Shelter policy is cruel and harmful – The Boston Globe

Last week, Governor Maura Healey announced a new policy that will drastically limit children’s and families’ access to Emergency Assistance shelters and state-funded overflow shelters. Under the policy, which went into effect Aug. 1, many families with children who are experiencing homelessness will be faced with a stark choice. Eligible families can choose to stay for five days in an overflow shelter (with very limited opportunities for short-term extensions) or remain unsheltered and hope that they quickly come up to the top of the waiting list for a longer term Emergency Assistance shelter placement.

If a family stays five days in an overflow shelter, they not only will have to leave rapidly (almost by definition before they have regained stability) but they also will be deemed ineligible for Emergency Assistance shelter for at least six months. Anyone who lives in Massachusetts knows that it will be impossible for most families who have nowhere else to go to find a safe place to live within five days.

The dramatic decisions by the administration to discourage families from accessing overflow shelters and to abruptly limit the stays of families who do choose that option are particularly punitive as the only families who have been able to access overflow shelters are those who state officials have deemed eligible for Emergency Assistance shelter after a rigorous application process and who the Commonwealth has placed on the waiting list due to state-imposed capacity constraints.

Last October, Healey instituted a cap of 7,500 families in the Emergency Assistance program, the first such limit in the program’s 40-year history. In November, the state Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities began placing eligible families on a waiting list for longer-term shelter. Recognizing the dangers of unsheltered homelessness and the state’s obligations under the Commonwealth’s landmark 1983 right-to-shelter law, the Legislature intervened last December to require the administration to establish overflow shelters for families on the Emergency Assistance waiting list.

While the capacity of overflow shelters has never been to scale, these sites have been a lifesaving layer in the state’s response to family homelessness over the past year, keeping children and parents off the streets during the freezing cold nights of winter, through summer heat waves, and on the days in between. Indeed, there is never a good time to experience unsheltered homelessness in the Commonwealth. This can be attested to by the hundreds of children and parents who slept on the floor of Logan Airport for months until the administration worked to place those families in overflow shelters while barring additional families and individuals from accessing Logan as a place of last resort starting in July.

Before the Commonwealth terminates the first families from the overflow shelters next week, the governor should use the intervening days to reconsider and rescind this harmful policy. Healey should commit to having a dialogue with the families who will be most directly impacted and engage advocates, providers, and key legislators about alternatives that truly center the safety and dignity of children and families experiencing homelessness.

The Legislature should intercede to uphold the spirit of the state’s landmark 1983 right-to-shelter law by securing access to shelter for all eligible families, committing to providing the needed funding to keep the doors of shelters open, and making bold investments in the homelessness prevention resources, long-term housing, and supportive services that children, families, and communities need and deserve.

Families should not have to resort to sleeping in hospital emergency rooms, bus stations, train stations, airports, cars, and other places not meant for human habitation.

While state lawmakers continue to pressure federal officials to reform the nation’s immigration system and better support immigrants, refugees, and children and adults seeking asylum, the state must simultaneously stabilize rents, uplift communities, eliminate inequities, and uphold the basic human rights of shelter and housing for everyone who calls Massachusetts home.

Kelly Turley is associate director of Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless.