Healey to open shelter in former Cambridge courthouse

Overnight facility will be for up to 70 homeless, migrant families

Governor Maura Healey’s administration plans to open an overnight shelter for dozens of homeless and migrant families in a former courthouse in Cambridge on Friday, state officials said, expanding the options for those waiting for a place in the state’s overwhelmed emergency shelter program.

Healey faces a Dec. 31 deadline, set by the Legislature, to open one or more overnight shelters, using up to $50 million lawmakers included in multibillion-dollar spending bill Healey signed this month. Her administration had for weeks operated a shelter site inside the state’s transportation building in Boston before officials closed it in early December. The state then opened a larger overflow site at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy.

The state-owned, 150-year-old building in East Cambridge currently houses a Middlesex County Registry of Deeds office, and until 2020, was home to a probate and family court, state officials said. The new shelter site is expected to house up to 70 families during the evening and overnight hours, and will be equipped with cots and what officials described as “limited amenities.”

The site is designed to ensure families have a “warm and safe place to stay overnight until an [emergency] shelter unit becomes available,” L. Scott Rice, the state’s emergency assistance director, said in a statement.

“We’re grateful for the partnership of the City of Cambridge and [the site] provider AMI, and we encourage community organizations to reach out to us with any daytime programs and resources they are able to provide to families in need,” Rice said.

Lawmakers required that Healey stand up the overflow sites after Healey began limiting how many people the shelter system could house. The firstterm Democrat created a 7,500-family cap and said the state could no longer guarantee families housing after decades of guaranteeing shelter under Massachusetts’ unique right-to-shelter law.

Massachusetts House leaders had pushed to require Healey open overflow sites after criticizing administration officials for not having a “real plan” for housing families with no other options.

Beyond its own sites, the state also seeded the United Way of Massachusetts Bay with $5 million that it could spread to faith-based groups and other local organizations to set up overnight shelter for families on the waiting list. So far, the United Way has awarded money for three sites — one in greater Boston and two in the north central region of the state — that together can serve anywhere from 50 to 57 families total, according to state officials.

Combined with the overflow shelter

the state set up in Quincy and the other it’s now planning in Cambridge, the Healey administration has created capacity for roughly 180 families. As of Wednesday, there were 357 families on the waitlist, raising the possibility that there are some who were deemed eligible for shelter by the state but didn’t have a place to go.

Kevin Connor, a spokesperson for Healey’s housing office, said the state is still exploring other options for overflow shelters. The Boston Herald first reported the state’s plans to use the Cambridge site.

The Healey administration in the last two weeks contacted Secretary of State William F. Galvin’s office, which oversees the registry of deeds, to gauge whether the former courthouse building could be used for a shelter, said Deb O’Malley, a Galvin spokesperson.

The secretary’s office has maintained the building on Cambridge Street since the probate and family court shifted to a new site in Woburn early in the COVID-19 pandemic. But O’Malley said plumbing and other infrastructure in large swaths of the building had gone unused for years, given the deeds office only uses a portion of the site.

She said city inspectors and fire officials planned to do a walk-through of the site Thursday afternoon, and that the state could begin setting up the site as early as Friday, if the “city signs off on it.”

“Most of the building has no [working] plumbing right now,” she said. “Nobody has been using it. And it hasn’t been cleaned frequently.”

The building was first built in 1870, according to city records. State officials said the building on Thursday was undergoing deep cleaning and other work, including efforts to ensure there were physical divisions between the shelter space and the area accessible to members of the public who need to visit the registry of deeds during the day.

The Healey administration is in the midst of consolidating other shelters for homeless and migrant families into hotels fully dedicated to providing emergency shelter.

On Monday night, state officials also announced a proposal to dip into the state’s surplus account to help cover the mounting costs brought on by the shelter system, projecting it will need $224 million more this fiscal year and $915 million in the next.

The Healey administration estimated that it will spend $932 million on costs related to the shelter system this fiscal year. That’s nearly triple the $325 million the state initially budgeted for family shelters.

Samantha J. Gross of the Globe Staff contributed to this report. Matt Stout can be reached at matt.stout@globe.com.