The other shelter crisis
SALEM — This is a lonely time for people who serve homeless adults.
Just about everybody is focused on the family shelter system, bursting at the seams in part because of a surge of migrants over the southern border. The more than 7,500 families housed in shelters and converted hotels under the state’s right to shelter law have dominated policy discussions, and are taking up an increasing chunk of the state’s finances, with the cost of giving them refuge expected to approach $1 billion this year.
“It feels like everyone has faded off and focused on something else,” said Jason Etheridge, president of Lifebridge North Shore, which operates a shelter in Salem.
But the individual shelter system is in crisis too. It is also seeing alarming spikes in folks needing somewhere to eat and sleep. And providers are trying to offer care with funding that doesn’t come close to the need arriving on their doorsteps every day.
On Tuesday, Etheridge and a few of his colleagues were crowded into a small office at the shelter in Salem, because the conference room was crammed full of cots. There were more cots along the walls by the dining room, where tables were cleared later in the week to accommodate yet more overnight guests. Half of the shelter’s thrift store has just been converted into sleeping space for some of the folks who live in a tent encampment behind a Wendy’s on the South River, the awful weather coaxing even those reluctant settlers indoors.
It used to be that Lifebridge sheltered 40 to 50 people here on any given night, in a large dormitory in the basement where double bunks are lined up neatly and guests store their belongings in big plastic boxes. On Wednesday night, the nonprofit gave shelter to 100 people, a number Etheridge hasn’t seen in his 11 years there.
Adult shelters all over the state are feeling it, too. Pine Street Inn in Boston, which has beds for 483 people across its four facilities, is straining to accommodate an extra 163 people per night, said president Lyndia Downie. There, too, cots and mats are being crammed into every available space, including in the lobby.
The migrant crisis is part of the surge there, with recent arrivals to Massachusetts making up close to 50 percent of guests at the men’s inn, she said.
But there is more going on here. The shelter in Salem is seeing few migrants. What’s driving the demand north of Boston, and elsewhere, is a confluence of other unhappy circumstances. The end of pandemic assistance and the return of evictions has turned more people out onto the street, with nowhere else to go in a ridiculously overpriced housing market. What Etheridge calls “a raging behavioral and mental health crisis,” has collided with a severely understaffed health care system, leaving people who desperately need care without access to it.
And it’s about to get harder: Salem is considering an ordinance that would clear away the 25 to 30 tents at the South River encampment, and others. The people who have been living there will arrive at the shelter with pets, more belongings, and active substance abuse issues.
“We are called to serve these folks, but we wouldn’t have enough space for them,” Etheridge said. “We have no playbook for this.”
In this time of massive unmet needs, imagine what it must have felt like for
these providers to learn that the governor’s budget proposal provides no funding increases for their vital work. And that $10 million in funding that had been provided in the last couple of years to help them retain staff has been nixed entirely.
“Our staff do amazing work, and they need to get fairly compensated for it,” Downie said.
A coalition of shelter providers is asking the House and Senate to bump up their funding from $110 million to $126 million, and to reinstate funding for employees. They must find a way.
Yes, these are tough times for the Commonwealth, with tax revenues sliding and the state freezing some hires. But none of that is going to stop people showing up at these shelters, which would never turn them away. Etheridge worries about his staff, already stretched thin.
“Burnout is realizing what you’re doing isn’t making a difference, and that is what I am afraid of,” he said. “You look around and think, ‘Does anybody see this?’”