Judge weighs blocking shelter system cap amid crush of families
A state judge is poised to rule on the Healey administration’s effort to limit the number of homeless families allowed in the state’s emergency shelter program, which has been overwhelmed by a surge of migrants amid an escalating housing crisis.
Lawyers for Civil Rights, a Bostonbased advocacy group, last week sued the state and asked a judge to block Governor Maura Healey’s plan to set a cap on the emergency shelter system, which would create a waiting list for those who have no other place to go.
The group, on behalf of three migrant families, is seeking a temporary restraining order to prevent the state from implementing the new limit, which officials have capped at 7,500 families.
Lawyers focused on a piece of a state law that requires the state’s housing agency to tell the Legislature 90 days before it changes the shelter system’s rules, something the Healey administration did not do.
“This is like the fire department creating a waitlist for families with ongoing house fires,” attorney Jacob Love said during a hearing in Suffolk Superior Court on Tuesday.
Judge Debra A. Squires-Lee said she would likely issue a decision by Wednesday.
Hours before the afternoon hearing, the Healey administration filed proposed regulations that laid out how state officials plan to place a cap on the number of families in the emergency shelter system. They also would allow state officials, with 30 days notice, to cut off how long a family could stay in a shelter — which itself is a step the state has never taken since adopting its socalled right to shelter law 40 years ago.
The regulations did not spell out how tight of a limit the state could seek. But Kelly Turley, associate director at Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless, said families currently are staying more than a year on average in shelter.
“We know that that’s too long in terms of what the state’s responsibility is to help families successfully exit into long-term, affordable housing,” she said. “But to put an artificial cap and sending families back into homelessness without the opportunity to stay in shelter or secure alternative resources is just cruel.”
The Healey administration on Tuesday also filed an emergency declaration, saying that the current need to expand “is unsustainable.” The declaration would last 120 days — or until Feb. 28 — but can be extended if the housing secretary determines the state can’t meet the demand.
“The Commonwealth does not have enough space, service providers, or funds to safely expand shelter capacity any longer,” Housing Secretary Edward M. Augustus wrote in the declaration.
For decades, homeless families have been guaranteed a roof over their heads under a 1980sera law in Massachusetts, the only state in the country with a so-called right-to-shelter requirement.
Healey has said she is not seeking to end the right-to-shelter law, but rather is acknowledging the state is reaching its capacity to shelter families with the resources appropriated by the Legislature. State officials have said they intend to begin pushing families who are seeking shelter to a waiting list once the system reaches 7,500 families, which they warned could happen “imminently.”
As of Tuesday, there were 7,389 families in the system, more than half of whom were in state-funded hotels or motels. During the hearing, Squires-Lee repeatedly pressed the state’s attorneys about when, exactly, the state’s current funding would run out.
Kimberly Ann Parr, an assistant attorney general representing the administration, said she could not provide a exact date, but said the state would need at least another $210 million — on top of the $325 million the state originally budgeted — to serve the families currently in the system through the end of the fiscal year.
Healey has asked the Legislature to provide up to $250 million more of state money, warning that with an “unlimited rate of shelter expansion,” the state would exhaust its current budget by mid-January, or just halfway through the budget cycle. By capping the number of families in the system, her office estimated it could extend the current funding by months, though it has not provided an exact timeline.
Parr also cautioned the judge against granting the injunction and stopping the state from setting a cap, even temporarily, warning that the system is taking on up to 50 new families each day.
“It keeps going up and up and up,” Parr said. “It’s unrelenting.”
In a radio interview earlier Tuesday, Healey said the state also needs more funding and aid from the federal government to address what she called a “federal problem.”
“My heart aches for mums and dads out there, particularly who have kids and they don’t have a roof over their head. Of course I’m worried about that,” Healey said during a WBUR “Radio Boston” appearance. “I’m also trying to deal with a situation . . . that I don’t think any advocate had predicted or seen before — and that was the arrival of 40 or 50 families a day from the border into Massachusetts, families seeking housing.”
But Healey administration officials have also made a legal argument for the new cap. They’ve argued that not only was the right-to-shelter mandate set during a different era, the current statute makes it “subject to appropriation” — in other words, the state is required to follow it only as long as it has enough funding.
Democratic legislative leaders have yet to act on Healey’s request for the $250 million nearly seven weeks later.
Should Healey’s cap take effect, it would usher in major changes for migrant and homeless families who have no other place to go.
State officials said they would create a new layer of screening for those applying for emergency shelter, in which health care providers will perform a “medical assessment” of families to determine who will be given priority for shelter, according to a copy of the presentation that officials provided to advocacy groups.
Families with infants under 9 months and pregnant women in their third trimester will be among those prioritized for shelter, while those with medication that needs to be refrigerated could also move up in line, according to homeless and legal advocates briefed on the state’s plans. Those who are effectively screened out will then land on the new waiting list, though it’s unclear how long they could idle there.
At a rally at the State House Tuesday, Representative Marjorie Decker said she has written to Healey, asking her not to end the right-to-shelter policy. The Cambridge Democrat said “being unhoused as a child is a health crisis” of its own.
“Children will continue to be unsafe,” she said. “They will continue to be in places that are not meant for human habitation, period. And that’s not a solution.”
The plan has also sown anxiety among migrant and homeless families and the advocacy groups who work with them.
Iliana Reyes, who moved with her three children from the Dominican Republic to Boston, has lived in a family shelter run by nonprofit Heading Home for four years.
“We need the resources for the families in the state who do not have anywhere to go,” Reyes, 35, said in Spanish at a rally at the State House Tuesday. “It is unacceptable to be waiting in the cold.”