We can help families seeking shelter — if we choose to
We are woefully bereft of affordable housing in this state, primarily because it has not been a high enough priority for government at any level.
This is all about choices.
Massachusetts has chosen to be a right to shelter state. But if we choose to be a true one, withholding emergency shelter from homeless families because they’re not quite poor enough or virtuous enough or expert enough to qualify won’t cut it.
For all its progressivism, this state harbors some judgy, Victorian-era values when it comes to its unluckiest residents. Hundreds of families each year are officially denied in their quest for emergency shelter. Hundreds more give up, defeated even before they complete applications for the temporary housing — housing which, let us be clear, no family would choose if it had other viable options.
Put Stacey and her 12-year-old daughter in the latter category. Evicted and living in hotels, Stacey eventually gave up on her first application for emergency shelter after she and her housing advocate spent weeks working to convince the state that a meager inheritance was long gone, and proving that the family’s current situation was untenable. Only after being thrown out of a second hotel a year later did she and her daughter try again. With help from a tireless advocate, they were finally approved for emergency assistance in the fall, and are now living in a shelter in Danvers.
Tami Mitchell and her three teenage grandchildren, paying by the month to live in a hotel room nearby, were denied emergency shelter because the state has decreed that, though they are poor, they are not poor enough. If they can keep up with the rent, they will be living in that single, crowded room until one of their many applications for affordable housing comes through.
Evicted from her Revere apartment and living for months in a hotel she could not afford, Erica Buckley and her two children were denied shelter because she could not bring herself to spend down her $13,000 retirement account, her hope for the future. Only af
being homeless made it impossible for her to work — or to access her 401k — did she qualify for emergency assistance. She, too, is on a long waitlist for affordable housing, hoping for release soon from the confinement and restrictions of the Peabody shelter where she now lives with her children.
Tina Farrer, Carl Spinks, and their eight children were denied shelter — and barred from it for three years — because the state wrongly decided the parents were to blame for their eviction from a subsidized apartment in Dorchester. For more than two months, the family of 10 has been crowded into the subsidized, one-bedroom apartment of a generous neighbor — who could himself be evicted for letting them stay there. A few weeks ago, the state finally reconsidered their application and approved them for emergency shelter. Farrer is hoping to use her housing voucher to lease an apartment in Lynn instead, but that process has been dragging on for weeks.
These four families lay bare the maddening inadequacies of our emergency shelter system — inadequacies that were bedeviling desperate applicants long before a surge of migrants from the south exceeded our capacity to house people. It may seem to some that the state is prioritizing these immigrants, who are here legally, over longtime residents. But the migrants arrive with nothing, and so can easily meet the stringent requirements of the Commonwealth’s nation-leading right to shelter law. And because they are new here, they have none of the histories, mistakes, and misunderstandings that trip up other homeless families seeking somewhere to sleep.
The recent arrivals have helped put an immense strain on the system, but that system was well and truly broken to begin with.
We can fix it, if we choose to, starting with the high hurdles families must clear to qualify for emergency shelter. No homeless family should need an advocate or attorney to argue their case, but the application process is so complicated and demanding that sometimes, only an expert can find a way through it. For families lucky enough to become their clients, overworked advocates at Greater Boston Legal Services, Family Promise North Shore Boston and other nonprofits help gather up the reams of documents and granular histories the state requires. Too often, whether or not a family is approved for shelter comes down to how busy or well-trained their particular state housing coordinator is, and these days, those coordinators are very busy indeed. Sometimes, it seems like their priority is to hold the door against new recipients, rather than to keep homeless families from the street.
Here, at least, help is at hand. The Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities, which runs the shelter system, is in the process of simplifying the application process and making it friendlier to families, said housing secretary Ed Augustus. He has promised better training for overburdened housing coordinators, and more uniform outcomes. If that happens, fewer applicants like Stacey, struggling at the lowest point in their lives, will give up on seeking the help that is their right.
But even then, they will still face those absurdly high barriers to entry.
Here, in one of the most expensive states in the country for housing, the income cutoffs to qualify for shelter are laughable. Right now, families are barred if their income exceeds 115 percent of the federal poverty level — $2,875 a month for a family of four. But the fair market rent for a three bedroom home in Essex County is $3,418 per month, according to federal guidelines. And rent that costs more than 30 percent of a family’s income is considered unaffordable.
On top of that, it is an owners’ market, where demand for housing is so high that landlords often insist tenants earn three times the rent each month.
“Three times the rent, who has that kind of money?” asked Tami Mitchell, who spends all day scouring listings for an apartment her family can afford.
It makes no sense that Mitchell’s family of four — including a granddaughter with autism and a severe seizure disorder — is shut out of emergency shelter because the family’s disability checks add up to $3,776 per month. At the very least, state legislators should do what homeless advocates have long been asking for and raise the income limit to 200 percent of federal poverty guidelines, which would bring the cutoff to $5,000 per month for families like Tami’s. That still wouldn’t reflect the true cost of housing in this state’s out-of-control housing market, but it would be a start.
In addition to raising the income limits, we can choose to do away entirely with the rule that bars families from shelter if they have more than $5,000 in assets. That rule requires applicants like Erica Buckley to liquidate savings or insurance policies that might help support them and their children once they get back on their feet. There is no asset limit for most other forms of housing assistance in this state, or for cash assistance. The state could do away with the asset rule right now if it chose, say experts on the state’s housing laws. State Representative Marjorie Decker has tried to do it with legislation, so far without success.
But the cruelest rule keeping homeless families from emergency shelter is the one barring families the state blames from their own evictions from subsidized housing. Because she stopped paying rent on her family’s unter livable Section 8 apartment, the state deemed Tina Farrer and her husband responsible for their own plight, and found the couple and their eight kids ineligible for emergency shelter — not just now, but for the next three years. With help from a pro bono attorney, they convinced the state they were not, in fact, at fault. But even if they had been, no parent’s mistake can justify leaving their child on the street. No eviction, for whatever reason, should prevent a homeless family from finding refuge in a state that claims to care about them. Visiting the supposed sins of the parents upon their children is, and will always be, unconscionable public policy.
Of course, lowering barriers to entry would mean bringing more families into the emergency shelter system. With that system currently housing more than 7,500 families and at its breaking point, there is little appetite for that on Beacon Hill.
“It is a very challenging time to talk about making it easier to get into the system, given that we have a cap on the system and we’re struggling to do right by the families that we do have,” Augustus said.
That seems reasonable, until you remember that the consequences of that choice are more parents sleeping with their kids in cars, living in unaffordable hotel rooms, staying with abusers and in other unsafe situations, imperiling their families’ health and their futures because for them, the state’s right to shelter is no right at all.
Their predicaments are the utterly foreseeable result of other people’s choices. The shelter crisis sprang from the same decisions that wrought the state’s housing crisis — a crisis that drove a surge in emergency shelter applications well before migrants began arriving here.
We are woefully bereft of affordable housing in this state, primarily because, for decades, it has not been a high enough priority for government at any level. Opposition to denser, more affordable housing in cities and towns across the state has produced a huge shortage for those on all incomes, but especially for our least lucky residents – a shortfall approaching 200,000 affordable homes.
In recent years, the state has pushed reluctant cities and towns to build more, and denser, housing. Governor Maura Healey has proposed a $4 billion housing bond bill that would help drive the construction of new housing, producing some 40,000 new homes (half of them affordable), and up the pressure on cities and towns to allow more construction. Some municipal governments have recently passed their own measures expanding housing, though it’s unclear how much of that will be for those on very low incomes.
That is all a start, but the relief that will come from dramatically expanding housing supply is years off, too far away to help homeless families hurting right now.
In the shorter term, we can keep more of them from becoming homeless in the first place, by preventing the lifealtering evictions that drive so many from their apartments, affordable and otherwise, and thwart their attempts to rehouse themselves.
“Who is going to want to rent to someone with multiple evictions,” said Stacey, who has had two, and asked that her last name be withheld to protect her daughter’s privacy. “Once you’re here, there’s really no way to climb out.”
Saving others from that fate means further expanding state rental assistance programs designed to help those struggling to pay rent, an expansion on which both the legislature and Augustus have made a start, but have a ways to go. It means better financial incentives for landlords willing to rent to families with subsidies, and more enforcement against those who discriminate against them. It means more supportive housing for parents who struggle with daily life, let alone with navigating the morass that is public assistance.
It also means making sure tenants dragged into court to face eviction hearings — almost all of whom do so without legal representation — fully understand the stakes, and have access to attorneys who can help resolve their cases in ways that won’t ruin their lives.
“The judge didn’t even let me speak,” said Erica Buckley, who had no attorney at the Chelsea District Court hearing that made her family homeless.
And in the event that a family is evicted, it means sealing off their records so that prospective landlords cannot hold against them evictions that were not their fault, or which happened long ago. Four times since she moved her family into that one-bedroom apartment in Dorchester, Tina Farrer thought she had found a new apartment for them, but every one of them was a dead end, and she knows why.
“That eviction is destroying every chance we have,” she said.
Healey’s housing bill, yet to be taken up by the legislature, includes measures to seal some eviction records, though they wouldn’t help Farrer or Stacey right now.
Preventing more evictions costs money, of course. But bolstering supports for vulnerable families would still be way cheaper than providing them with emergency shelter. Families who exited shelter in the last three months of 2022 stayed an average of 428 days, at an average cost to the state of $65,423. For some families, costs exceeded $400,000. And, given the shelter system’s recent expansion, those numbers will surely climb higher.
The right thing to do is also the fiscally responsible thing. But right should be reason enough in a right to shelter state.
A homeless child is a homeless child. Every single one is a failure — and a choice.
All we have to do is stop making it.