But where some outreach workers see peril, Dion sees a positive.

“I’m pretty proud of it,” he said of the city’s response, including opening a new, 258-bed shelter, which city officials said had absorbed many of the homeless evicted from the camps. “Some of the nonprofit world wanted a perfect answer, but you can’t wait for perfect.”

Crackdowns against homeless encampments have gained momentum in New England, after the Supreme Court ruled in June that communities can enforce bans on sleeping on public property. This month, the Brockton and Lowell city councils banned unauthorized camping on public property, joining Boston, Fall River, and Salem with some form of prohibition.

In Portland, the parks are now cleaner, but the underlying problems of homelessness remain, social workers said.

“The research is pretty clear that sweeps don’t work. We’re not supportive of the encampments, either; they’re awful places,” said Mark Swann, executive director of Preble Street. “But poverty is complex, and solutions to poverty and homelessness are complex, and people like the black and white.”

After the evictions, some of the homeless found shelter and a broad range of care at the $25 million homeless services center, which opened in March 2023 on the outskirts of the city, about 5 miles from downtown. About 15 to 20 beds are available each day, city officials said, but a far greater number of homeless are sleeping downtown and elsewhere.

The 53,000-square-foot complex contains a health clinic, dental services, storage lockers, mental health counseling, and meeting rooms for caseworkers, as well as three meals a day, laundry facilities, and shuttles that take clients to and from downtown, where other social-service providers are located.

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“This place saved my life,” said Michael Smith, 33, an Army veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, who had been sleeping next to a heating vent outside City Hall before he moved to the shelter.

Clients can leave whenever they choose, but many remain for days or weeks while matches with hard-to-find housing are sought for them. No identification is required, and people are accepted even if under the influence, but substance use is not tolerated on site.

“We’ll serve 1,300 to 1,400 unduplicated individuals in a year,” said Aaron Geyer, the city’s director of social services. “I’m incredibly proud of the space we have. It had been a long time coming.”

City spokesperson Jessica Grondin said the number of homeless on the streets is smaller than the number evicted from the camps.

“Most have gone to the shelter,” Grondin said. “We will have a warming shelter in place this winter when the temperatures get to a certain level,” she added, and “outreach workers will encourage these folks to go there for the night.”

The city’s previous shelter, located downtown, had used beds and floor mats, some placed about 12 to 16 inches apart, to accommodate 154 people. In addition to the new facility, Portland operates a family shelter with 146 beds, and a space with 179 beds used by asylum seekers.

David George Delancey, 62, a former truck driver, has been living at Portland’s upgraded shelter for more than a year. “This is probably the best place to be if you want to be safe,” he said.

Delancey is still looking for housing, which Swann, of Preble Street, said is increasingly unaffordable and has contributed to the dramatic escalation of Portland’s homelessness.

“There was a time not that long ago, about seven years ago, when it was extremely rare in Greater Portland to see somebody sleeping outside,” Swann said. “There were eight or nine nonprofits running shelters along with the city at that time, and a really robust planning mechanism. That stopped on a dime.”

Under former governor Paul LePage, the state cut its reimbursement rate for general-assistance funding, which communities can use for shelter costs, to 70 percent from 90 percent, Swann said. For Portland, a tourist destination with a lively food and arts scene, that decrease squeezed its ability to serve the homeless, he added.

“People do not disappear when you do not shelter them, and almost overnight dozens and dozens of people could not find a safe place to sleep with a roof over their heads,” Swann said.

Other reasons for the spike included the mass social disruptions caused by COVID, a shortage of housing vouchers, and a steep rise in Portland’s cost of living. The city’s real-estate prices, including rents, have soared along with an increase in gentrification.

A point-in-time survey in January 2023 by MaineHousing, an independent state agency, found 4,258 people were homeless in Maine, a nearly fourfold increase over the 1,097 who were recorded in 2021.

“The other big challenge is that Maine has a serious opioid problem, one of the highest per-capita rates in the nation,” said Andew Bove, vice president of social work at Preble Street, which has 108 beds at three shelters in the city. “Many of the people we see sleeping out, a high percentage, have opioid-use disorder.”

Opioid fatalities have declined in Portland this year, to 14 deaths through October compared with 39 through October 2023, according to police statistics. But nonfatal overdoses have increased, to 459 from 399 over the same period.

Dion said opioid use in the camps, and its related safety concerns, were important drivers of the decision to raze them.

“There was a lot of violence and exploitation directed against women in that population,” as well as theft in abutting neighborhoods, said Dion, who was elected to the City Council in 2020. “It went from being incidental to dominating the landscape of the city. At City Hall, it sucked the oxygen from every other issue.”

On the streets, the homeless continue to congregate during the day, primarily in the Bayside neighborhood, which is home to several social service providers.

Matt Brown, who founded an outreach group called Hope Squad, said it’s painfully apparent that more needs to be done, especially with winter approaching.

“I see people here, and I can almost see putting them in a [body] bag,” said Brown, a former federal parole officer, as he walked through Bayside recently.

“The uncertainty of what’s going to happen in the next few months is really scary,” he added. “Your garden-variety citizen doesn’t know exactly what’s going on.”

Brian MacQuarrie can be reached at brian.macquarrie@globe.com.