This is no solution

This one goes out to House Speaker Ron Mariano, and anybody else who is apparently clueless about what it’s actually like to live in an emergency shelter in Massachusetts.

To put it plainly: It sucks.

Nobody would choose to live this way. Most everybody who enters the shelter system — especially those in hotels and motels — is desperate to get out of it. Even the best-run large shelters are tense, noisy, stressful places. They’re full of people at the end of their ropes, people battling mental illness, trauma, poverty, and lost hopes — strangers with no choice but to live side by side.

“I wish every day I could get out of here,” said Erica Buckley, who is living in a hotel in Peabody with her two children, ages 3 and 14. “If I could only find an apartment that would take me, I would have got up and left already.”

I wrote about Buckley in December, as part of a series on families who needed emergency shelter but couldn’t qualify for it because of gaping holes in the state’s right-to-shelter law. She and her kids were living in expensive hotel rooms after having been wrongly evicted from an apartment in Revere. For months, she was denied emergency shelter because she had a meager retirement account and could not bring herself to spend it down to qualify for assistance. She was finally placed after those savings became inaccessible.

She is beyond grateful the state has provided a roof over her family’s head. But every day in a shelter is a struggle. The three of them live in one small room. There is no privacy for her teenage son, and potty-training her daughter is impossible. Their mini-fridge is full of Buckley’s diabetes medication, so there’s no room to store anything else. Meals are provided, but the kids mostly eat microwave food. They live on busy Route 1, with no place nearby to get fresh air or exercise. Her boy is cut off from his friends. All of their movements are circumscribed: There is a 10 p.m. curfew and strict rules about noise and using the common areas.

“It’s basically like I am a teenager all over again,” she said. “I’m being babysat.”

She is working again, as a dispatcher for The Ride. She would rent a place, except the things that put her in shelter in the first place are the same things that are making it impossible for her to get out of it: Her eviction case is a turn-off for landlords, who are charging ridiculous rents and demanding tenants earn higher wages than Buckley could dream of.

And now Mariano’s House has approved a measure that would kick families like Buckley’s out of emergency shelter after 9 months, or 12 months if they fulfill certain requirements.

They approved the temporary measure because the shelter system is impossibly strained due to an influx of migrants and a wave of post-pandemic evictions. There are about 7,500 families currently in shelters and hundreds more waiting to get in. It is costing the state $1 billion per year, at a moment when revenues are dropping. Mariano says the state has to cut some families off to prevent the entire system from tanking.

“It isn’t fair for these people to stay there for as long as they want,” he said on Tuesday.

As long as they want? Can Mariano really be that unaware of what we’re dealing with here?

Emergency shelter isn’t some all-inclusive resort. Families stay longer than any of us, and especially they, would like, not because they’re living the high life, but because they have no other choices.

So how is this going to work exactly? Are the overworked, underpaid shelter staff serving these families suddenly going to find more time to connect them with services and housing? Is a massive building boom underway that will create thousands of affordable homes within the year for families working low-wage jobs, or unable to work at all?

Right now, families who leave shelters are barred from re-entering them for 12 months. So it’s possible those exiting the shelters and landing back on the street will have to stay there.

This much should be evident to Mariano and the rest: Booting families prematurely will do severe — and costly — damage to many of them.

We have to find a way forward. But this cannot be it.