Massachusetts Slashes Emergency Shelter Budget by Over 60% as Reforms and Declining Caseloads Ease Crisis

By Ella Adams

After two years of spending about $1 billion annually on an overburdened emergency family shelter system, top Democrats are proposing that the state can live within a much leaner shelter budget in fiscal 2026 as new system regulations take effect and caseloads decrease.

The rollout of House Ways and Means’ fiscal 2026 budget proposal — which funds the EA system at $275 million — coincided with an announcement Wednesday from the Healey administration that the number of families in the Emergency Assistance (EA) Shelter System is down 33% from its peak and fell below 5,000 for the first time since July 2023, the month before Gov. Maura Healey declared a shelter state of emergency.

Gov. Healey recommend a $325 million emergency family shelter allocation in her fiscal 2026 budget bill. 

House Ways and Means Chair Aaron Michlewitz pointed to the implementation of recent programmatic changes, which he said are decreasing system caseloads, as part of the reasoning behind the lower figure. 

“We think that the numbers will continue to go down,” Michlewitz said at a State House press briefing Wednesday morning. “By implementing those things, we’re going to be bringing our costs down, as well. So we are projecting our costs are going to be lower this time around.”

Should those costs balloon higher than expected, Michlewitz said the House would revisit the conversation, as it has been forced to do in each of the last two budget cycles in the face of exploding costs.

“If we have to come back and reevaluate, we will. But for right now, we’re feeling that it’s trending in that direction, and something that we feel confident with right now,” he said.

For about two years, the shelter system has posed a major financial strain on state, which has been coping with the humanitarian aspects of an influx of families in need of places to stay.

In February, Healey signed a shelter funding and reform bill that plugged the EA system with $425 million through the end of fiscal 2025 and made temporary and permanent reforms to address security protocols. In March, the administration rolled out regulations executing many of the reforms included in the bill.

The Healey administration set a goal of decreasing EA shelter caseloads to 4,000 families by the end of 2025 and phasing out the use of hotels and motels as EA shelter sites. 

The administration announced Wednesday that as of Tuesday, there were 4,966 families in “bridge shelter” track — down from the system’s 7,500-family peak — and 202 additional families in the “rapid shelter” track.

The administration said it has cut the number of hotels used for EA shelter “by more than half, and is on track to eliminate the use of hotels by the end of the year.” The number of hotels used for EA shelter has decreased 56% since 2023, per the release, and 10 more locations are expected to close by the end of the month.

The phased closure approach follows calls by some lawmakers to close hotel shelters in their communities. Taunton Sen. Kelly Dooner, who supports overarching reforms to the state’s “Right to Shelter” law, heard news in February that the Taunton Clarion Hotel in her district is expected to close as a shelter by June 30. 

Dooner said the planned closure “represents a significant step in phasing out the use of hotels as emergency shelters and addressing long-term housing solutions across Massachusetts.”

Case managers are expected to work with families exiting hotel and motel shelters. Should families not be able to exit into permanent housing, and are not yet at their length-of-stay limit, the state will offer them a transfer to another family shelter site.

An influx of migrant families added to the strain on the shelter system, and the administration said Tuesday that about 75% of families now seeking shelter are longtime Massachusetts families. Since the start of 2025 about 2,100 families have exited shelter while about 1,000 have entered the shelter system. 

The administration noted that the EA system no longer requires a multi-agency “Incident Command Structure” to run, and that it has been staffed and run within the Executive Office of Livable Communities since April 1. The agency began implementing some EA presumptive eligibility and length of stay changes required in the February spending bill last Friday, per the administration.