By Chris Van Buskirk
Boston Herald MA shelters headline news
(Boston Herald) — Timothy Scalona knows just how important the emergency family shelter system can be to those in need.
The 26-year-old from Wilmington said he cannot escape the memory of his family’s foreclosure more than 10 years ago — a moment that “thrust” him and six younger children into the state-run shelter system. The temporary housing provided a “lifeline,” he said.
“Though it was just four walls and a roof, it provided me the space to create a future for myself and to find a way out of homelessness. Without the shelter provided, I’m unsure I would even be speaking here with you today,” the recent Suffolk University Law School graduate said at a rally outside the State House Thursday.
Scalona joined critics of a policy limiting local and migrant families’ stays in state-run overflow shelters to five business days pressed Gov. Maura Healey to pause or rescind the rule one day before the first batch of people were required to exit their temporary housing.
State officials have told 57 families, including 10 at a site located inside a former prison in Norfolk, this past week that they must leave overflow sites by Friday under a new rule designed to lessen demand on a shelter system strained by an influx of migrants over the past year.
With the cost of housing families in a sweeping network of hotels and motels surpassing $1 billion a year, Healey has implemented a series of restrictions on the emergency shelter system, including the policy affecting overflow sites.
MA shelters headline news
But some advocates argue five days in an overflow shelter, which Healey has rebranded as “temporary respite centers,” is not enough for local and migrant families experiencing homelessness who have no place else to go.
Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless Associate Director Kelly Turley said Healey still has time to roll back the five-day policy before the first families are required to leave Friday.
“The clock is running out, but we are asking the governor to reconsider this policy, to rescind the plan … and to talk to families who are directly impacted, to talk to providers, advocates, and community members to chart a new path forward that doesn’t involve leaving children and parents on the streets, in transit, stations, hospital emergency rooms and cars,” Turley said.
In a statement responding to the calls from advocates, a spokesperson for Healey said overflow shelters involve “intensive case management” services to help families access alternative housing options.
Social service providers at the overflow shelters are also “actively working” with families on rehousing plans, and those who have not yet found a new place to stay “are being provided extensions when extra time is needed,” the spokesperson said.
“This is a difficult situation that we are managing as best we can, but Massachusetts is out of shelter space and cannot continue to afford the size of this system,” the spokesperson said.
MA shelters headline news
Families who decide to stay at an overflow shelter for five days have an opportunity to receive extensions depending on their circumstances, according to the Healey administration.
Families and pregnant women with children are barred from signing up for long-term emergency shelter placement for at least six months if they take advantage of the brief chance at housing in overflow shelters, a rule Healey has said will address capacity constraints on the larger system.
“The governor and team have worked with the Legislature and expanded the system far beyond what any of us thought we even possibly could do,” said Heading Home CEO Danielle Ferrier, who oversees overflow shelter operations at a former prison in Norfolk. “The governor has no choice but to start to put some parameters around the system.”
The 57 families who were given written and verbal notices that they must leave the four overflow sites in Norfolk, Chelsea, Cambridge, and Lexington have worked with providers to identify “next steps,” according to the state’s housing office, which partially oversees the shelter system.
Ferrier said the 10 families at the Norfolk site who are required to leave have all identified “safe places to go,” including staying with friends and families, after working with a case manager and a “housing search specialist.”
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“I think folks are still learning and understanding what it means given it’s such a new policy,” Ferrier said.
A spokesperson for the state’s housing department said the goal of the overflow shelters and the five-day limit of families’ stay is to offer “intensive case management” in order to find alternative housing options.
MA shelters headline news
That could include offering people state-funded travel to family or friends living elsewhere in Massachusetts of the United States or access to a program that helps with rental payments.
There were 7,306 families in the emergency shelter system as of Thursday and 271 families at overflow shelters as of Wednesday, according to the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities.
Andrea Park, the director of community driven advocacy with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, questioned arguments from the Healey administration that the five-day policy was put in place because of a lack of funding.
“I would just like us to stop for a moment and consider whether we can accept that premise, that this is the only option we have,” she said.
For Scalona, he said he was “gravely disappointed” with Healey and state lawmakers.
Making families choose between five days in a temporary facility or to maintain their position on the waitlist for longer-term placement puts them in an “impossible position,” he said.
“Children today that are caught in the throes of this disastrous policy are now wondering not what, but if there is a future for them here too,” he said.
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MA shelters headline news
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