The cost of emergency shelter has become unsustainable. Some caps may be warranted.
Massachusetts’ emergency shelter system is, on its current trajectory, unsustainable. Governor Maura Healey’s administration estimates that the state will spend nearly $1 billion this year and a similar amount next year on emergency shelter.
And the system is, literally, overflowing. The governor imposed a cap of 7,500 families. As of March 7, there were 7,490 families enrolled, split between traditional shelters and state-contracted hotels and motels. According to a spokesperson for the Executive Office of Housing and Liveable Communities, an additional approximately 370 families are staying in overflow sites, often no more than cots in a large room without sufficient bathroom facilities or showers.
The cause of the surge is the huge number of foreign migrants who have arrived in Massachusetts over the past year. Many of them are legally prohibited from working to support themselves. But they still need a place to live, so many have ended up in the emergency shelter system.
How long the flow of migrants continues is anyone’s guess — and well outside the state government’s control. What the state can do is adopt some reforms to limit the program’s costs before it drains resources from other priorities.
Massachusetts has one of the country’s most generous emergency shelter systems, due to a rightto-shelter law that requires the state to offer shelter to homeless families and pregnant women. It has not traditionally placed a limit on how long families could stay in shelters. But to rein in the costs, the House on Wednesday passed a bill that would do just that.
Time limits may sound coldhearted, but such rules are part of the shelter system in many states. But any limits need to be imposed in a humane way, which means providing intensive services to help families find housing and jobs, and offering a path to stay longer for those in the most dire need.
Additionally, policy makers have to be realistic about how little the House-approved cap would do, on its own, to solve the current challenge. Because it would take months before it started to take effect, the cap does nothing to address the immediate short-term problem of an overflowing shelter system. Nor does it affect the long-term problem of unaffordable housing. Massachusetts needs more subsidized housing so that there is actually a place for people to go after leaving the shelter — but that, clearly, is a long-term project.
In the near term, the House bill includes $245 million to fund emergency shelters through the end of the fiscal year in June, including $10 million for new workforce training programs; $3 million for family welcome centers, which work with new migrants; and another $3 million split between staffing, resettlement agencies, and Head Start, which offers child-care-related services.
The most headline-grabbing part of the bill would cap the length of shelter stays at nine or 12 months. This would be a big shift, since the average length of stay between October and December 2023, the latest data available, was 428 days, about 14 months.
However, even if the policy is adopted, it would be a long time before anyone was evicted.
In the current bill language, the length of stay is measured starting April 1, regardless of how long a family was in shelter before then. (That date could get delayed if the Senate doesn’t pass the bill immediately.) While families could be evicted after nine months, on Jan. 1, 2025, the categories of people the legislation allows to stay for 12 months are broad: anyone who is working or in a job training program, veterans, those at risk of domestic violence, or anyone who cannot participate in workforce training because of pregnancy, disability, or certain caregiving responsibilities.
The House, during a floor debate, also adopted an amendment prohibiting more than 150 people from losing benefits per week. The cap would expire July 1 unless the Legislature reenacts it, and it would be lifted should system capacity no longer be a problem.
Time limits need to be imposed in a humane way, which means providing intensive services to help families find housing and jobs, and offering a path to stay longer for those in the most dire need.
Establishing a reasonable time limit for shelter stays during the current crisis makes some sense, since shelters were never intended as multiyear housing. In its current overloaded state, new families are consistently waiting for shelter beds to open up.
While some states have adopted stay limits specifically for migrants, Massachusetts’ Democratic policy makers have so far declined to adopt different policies for long-term residents and new arrivals. House Ways and Means Chair Aaron Michlewitz said the House rejected proposals for a residency requirement partly because of concerns about a court challenge.
But any cap must be paired with better social services aimed at helping families find housing. This can mean helping migrants apply for work authorization or offering job training. Under the House proposal, employers would be incentivized with a tax credit to offer job training. Many people probably need help obtaining housing vouchers or finding available subsidized apartments. None of this will be easy, but there are nonprofits already doing this work.
The House bill also has a provision letting people who are about to be evicted reapply for shelter, with priority given to certain vulnerable populations, like families with babies or people with serious medical conditions. Ensuring a smooth reapplication process that takes into account families’ individual circumstances will be key to instituting more checks and balances in the system while ensuring that families are not thrown out to sleep in cars or at Logan Airport.
Whether the policy will be adopted is uncertain. Senate President Karen Spilka hasn’t taken a public stance on shelter limits. Healey’s spokesperson, Karissa Hand, said the administration “is open” to limiting shelter stays. “This is intended to be a temporary, emergency option and we are facing severe capacity concerns due to federal inaction on immigration reform,” Hand said.
The bigger problem is that, short of congressional action giving more money to states for sheltering migrants, no one seems to have an effective short-term solution for solving the shelter crisis.
In the long term, Congress must pass effective immigration reform. Massachusetts must resolve its housing crisis. Lawmakers have acted to encourage housing production, including passing the MBTA Communities Act. Ensuring communities are building more housing, including units set aside for low-income people, will need to be part of any solution.
As Andrea Park, director of community driven advocacy at Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, points out, “The fact that we’ve seen the average stay get longer over the last 10 years isn’t a shelter problem; it’s a housing problem.”