as an advocate for the Maine Children’s Alliance, we bring two different but deeply connected perspectives on how Maine’s housing crisis affects children. One of us sees what happens when kids must enter foster care in part because of the high cost of housing; the other works to advance policies that strengthen families statewide.

While fostering kids, Carly has seen the trauma that losing stable housing can cause. Last winter, she and her spouse got a Friday-night text from the state: could they take an emergency placement — 4-year-old twins — right away? The twins’ mom struggled to make rent with no child care and therefore no steady income. Now, her children had been placed into foster care — and separated from their family — largely because she’d lost her home.

The twins stayed with Carly for only a week before transitioning to a longer term foster home, but the harm to the children will last. One morning, one of the kids said, “We don’t have a house, and that is why we have a new family.” That sentence will stay with Carly forever.

From Kristen’s vantage point at the Maine Children’s Alliance, the twins’ story reflects a broader pattern: losing a home is never just a housing issue. When families are pushed into crisis, communities shoulder the fallout through higher demand for emergency shelters, MaineCare, the child welfare system and other services. In 2023, housing instability was cited in child welfare cases as a reason for separating children from their families 18% of the time in Maine. 

Maine Children’s Alliance works to ensure every child has a strong start and a safe, supported, economically stable path to adulthood. For families, evictions mean empty savings, disrupted jobs and education, and sometimes living in shelters, cars or overcrowded living situations. Children lose their schools, routines and communities, the very things that help them feel safe and learn. Last year, nearly 5,000 Maine households were at risk of losing their homes because of eviction.

But eviction is also preventable, and the Maine Legislature and Gov. Mills currently have the opportunity to fund a meaningful solution, the successful Eviction Prevention Program or EPP. 

EPP is a simple idea: when a family is facing a crisis, help them catch up on rent before the crisis becomes a catastrophe. Recently, EPP prevented 1,300 households from being evicted. Seventy-five percent of people who received help made under $31,000 a year, according to Project Home, which ran the program with Maine Housing. EPP provided targeted, time-limited assistance — covering rent owed and, when needed, forward rent while a household regains its footing.