A cold welcome
What the heck happens now?
Governor Maura Healey all but threw up a white flag on Monday with her announcement that, after providing emergency shelter to some 23,000 people, the state system is near capacity and will no longer guarantee housing for homeless families — half of them migrants fleeing Haiti and other broken places. Qualified families will go on a waitlist, instead, with those in the most dire need at the top.
This is a tragic development, and possibly an unlawful one: This state’s right-toshelter law requires that those who qualify for shelter be given it. But the shelter system has almost reached Healey’s new cap of 7,500 families. And even if there were mountains of money available to further expand it, it’s unclear where the thousands more families expected to need help in coming months would go, given our crushing housing shortage.
Unlike some other states, ours has welcomed these new arrivals with compassion and gratitude. Isolated neo-Nazi demonstrations notwithstanding, most of us want to help. But some shelter providers are crying uncle.
“We welcome the decision,” said Mark DeJoie, CEO of Centerboard, a North Shore nonprofit currently sheltering 10 percent of the close to 7,000 families in the system, including in converted dorms at Salem State University. “There is no place to put these folks.”
DeJoie can’t expand his operation to meet the demand because he and other providers are competing for rental housing with everybody else.
The housing shortage means longtime Massachusetts residents are staying in emergency shelters for much longer: They used to be out and into apartments in seven to nine months, but now it’s close to two years. Those who need the federal work authorizations — for which Healey has been begging — will stay longer.
“They are not trying to take from people,” he said. “They’re trying to go to work and provide for their families.”
So where are the folks who are shut out of the emergency shelter system going to go? To the same places as the thousands of families already turned away: They’ll doubleand triple-up with other families; they’ll stay in places not fit for human habitation; they’ll remain in abusive situations; they’ll luck into one of the small number of shelters at nonprofits and in faith communities that open their doors.
“It is a misconception that the right to shelter in Massachusetts applies to all families experiencing homelessness,” said Kelly Turley, associate director of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless. She provided figures from the first quarter of fiscal 2023 showing that, of 3,153 applications for emergency shelter, only 803 entered the system. Admission is narrowly limited: For example, a family of three with an income of $25,000 per year earns too much to qualify. Now they will have even more company. “For families who need shelter tonight or tomorrow ... it will be like the right to shelter doesn’t exist,” Turley said.
Though she and other critics of Healey’s decision to close the door to further admissions “acknowledge the state has never seen numbers like this,” Turley said, they have also been advocating for years for better rental assistance and other policies that would help prevent homelessness in the first place.
Like so many catastrophes — climate change and our disastrous transit system come to mind — this one has been long in the making, born of a refusal to think beyond the current crisis, or the next election.
As this week’s searing Spotlight story shows, our housing crisis is the result of many decades of short-sighted decisions, made to keep the unluckiest of us away from those who saw to their own needs then pulled up the ladder.
Housing reforms under former governor Charlie Baker, and now the changes proposed in Healey’s $4 billion housing bond bill, will be long-overdue correctives to those decisions, eventually expanding the state’s housing supply. But that won’t come soon enough for the folks who will keep walking into the Immigrant Family Service Institute in Mattapan, new arrivals from Haiti who need emergency shelter right away.
“After all they’ve gone through, the worst we can do is let them stay in the streets,” said Dr. Geralde Gabeau, who heads the center. “The cold is coming. We have to find ways to make sure we are ready for these families.”
If we aren’t, who are we?