"I've never not been broke," said the 24-year old who was born and raised in Portland.

Living paycheck to paycheck
by Trevor Maxwell
Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram
November 23, 2005

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Counting her last paycheck, Evans will have about $500 in the bank.

Minus $437.50 for rent.

Minus $150 to fill the heating oil tank.

"After I pay the bills, I won't have any money left," she said.

From the East End to the Arts District, the Old Port to the West End to Forest Avenue, hundreds of young wage earners live month to month, earning just enough to stay in Portland for now, but not enough to promise a future that is comfortable or even safe.

Nearly 7,000 people between 18 and 24 called Portland home in 2000, according to Census figures. That was down by more than 1,000 from a decade earlier.

Many are retail clerks and salespeople, waiters and service workers. They often have strong ties to Portland and are determined to cobble together a life in the city, no matter the sacrifices. The pressure is on, though, as the cost of living races ahead of them.

Evans will rely on her housemates to help with her share of the heating oil; otherwise, she won't have any cash for food or other necessities. Next month, she hopes, she will make it up to them. Evans makes about $9 an hour working at Videoport, a popular movie rental shop downtown where she has worked for three years.

It's not that she lives beyond her means. She doesn't own a car. She walks the 20 minutes to her job. Most everything she owns is second-hand, including a couch the roommates found on the street.

But Evans has no savings and no one to turn to if things really go south.

"For young people, this city is getting to be a much harder place to live," she said.

Since 1995, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in the city, without utilities, jumped from about $580 to $920. For four bedrooms, renters pay an average of $1,340, nearly double the cost in 1995.

Forget about buying. That market is long gone. For a low-wage earner intent on staying here, the city owns you.

"I would definitely say they are living on the edge," said Edmund Cervone at the Maine Center for Economic Policy. He was talking about Evans and others earning less than what his center defines as a "livable wage."

You have a lot of people competing for a fairly fixed supply of housing"

Last year, a single person in Portland with no children needed to make $10.41 an hour and work full time to meet basic needs, the center reported.

"That is a minimal food budget, adequate housing," Cervone said. "Not nice. Just safe and adequate. They don't have a lot of leeway. Every dime is accounted for, paycheck to paycheck."

Cervone has moved around the country enough to see the economy in action, having lived in New Jersey, Maine, Delaware, Colorado and elsewhere. The squeeze on wage earners is universal in the United States, he said.

"You have a lot of people competing for a fairly fixed supply of housing," Cervone said. "At some point these guys are faced with the question: Can they advance where they're at or find a new job to get a better wage and benefits? They'll have to if they want to stay in Portland."

Josh Samuels hopes to make it work.

He's 22 and all energy, with unkempt blond hair and blue eyes that widen when he hears an interesting conversation. Samuels is one of Evans' housemates. In fact, he's the one who found their house on State Street. He works at Bull Moose Music in the Old Port and dreams of starting up a custom apparel company.

On an afternoon in late September, the housemates sat at their kitchen table, framed in the light slanting through Victorian-style windows.

This house represents quite a coup for Samuels. The owners had renovated the whole place in immaculate detail, from period moldings to built-in cabinets and even a stained glass window on the stairway.

But the owners were forced to put it on the market when the husband was transferred to a military base in Oklahoma. The house didn't sell for the price they were asking, Samuels said, so the owners decided to rent it.

Samuels set up an appointment for the potential housemates to meet the landlords. They were worried about their youth status. Another property manager had just turned Samuels down outright, he thinks because of his age.

"We dressed up really nice," Evans said, laughing at the absurdity of it. "It was pretty simple. They said, 'Yes, you got the place.' " They moved in in August.

Samuels and Evans are joined by Matt Cronin, a Deering High School graduate who returned to Portland from Boston. Another housemate, Jonathan Merrifield, earns a little more than minimum wage at Toys R Us while playing keyboard for a band and working on his own music projects.

"I came back under financial duress," said Cronin, 26, who aspires to publish fiction. Right now he is living off savings from a high-tech job he quit in Falmouth and settlement money from a car accident.

He was thinking about moving to Chicago and possibly taking Samuels along too. But Samuels stopped the relocation, at least for now, by finding this house and letting Cronin set up his drum kit in the basement.

You can still make things work, it just takes more creativity"

Together, this group of housemates is very smart and media savvy, with a shared sense of ironic humor. And like Evans, they are most often just scraping by.

"The rents keep going up, and the wages pretty much stay where they are," Samuels said. He recently brought in a fifth housemate, bringing rent down to $350 a piece, before the additional costs of heat and electricity.

"You can still make things work, it just takes more creativity," he said. "Young people are pretty ingenious."

For one thing, that means pooling resources. Four, five, even six or more to an apartment or house is not uncommon in Portland, Samuels said. In this house—huge compared to the string of apartments he used to call home—the small kitchen, bathrooms and hallways can still make daily life seem cramped.

Cronin's room is actually a living space, with no door, just to the right of the main entrance. Most of the housemates have pared down their list of possessions to meet their definitions of essential.

Cervone of the Maine Center for Economic Policy said the trend toward pooling resources is common in cities on an economic upswing.

"This same thing is happening elsewhere," he said. "People will find ways to make ends meet. One of the ways they do it is living together. Friends and families often group together."

That's often considered a radical concept in Maine, though. Households in the state generally have just over two people, less than the national average of 2.59 in 2000. The average household in Portland for that year was 2.08 people.

Youthful ingenuity also means networking with friends to find the best landlords, vacancies and deals. Samuels heard about this house at a monthly get-together with other young people.

He called immediately. If you don't, he said, the place will already be rented.

Samuels and Evans have friends who have moved to other towns in Maine because Portland had become too expensive. They also know people who left the state after high school and want to come back.

Evans is committed to the city where she grew up. She thinks of herself as a Mainer who didn't take the fast track, and she doesn't feel that the size of her bank account should force her out.

"I'm not leaving Portland; I don't see myself living anywhere else," she said.

The housemates say this city has a sense of community that makes them feel connected.

They like the progressive atmosphere and how their own views on the world are reflected in the city's youth culture here. They like being able to see a show at Local 188, Geno's, Space gallery or the old St. Lawrence Church. They like that not every coffee shop is a Starbucks.

What they don't like is how fleeting this all may be.

Samuels knows his telephone could ring in a few months with the owner on the other end of the line telling him the house is going back up for sale.

In a way, this makes the group even more grateful about what they have right now. Samuels always seems to be smiling.

When they sit around the table together on a late September afternoon, talking about jobs and money and love and dreams, they make up a portrait of what it means to be young in this city, at this time.

"Ultimately that's what I really care about," Samuels said. "Having a roof over my head that makes me happy."

Staff Writer Trevor Maxwell can be contacted at 791-6451 or at tmaxwell@pressherald.com