Individual migrants fill Boston’s shelters
City-run, nonprofit facilities above capacity amid a surge in men
When Mamadou Diallo arrived at Logan Airport in January, he didn’t know a single person in Boston.
The 28-year-old, originally from the West African country of Guinea, had heard the city had resources to help migrants like himself get on their feet.
“I came here for a better future, better opportunities,” Diallo told the Globe through a translator, adding he wants to find a job so he can send money home to his parents and five siblings. But with no connections and nowhere to stay, he’s spent the past two months sleeping at the Pine Street Inn men’s shelter.
And he’s not the only one. While the headlines and political debate have focused on the wave of immigrant families, and the resultant strain on overwhelmed state-run shelters, individual migrants are exacting a similar toll on the system of city-run and nonprofit shelters in Boston.
According to Boston officials, individual migrants now make up 25 percent to 30 percent of the people staying in city shelters, most of whom are men, and their added numbers have filled these shelters well beyond their capacity amid the ongoing housing crisis.
Currently, about 475 to 500 men are staying at the city-run shelter on Southampton Street every night, which has a capacity for 380, including in overflow spaces, according to the Boston Public Health Commission. To accommodate the extra residents, staff each night place mats on any available floor space that wouldn’t pose a fire hazard, the Globe observed on a recent tour of the facility. Even then, dozens end up spending the night upright in hard plas
tic chairs in the facility’s cafeteria.
Boston shelters run by various nonprofit groups are similarly overwhelmed.
“Every winter we add additional overflow capacity, and those beds have all been full since we added them,” said Lyndia Downie, executive director of the more than 50-year-old nonprofit Pine Street Inn, which operates four shelters in the Boston area.
At Pine Street Inn’s shelter for men on Harrison Avenue, she said individual migrants probably comprise close to 50 percent of its residents. To accommodate the higher numbers, shelter staff have converted rows of cots in the third-floor dormitory into bunk beds, and moved them closer together.
About 300 residents sleep in beds in the facility’s three floors of dorms. Another 80 to 100 sleep on cots or mats in the cafeteria, seating area, and lobby.
Part of the problem is that individual migrants are staying longer in shelters, said Gregory Grays-Thomas, director of the homeless services bureau at the Boston Public Health Commission. Though shelters first noticed an influx of migrants during the summer of 2022, city officials say many back then were able to move on relatively quickly, with the help of family and community resources. Today, most of the migrants, many of whom are Haitian, don’t have a ready place to go next and need much more intensive support, he said.
Case managers working at both city and nonprofit shelters help residents with getting identification documents, admission to substance abuse treatment programs, or applying for rental assistance or jobs. But providing this level of support to migrants can be significantly more complicated than to other homeless individuals, especially because many of these new arrivals, such as Diallo, need help navigating the country’s complex immigration system, and face language barriers.
“For my future, I want to work, to have a happy life here,” said Diallo, who landed at Pine Street Inn thanks to a sympathetic American woman who offered him help at the airport, and paid his fare to the shelter. But he said that while he has legal status, he does not have permission to work. He’s looking for an immigration attorney to take on his case, and help him complete that paperwork.
Though city officials are closely collaborating with shelter providers and a network of nonprofits to connect migrants with support services, establishing those systems takes time.
“For staff who are amazing and work really hard at this, it’s a whole new group that they have to learn,” said Downie. “If we had known this was going to happen, we would have been doing this six months ago.”
While the state has had to appropriate hundreds of millions of dollars for the emergency shelter system due to the ongoing crisis, the city has not yet experienced a similar strain on its budget. Over the past two fiscal years, Boston has allocated $4.6 million of city and federal funds to pay for overflow shelter beds and emergency housing services as part of its migrant response, and hired staff to help address the issue, officials said.
Monique Tú Nguyen, executive director of the Mayor’s Office for Immigrant Advancement, said her department has recently hired a project manager and two rapid response liaisons, who are working on developing a case management model for migrants in city shelters. In the past month, they launched a pilot program with a group of 30 individual migrants staying at the city’s women’s shelter to get them access to community resources such as English classes and cultural workshops.
A $825,000 grant from the state in November has also helped fund the additional overflow beds and staffing at the city’s two main shelters, and allowed the Boston Public Health Commission to hire one parttime migrant liaison who speaks Haitian Creole. But there is far too much work for just one person.
“She comes in and is inundated with people waiting, ‘I need a job, I need connections with this, I need connections with that,’” said Corey Grier, interim associate director of the Boston Public Health Commission’s homeless services bureau. “It’s kind of learning to fly the plane when you’re in the air, because we weren’t able to plan this and then implement it. She started and there was already the need.”
That need is likely to grow. About 10 to 15 additional migrants are arriving at city shelters every week, according to the Boston Public Health Commission. The violence and political crisis in Haiti also continues to intensify.
“This crisis is completely unpredictable,” said Yusufi Vali, deputy chief of staff for the mayor’s office. “But as other cities start to put in stricter limits, invariably we think some folks may end up coming here.”
One of the largest ongoing concerns is the lack of a clear pathway to move individual migrants out of the shelters and into housing.
With migrants largely ineligible for federal housing support, the only option for many is market-rate housing, officials said. And even for those with work authorization, affording Boston rent is out of reach.
“Ultimately for Boston and for Massachusetts, this is a housing problem,” said Mayor Michelle Wu. “When the infrastructure is strained, and we don’t have enough housing, that is when we feel the pressures across every part of the income spectrum.”
City, shelter, and nonprofit staff said they are trying to be as creative as possible, but those efforts only go so far.
“These are crises, frankly, well beyond the control of the city. And in an ideal world, there would be deeper systematic fixes led by the federal government, and coordinated at the state and city level — that doesn’t exist,” said Vali. “If there’s more waves of folks coming, we will need a lot of support from the federal government and other entities in between. To be able to weather the storm is well beyond the capacity of one municipality to be able to handle.”