Soaring Rents And Stagnant Incomes Leave Record Number
Of Mass. Families Homeless
Tuesday, December 17
By Bruce
Gellerman December 16, 2013
Lynnicia, 22, and her 15-month-old
son, Myshon, were forced to seek emergency shelter after their federal rent
subsidy expired and their landlord raised the rent to market rate. With no
shelter space available, they were placed in a Brighton motel. (Jesse
Costa/WBUR)
BOSTON — Hundreds of volunteers will
fan out across Boston Monday night to conduct the city’s 34th annual homeless
census. They’ll be counting how many people are living on the streets and in
shelters.
By now, homelessness was supposed to
be a thing of the past in Boston and all of Massachusetts. In 2008, a state
legislative commission released a five-year plan to eliminate it. But today,
homelessness is up and the number of families seeking shelter is at an all-time
high.
‘Obligated To Place’
When it comes to dealing with
homeless families, Massachusetts is unique. Thirty years ago, the commonwealth
become the first “right to shelter” state, guaranteeing every eligible family a
roof over their heads.
“We have the most extensive emergency
shelter system in the country and we’re the only state where [when] someone
qualifies for emergency shelter, we are obligated to place,” explained Aaron
Gornstein, Massachusetts’ undersecretary of Housing and Community Development.
The housing office has contracts
with permanent shelters around the state to provide emergency assistance for
2,000 families. In normal times, the safety net works, serving homeless
parents and their children under 21. But, Gornstein says, these are not normal
times.
“We’ve been coming out the Great
Recession but there are still many families facing economic hardship,”
Gornstein said. “We have a very tight rental market compared to a year ago, so
we do see more evictions for non-payment of rent because rents are going up.”
Way up: the average monthly rent in
Massachusetts is the sixth highest in the nation. And as rents have soared
around the state, incomes have stagnated. Massachusetts has one of the widest
wage gaps between rich and poor in the country.
“People
don’t choose homelessness, people do not choose poverty,” said Diane Sullivan,
policy director at the Boston-based advocacy organization Homes for Families. ”You
could be working two jobs. That’s what a lot of people say, ‘Oh, well, if
you’re working and you’re still poor, get another job.’ You could never sleep,
you could never be there to care for your children and you still wouldn’t be
able to pay the rent. That’s the reality.”
Sequestration Hits An
Already-Struggling System
“But what’s made it worse,”
Gornstein explained, “is the federal budget cuts that occurred as part of
sequestration earlier this year.” Gornstein says since spring, the state has
lost $20 million in federal funding for subsidized housing. The so-called
Section 8 program has been frozen at 20,000 vouchers in Massachusetts. There
are 95,000 households on the waiting list.
Libby Hayes, executive director
of Homes for Families, says the situation is worse than it’s ever been in
Massachusetts — with the state’s emergency shelter system now serving 4,100
homeless families, or twice its capacity.
“The numbers in shelters are higher
than ever before and shelters are scrambling to add on more capacity to meet
the need, and we have more families being turned away because they’re found not
to be eligible than ever before,” Hayes said.
Last year, the state instituted new
standards making it harder for families to qualify for emergency
assistance. Liza Hirsch, an attorney with the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, says now more
than half the families that apply are denied emergency shelter.
“The effect of tighter standards is
that families are in very, very dire circumstances,” Hirsch said. “So they’re
scrambling to find family members, friends, acquaintances, people they barely
know to stay with and then sometimes have to resort to sleeping in cars in
sub-freezing temperature. It’s really a crisis.”
Motels As Emergency Shelter
Gornstein says the state office is
doing the best it can.
“We are obligated to place every
family that’s eligible. We do that the same day and we do it to make sure that
the families and children are safe,” Gornstein explained. “And if we don’t have
enough emergency shelter beds in our regular shelter system, we then go to
hotels and motels. It is not our preference to do that.”
Across the state, a record number of
motel rooms are being pressed into service as emergency family shelters.
“It’s pretty depressing,” Hayes
said. “It’s cars whizzing by, it’s the only accessible food being sometimes
fast food, if you’re lucky. And it’s one room. Imagine your house with just
your bedroom and your bathroom.”
Lynnicia, 22, whose last name we’re
not using for privacy reasons, doesn’t have to imagine it. For her and her infant
son, homelessness is real. Last summer, she was living in an apartment in
Taunton when the federal subsidy ran out and the landlord raised the rent to
the market rate. Lynnicia couldn’t afford it on her salary as a child care
worker, so she and Myshon, now 15 months old, moved out.
“Well, making part-time income was
not enough for me to afford my own apartment so I had to apply for a shelter,”
Lynnicia explained.
But there was no emergency shelter
spaces left in eastern Massachusetts, so the state sent Lynnicia and her son
west to a motel in Greenfield.
“I mean, I was grateful to have a
place to stay, but Greenfield wasn’t ideal for me,” Lynnicia said. She had
never been to Greenfield before. She looked at a map to realize it was two
hours from her old apartment in Taunton – too far from her job in Quincy
and her son’s doctors in Boston. Myshon has sickle cell anemia. They got
help from the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute and a week later they got a
room at the Days Hotel in Brighton. It’s still a three-hour round-trip ride to
her job on public transport, but the room is clean and safe and warm. There are
two beds, a crib, a small fridge and a microwave.
“I never thought I’d be in shelter,
period. I mean, I’ve always been working and I always felt that I was going to
make a way, but nowadays, the apartment we had was affordable and now we don’t
have anything that’s affordable,” Lynnicia said. “So, I mean, affordable
housing would be great.”
“The
problem is that the wait lists are very, very long,” Hirsch said. ”Families
basically have to apply at all of the different housing authorities separately
and they just have to complete application after application after application
and then they sit on waiting lists.”
The
average homeless family stay in a motel is seven months. The state pays $82 a
day, or about $17,000 per family.
In
2008, Massachusetts spent $1 million for the entire year on motel space. This
year, it will spend that and more in a week.
“It’s
not just about the money, families go through trauma,” said Diane Sullivan,
policy director at Homes for Families.
She knows firsthand about the human cost of homelessness. Twelve years ago, her
husband lost his job and they and their four children lost their home.
“We were evicted for owing just over
$1,000,” Sullivan said. Today, if a family is evicted from subsidized housing
for failing to pay rent, it cannot qualify for emergency shelter for three
years. But back in 2001, the regulations were different and Sullivan’s family
did qualify for a motel room. It was Christmas Eve.
“When I talk about it, it brings up
these emotions that I guess I haven’t dealt with. But, this is why I do this
work. Because it doesn’t need to be. Families don’t need to be homeless,”
Sullivan said. “Some families just need a housing subsidy, some families need
more than that, we need to
stop this cookie cutter approach that says, ‘Here’s the one solution that is
going to work for every single one of you.’”
Preventing Homelessness
Ultimately, homeless advocates and
state officials agree. What’s
needed is more permanent affordable housing. Lots of it, Gornstein says.
“It’s
better for the families and better for the taxpayers,” he explained. But the up-front costs for permanent,
affordable housing are very expensive. There’s another approach, Gornstein
says: Residential Assistance for Families in Transition, or RAFT.
“The most cost-effective measure
would be to prevent the homelessness in the first place,” Gornstein explained.
And state funding for the RAFT prevention program has gone from $200,000 two
years ago to $10 million today.
“This is a flagship program which
helped 3,000 families from becoming homeless in the first place. And our
average level of assistance that we’re providing per family is about $2,500,”
Gornstein said. But the RAFT program to prevent homelessness is too late for
the 4,100 families in Massachusetts now living in emergency shelters. Among
them, Lynnicia and her infant son, Myshon.
“You know what? I don’t care where
it is that I stay, as long as there’s a place to stay, you know? Where I can do
what I have to do and not stop working,” Lynnicia said. “Where I can continue
to care for him and he can continue to get his health care. Other than that, I
mean, I’m working, I’m in school, based on that, I kind of want to continue to
make a better life for myself.”
Lynnicia is studying online to
become a lawyer. Her computer sits on the desk on her motel room in Brighton. A
place she’ll call home for the indefinite future.
