Advocates outraged at Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey’s “cruel” emergency shelter restrictions

Sam Drysdale

STATE HOUSE, BOSTON, JULY 29, 2024….Gov. Maura Healey’s “cruel” emergency shelter restrictions will force families to choose between sleeping in unsafe environments and making themselves ineligible for future shelter, advocates said outside the State House on Monday.

“The Healey-Driscoll administration’s decision to shorten our emergency shelter stay to five days is cruel and it’s short-sighted. It is placing the burden on desperate, hardworking families and turning them into scapegoats for the state’s inability to create safe and stable housing that’s affordable for regular people,” family medicine doctor Anita Mathews said at a rally on Monday.

Advocates held protests in Boston and Springfield three days before the administration’s new shelter regulations are scheduled to take effect.

The new rules — the latest development in the effort by Healey to manage the tide of homeless families seeking state-funded shelter — sets up a five-day cap on how long people can stay in overflow sites. Families who choose to use one of those temporary shelter locations after Aug. 1 will then also need to wait at least six months to qualify for placement in a more long-term emergency assistance shelter.

Additionally, the new regulations prioritize families who have been in the state longer over newly arrived migrants fleeing political and economic crises in other countries, by placing families higher up on the list to qualify for shelter if they are homeless because of a no-fault eviction, have at least one member who is a veteran, or are homeless “because of sudden or unusual circumstances in Massachusetts beyond their control, such as a flood or fire,” the governor’s office said.

Healey’s tightening grip on the system has led to parents sleeping on the street or in cars with young children, emergency rooms inundated with families looking for a place to spend the night, and even some mothers trading sex for a place for them and their children to stay, advocates said on Monday.

Many of the speakers at the protest outside the State House were outraged with the administration.

“We want to remind the governor that she’s beholden to us, and we will take this to the ballot. The working class are the ones who elected you, so with us you should keep first,” said Nadine Medina, an advocate from western Massachusetts.

Asked by reporters about the rally during an unrelated press conference on Monday, Healey said there wouldn’t be any changes to the policy.

“Let me say, this budget that I just signed includes $326 million for emergency shelter. That is important. It’s important that people who are unhoused or who come on hard times, either because of an eviction or because of job loss or because of a medical issue, that we’re able to support them. Victims of domestic violence, our veteran community, children, we are going to continue to do that, and that’s funded through the budget,” she said.

Healey defended the new restrictions, saying that the shelter system doesn’t have “unlimited capacity.”

“And so one of the things we’ve been focused on is getting people jobs, getting them out of shelter, and also implementing things so that people are able to move out of shelter with case management,” the governor said. “That is what this five-day program is about, because we need to open up more spots in that shelter for temporary respite care, which is a five day limit now.”

House Speaker Ron  and Senate President Karen Spilka have supported Healey’s new regulations. However, there were a number of elected officials who were present at the Boston rally on Monday afternoon.

Sens. Jamie Eldridge, Robyn Kennedy and Liz Miranda, and Reps. Marjorie Decker, Mary Keefe, Sam Montaño, and Erika Uyterhoeven were all present.

Montaño, who is also the executive director of the Transgender Emergency Fund which includes a small shelter housing program, said she sees the impact of the state’s housing crisis and shelter policies every day.

“Today I had a family call me from Missouri, trans folks with a toddler looking for a place to go. And I said, you know what? Don’t come to Massachusetts. It’s unaffordable, there’s a shelter waitlist, and we just created an anti-poverty policy,” Montaño said. “This policy is saying ‘Don’t come to Massachusetts if you’re poor, don’t come to Massachusetts if you’re low-income, don’t come to Massachusetts if you need services, because Massachusetts right now only wants to take people who are able to take care of themselves.'”

The Jamaica Plain Democrat said that as a first-term representative she could say some things that lawmakers later in their careers might be too afraid to say.

She followed that by saying, “We left a lot on the table with housing this year.”

Lawmakers are currently hammering out a compromise housing bill that would authorize billions of dollars of bonding — much more than the state can afford to actually put on the streets — and employ a handful of tactics meant to stimulate more housing production to chip away at a 200,000-unit deficit.

She continued, “Every day, I’m disappointed in myself that so much was left there. But, you know, there’s no looking back, we need to look forward.”

Major housing policies that were discussed, but failed to gain traction in either branch, include rent control and enabling municipalities to tax high-value real estate to build affordable housing.

Decker, a Cambridge Democrat who chairs the Public Health Committee, called the new rules “concerning.”

“We are not living up, quite frankly, to the founding principles of this country. I go back to that famous quote, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door,'” Decker said, reciting the poem on the Statue of Liberty.

A large number of the families newly seeking shelter are refugees and asylum seekers coming from Haiti and other countries undergoing political and economic crises.

“This five-day limit on overflow shelters will have a devastating impact on the health of families, especially children and infants,” Mathews said. “They will be pushed to the streets and face heat emergencies, rain, food insecurity, violence, trauma. As a physician, I actually have no treatment that will cure the depression of an unhoused new mother who has nowhere to safely feed her newborn. I don’t have a prescription to give a teen who has no hope for a future when they can’t enroll in school.”