The kitchen inside one of Winter Landing’s apartments. photos/Kiki Garfield
Last November we got a call from a whistleblower, a lady nearing 80 we’ll call Margaret, complaining about her experience living in a newly built senior-housing development at Mercy Hospital’s former West End campus. Called Winter Landing, the 52-unit building comprised of 600-square-foot one-bedroom apartments opened in mid-October of 2024. It was developed by Community Housing of Maine, a nonprofit that owns and operates over 80 residential properties all over the state serving tenants with low or no incomes and those with special needs.
Margaret felt duped. She’d driven by the old hospital site a few years ago and seen the big sign announcing new apartments for seniors. A cursory read of the news seemed to back this up, like the July 2021 Portland Press Herald articled headlined, “Portland Planning Board approves senior, family housing project in West End,” in which it’s reported that Winter Landing “will have 52 one-bedroom apartments for seniors,” and the development next door, Equinox, a mix of 43 apartments for low-income families. She was excited to live in a new, quiet building with other seniors at a very affordable rent (less than $1,200), within walking distance to neighborhood shops and services.
Imagine her surprise, then, the day she moved in last fall and discovered most of her new neighbors were rough-looking men who’d last stayed either in the city’s homeless shelter or a tent encampment. Turns out Winter Landing was built to house a mix of low-income seniors and recently unhoused folks with disabilities, including 15 units reserved for people who’ve been sleeping at the city-run shelter out by the Westbrook line. The “mix” of tenants, by Margaret’s estimation, consisted of maybe three or four seniors and scores of recently homeless residents — plus all their buddies still sleeping on the streets.
“It’s a trashed place already,” Margaret said, complaining of litter and cigarette butts around the building, a “filthy” laundry room with broken machines, and an overly complicated central heating system that left her and other seniors shivering in their apartments “[wrapped] up in all our pajamas and socks and blankets.” As for her recently housed neighbors, “one person moves in from the street and then ten more come in with them,” she said. The guy next door “drags in all these street people; thinks it’s his party place.” She’d recently called the cops to break up one of their late-night parties and now feels threatened for doing so.
Almost any new apartment building will have a few unfinished touches when people move in, a couple kinks to work out once everyday life has gone on there for awhile. But three months after Winter Landing opened, residents still could not receive mail there or set up Internet service. Margaret took to traveling to a downtown post office, where a sympathetic clerk set a box aside for her letters and magazines. To go online, she went to the library or used her phone wherever Wi-Fi was available— as did some of her neighbors.
The office at Winter Landing did have Internet and the manager shared the Wi-Fi password with some residents, who had to sit in the common area by the office to access the connection. Margaret was unsettled to routinely walk into this reception area and overhear the websites they were visiting. “It’s porn,” she said. “I don’t want to even think about what I hear.”
Winter Landing is not a drug- or alcohol-free building, and the rule against smoking anywhere on the property was either flouted with impunity, Margaret said, or smokers heeded management’s directive to puff across the street, which Margaret is certain those neighbors don’t appreciate.
“There’s no help here for these people,” said Margaret. “It’s a free-for-all. They love it. They don’t have anything telling them what to do. They can live like street people.” She’s ready to move out already and said management agreed to return her security deposit once she finds a new place despite her year-term lease.
Several properties in Portland built and operated to serve chronically homeless people, like Logan Place, Florence House and Huston Commons, have on-site supervision and services available 24/7. Winter Landing does not.
“Meeting everybody’s needs is a delicate balancing act,” said Bob Bergeron, a formerly unhoused peer-support specialist who works with local homeless people and contributes comics about homelessness to The Bollard (“The Pirate Ship”) with artist and social worker Katy Finch. “If the older folks are concerned about crime, the news bears that out,” he wrote. “If the world made sense, you could say, ‘Just be cool,’ but it’s not like that. I’m not one to call for draconian oversight of the property, but to guarantee success and safety I think you need strong but equitable building management.”
Ali Lovejoy, Vice President of Mission Advancement at Preble Street, which runs the three aforementioned supportive-housing properties, had this to say: “Just as the reasons people become homeless vary significantly, so do the support needs of people moving out of homelessness into housing. Site-based Housing First programs like Logan Place, Florence House, and Huston Commons serve people who have multiple barriers to housing stability and a history of chronic homelessness, and so those programs provide on-site 24/7 support.
People who have experienced homelessness and have a disability may have fewer housing barriers and so would benefit from a different constellation of support services.”
That’s what’s happening at Winter Landing. In response to our questions, Cullen Ryan, Executive Director of Community Housing of Maine, wrote, “We have a property manager, resident services coordinator, and a maintenance technician. We do not have a person stationed at the door, but we do contract with a professional security company to provide regular patrols after hours. We also rely on City Social Services staff to provide ongoing housing retention support to the residents that have come from the Homeless Services Center. There are referrals from other service providers who provide support to their clients in their apartments as well.”
On an afternoon a few days later, Ryan gave us a tour of Winter Landing and the building next door for families, Equinox. Both are clean, quiet and well-constructed properties designed to Passive House Performance standards, so no fossil fuels are used to heat or cool them. The temperature in the hallways and one of the units we visited was quite comfortable. Handsome work by emerging artists associated with the Maine Art Collective is hung throughout the common areas and hallways.
Most of the washers and dryers at Winter Landing were operable, and there was a Spectrum technician parked outside when we visited, the connectivity problem having finally been resolved. Still no mail, though, and Ryan’s reason for the delay — that special locks required by the postal service are on back order — is questionable, since the boxes are inside the building, which makes them the landlord’s responsibility. All the postal service should need is a key to the back door and a mailbox master key or keys provided by the landlord.
While we were examining the rows of mailboxes inside, a woman was struggling to open that back door. It was Margaret. Part of a key or something else was jammed in the lock. Ryan let her in and dealt with her patiently and gracefully, then made a couple calls to get the lock fixed.
Ryan comes across as a genuinely empathetic and judicious landlord. A former clinician, he’s led Community Housing for two decades and understands the challenges recently housed people face, like the pressure to let one’s unhoused friends hang out or crash at your new pad. It’s certainly not illegal to have guests, but Ryan described one clever workaround he devised for a tenant at another property in danger of eviction for rowdy gatherings. He said he drew up an official-looking, but non-binding agreement limiting guests that this tenant could show to his pals when they came by to party and say, “I’d have you over, but this asshole [Ryan] won’t let me.” It worked, Ryan said.
Community Housing does take a fairly lenient approach with its Winter Landing tenants, preferring reminders to reprimands or threats of eviction for minor offenses like smoking. But police call logs don’t back up Margaret’s complaint that emergency responders are there almost every night — one tenant died at Winter Landing of natural causes and there was a confrontation out front over a stolen laptop, Ryan recalled, but other than Margaret’s 2 a.m. call to break up a loud party, not much else to report.
There are 55 different social-service providers who regularly visit formerly homeless tenants at Winter Landing to provide support, Ryan said. And management is mindful to treat everyone the same, regardless of their housing history.
Despite all this, seniors like Margaret who haven’t been homeless may never feel entirely comfortable living at Winter Landing. Life there, like life everywhere, is a work in progress, and that work is harder for most of her neighbors. Gov. Janet Mills’ proposed budget, with its draconian three-month limit on emergency housing assistance and pay freezes and cuts for social-service providers, would further strain life at Winter Landing and all over Maine.
Ryan knew who the whistleblower is. Margaret “appears to be uniquely unhappy,” he wrote via e-mail. “I have chased down a number of her concerns, leading me to believe we may be unable to please her despite what we do to try. But we will keep trying.”
