Driscoll warns Mass. shelters are ‘at capacity’
Concerned for children, families
Massachusetts is going to run out of places to shelter newly arriving immigrants and other families without housing “very, very soon,” leaving the one state in the country that has a legal obligation to shelter unhoused families in a position where “there is not going to be literally any room at the inn,” Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll said Thursday.
Driscoll said Massachusetts has almost 7,500 families (close to 23,000 people) enrolled in the state’s emergency assistance shelter system. She said during a live interview on El Mundo’s La Hora del Café that “we’re really running out of capacity” and renewed the administration’s calls for the federal government to speed up the work authorization process for immigrants and to establish new congregate shelters.
“Folks are coming in through the border because they’re fleeing horrific circumstances. But when you have this many people in a shelter, in a motel, or in an unsafe setting, it’s just not something that we want, we can continue. So we’re really hopeful that we’ll get some assistance,” she said.
Driscoll added, “We have a lot of communities who have stepped up, but at some point we’re going to run out of rooms and I think that’s very, very soon. Unfortunately, we just don’t have the capacity.”
Host Alberto Vasallo asked Driscoll if there was any chance that Massachusetts could eliminate its 1983 right-to-shelter law, which guarantees homeless families access to emergency shelter. It has attracted fresh attention from Republican lawmakers, including Senate candidate Representative Peter Durant, who want to change the law so it would apply only to legal US citizens.
The lieutenant governor did not slam the door on Vasallo’s question, similar to the way Governor Maura Healey has softened her own rhetoric around keeping the law in place as is.
“I think that will be up to the Legislature because it is an existing law. And there are plenty of states who don’t have a right to shelter law that are also getting inundated with individuals coming here. So I think we’ll see going forward,” Driscoll answered.
A US Department of Homeland Security team was in Massachusetts this week for a twoday visit, prompted by the ongoing emergency shelter crisis, with Healey’s team viewing it as an opportunity to show federal officials the strain that the shelter crisis is causing.
A map released by the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities shows the geographic distribution of migrants and homeless families staying in emergency assistance shelters, including many communities that are not housing any families.
Last week, Housing Secretary Ed Augustus told business officials that Massachusetts had the largest number of families in shelters in the history of the state’s right-to-shelter law.
“It is an important responsibility that we have,” he said. “It’s the kind of state that we want to be, that we don’t allow pregnant moms and children to be left unsheltered. But that responsibility is very heavy when you’re talking about the volume of folks that are coming through that safety net system.”
The situation “gets more challenging,” he said, because families can’t move quickly through the shelter system and into permanent housing when there is a 1.6 percent vacancy rate, the lowest of the 50 states. In a “healthy ecosystem,” that rate should be in the 4 to 5 percent range.