Vote on Mass. shelter stay limit raises concern for families
As the state burns through the hundreds of millions already set aside to fund Massachusetts’ emergency shelter system, the state Senate late Thursday voted to inject millions more into the system, and limit the amount of time homeless families, including migrants, can stay.
The 32-8 vote, which happened shortly after 9 p.m. Thursday night, sets the stage for what will likely be a contentious debate with the House, which passed its own version earlier this month.
The proposal is part of a spending bill meant to buoy the strained shelter system through the end of the fiscal year, and help fund it into 2025. While the Senate proposal diverges from the House’s bill on some key details, both chambers are now united behind the concept of restricting, for the first time since the inception of Massachusetts’ right-to-shelter law, how long the state should provide a place to sleep for homeless families.
Senate budget chief Michael Rodrigues called the crisis “unprecedented,” and said the bill addresses “the necessity of continuing to proactively respond swiftly and decisively.”
The proposal would limit the maximum stay for most homeless families to nine consecutive months, but allows for multiple 90-day extensions for certain individuals such as veterans, singles parent of children with a disability, or people who have made progress toward receiving a permit to work.
It would also allow the goverSenators nor the spend the roughly $850 million left in a state escrow account that contains the remnants of last year’s multibilliondollar surplus.
The Senate’s plan gives the administration the leeway to draw down $75 million from the escrow fund every month for the remainder of the fiscal year, which ends in June. Starting in fiscal year 2025, the monthly allowance would go down to $65 million and drop by $10 million every three months through June 2025.
House lawmakers took a more targeted approach in their version of the bill, setting aside $245 million in surplus revenues to pay for shelter costs through the fiscal year, which ends July 1.
Homeless advocates say that while passing the funding is urgent, the move toward limiting time spent in shelter signals is still “concerning.” The state should instead focus on being more flexible around shelter exits while removing bureaucratic barriers for families to access resources like rental assistance.
Lawmakers should also be listening to the voices of homeless families, not just advocates who are able to come to Beacon Hill, said Andrea Park, a staff attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute.
“The problem with arbitrary deadlines is that every family is going to have a different situation,” Park said. “We need to get this done because we need the money in the short term, but these are changes to the system, so we need to be talking about that in a more open and public way.”
Senators on Thursday also rejected a slate of amendments to the bill, including amendments that would place shelters in “geographically diverse areas” as well as “areas with diverse median incomes.” A Globe analysis of state data found that few wealthy communities are hosting emergency shelters for homeless and migrant families while the bulk are in middle-income cities and towns.
adopted other changes, including one amendment that would allow women who recently gave birth to extend their shelter stay and another that would require a statewide review of safety procedures at emergency shelters.
The amendment came in the wake of a Haitian migrant’s arrest in the alleged rape of a migrant teenager in a Rockland shelter last week, and would charge a special commission with “reviewing safety practices and procedures at emergency shelters established under the emergency housing assistance program, including hotels and motels used for emergency shelter and overflow emergency shelter sites.”
The bill comes as political tensions over the migrant crisis are mounting.
In some cases, residents and local officials in communities with shelters have greeted the new arrivals with mistrust, or even outright hate, with some raising concerns that new arrivals would commit crimes in the surrounding community.
The Rockland arrest rippled through the political world, thrusting Massachusetts into the national spotlight, and handing anti-immigrant forces a potential talking point. Former president Donald Trump, for example, seized on it in a campaign release, labeling it as evidence that President Biden’s “border crisis has created a tragic surge in violent crime.”
In February, Taunton’s building commissioner sued a hotel operator for not paying fines related to the number of migrants being housed there, according to a complaint filed in Bristol Superior Court.
As of Wednesday, Massachusetts was providing housing for 7,514 families in its emergency shelter system, including nearly 3,900 in hotels or motels. Roughly half of the families in the system — not counting hundreds more on a wait list — entered the United States as migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers, according to state data.
The Senate legislation differs in many ways from the House’s proposal.
Unlike the Senate, the House proposal provided no money for the shelter system beyond the current fiscal year. And while the Senate’s proposal also includes language to make pandemic-era outdoor dining permanent, which the House passed, it would not allow restaurants to continue selling alcoholic drinks to go.
Until recently, homeless families were guaranteed a roof over their heads under a decades-old law in Massachusetts, the only statewide so-called right-to-shelter requirement in the United States. New York City, which has a similar shelter policy, imposes more stringent limits on how long newly arrived migrants may stay in emergency shelters: There, families with children are allowed to stay in shelters for a maximum of 60 days, though there are efforts to repeal that policy.