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GOV. MAURA HEALEY continued her makeover of the state’s emergency shelter program in a bid to make it less welcoming to families arriving from abroad.
The latest changes further restrict who will be prioritized for placement in the state’s shelters and shift the focus of four overflow sites in Cambridge, Chelsea, Lexington, and Norfolk, where homeless families and women in the past could wait at least 30 days for shelter spots to open up with options to extend their stay longer. The overflow sites will now be called temporary respite centers and offer shelter for five days only.
The new rules, which take effect August 1, will require families who stay in the respite centers to wait six months or more for a placement in emergency shelter. The new policy steers them toward other programs, one that provides transportation to another state if they have a place to stay, and a second that helps cover rent and other costs.
“Massachusetts is out of shelter space, and we simply cannot afford the current size of this system,” said Healey in a statement. “Our administration has taken significant action over the past year to make the system more sustainable and help families leave shelter for stable housing. But with Congress continuing to fail to act on immigration reform, we need to make more changes.”
The steady drumbeat of changes over the last year have transformed what had been a law providing shelter to anyone who needed it into a heavily bureaucratic system full of rules about who qualifies for shelter and for how long. Increasingly, the focus is on discouraging migrants fleeing other countries from coming to Massachusetts.
Last month, officials from the Healey administration traveled to the southern border of the United States to alert organizations there dealing with migrants that there is no shelter availability in Massachusetts.
Currently, families with significant medical needs or newborn children or who are at risk of domestic violence or homeless because of fire, flood, or other disasters are given priority for access to shelters. Starting August 1, priority will also be given to those who are homeless because of a no-fault eviction or “because of sudden or unusual circumstances in Massachusetts beyond their control, such as a flood or fire, or if they have at least one member who is a veteran.”
The language doesn’t distinguish between migrants coming to the state and existing state residents, but the prioritization scheme seems to favor residents.
Amy Carnevale, the chair of the Massachusetts Republican Party, issued a statement applauding the changes being implemented by Healey, noting “some of the measures we’ve been advocating.”
“While it’s good to see some necessary steps being taken, it’s frustrating to consider the significant amount of money that has been wasted reaching this point,” she said.
After a meeting in Healey’s office of the governor, House Speaker Ron Mariano, and Senate President Karen Spilka, the two lawmakers backed the latest changes.
Asked if the changes represented an abandonment of the right-to-shelter law, Healey said no. “What this reflects, though, is the real challenges that we’re seeing around capacity, particularly with respect to new arrivals,” she said. “We do not have housing. We do not have capacity. And I think that is the right thing to do. I think that is the humane thing to do.”
Mariano agreed. “We recognize that this was a limited program,” he said. “We didn’t have unlimited resources, so we felt it was a necessary decision and I certainly support the administration in their decisions. I recognize the limits of this program. It isn’t a step away from the right-to-shelter law. It’s a realization of the existence of limits to the law.”
The changes in the emergency shelter law started last fall, when Healey capped the capacity of the shelter system at 7,500 families. The Legislature recently passed and Healey signed into law a measure limiting stays in the shelter system to nine months. The administration also cracked down recently on migrants staying overnight at Logan Airport’s international terminal.
According to a July 11 report from the Healey administration, about half of the families in the emergency shelter system (3,751) are migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers. In the previous 14 days, the report said, 467 families applied for emergency shelter and 128 exited the program, leaving a waitlist of 728 families. There are 334 families in the current overflow sites.
Healey has established a commission to review “the sustainability, efficiency, and effectiveness of the emergency housing assistance program and how to best support and ensure the long-term sufficiency of those seeking shelter,” according to the law.
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