Mass. House Democrats want new limits on shelter stays

After more than a year of enormous, costly demand on the state's family shelter system, House Democrats began moving Tuesday to limit how long people can receive emergency services and to accelerate the work placements that help them find stable footing.

The House Ways and Means Committee advanced a bill (H 4284) Tuesday that would steer another $245 million to emergency family shelters, which lawmakers said should be enough to fund the system through the June 30 end of the fiscal year, while temporarily imposing length-of-stay limitations to cut costs amid a period of sustained financial strain for Beacon Hill.

House Speaker Ron Mariano suggested it's no longer sustainable for Massachusetts to continue operating its shelter system — which by law guarantees services to eligible families and pregnant women — without reforms, even after Gov. Maura Healey in the fall capped the number of families served at one time around 7,500.

"It isn't fair for these people to stay there for as long as they want. New people coming in don't have the opportunity to have access to some of the advantages that these people have," Mariano told reporters. "We thought in the interest of fairness, and in order to keep this program in existence — if we don't do something to change this and make it fairer, it's going to sink under its own weight."

It's a shift for House Democrats who late last year led the push to insist that overflow shelters be part of the state's safety net.

The House plans on Wednesday to take up the $260 million bill, which also includes $15 million for judgments and settlements.  The new shelter funds would bring total family shelter allocations this fiscal year to $820 million.

Rep. Michael Soter, a Bellingham Republican, objected to Democrats springing the bill Tuesday with plans for a vote Wednesday.

"Pissed off yet? You should be!" Soter wrote on X. "Once again, the super majority want to rush through another spending appropriation without time for us to read through the bill! They are, once again, focused on the non-citizens instead of our citizens!"  Posting a link to Wednesday's House session livestream, Soter added: "I hope you will make your voices heard just as I have been on Beacon Hill! This is getting ridiculous."

The measure also extends for another year a pandemic-era graduate student nursing program while making permanent other COVID-19 policies like allowing bars and restaurants to sell drinks to go and expanding outdoor dining.

Most people would be allowed to stay in shelters for no longer than nine consecutive months under the bill, according to a summary provided by Mariano's office. Those who are employed or enrolled in a job training program could stay for three months longer, while pregnant women and people with certain disabilities would be eligible for 12 continuous months of shelter.

That limitations are likely to lead to a significant change for families in shelter. House Ways and Means Committee Chair Aaron Michlewitz said the average length of stay in the system is currently 13 to 14 months.

"It's been growing by the day, month to month. If we don't get our hands wrapped around this from a logistical standpoint, financially, as the speaker said, it'll collapse. It will not be able to be maintained long-term," Michlewitz said. "This is a way for us to find a way to continue to do the program, keep it as one of the most beneficial programs in the entire country on this discussion, but also make sure that we're creating a system that is sustainable."

The proposed limit on how long families could remain in shelter would last until either April 1, 2025 or whenever the Healey administration lifts the 7,500 family capacity limit on the system, whichever comes first, according to a committee official.

The bill would also require Healey to seek federal waivers for expedited, temporary and provisional work authorizations, and create a new $10 million per year tax credit program offering a $2,500-per-trainee tax credit to businesses that provide workforce training to people in shelters.

Mariano pitched those measures as a way to simultaneously help more migrants exit the shelter system and patch holes in the state's workforce that continue to pose headaches for many employers.

Representatives also appear poised to try to impose further requirements on the Healey administration's operation of overflow sites, which offer some degree of services to families who are eligible for emergency assistance shelter but cannot immediately access the system due to capacity limit the governor imposed in the fall.

The bill would require overflow sites to remain open until at least 9 a.m. each day, and additional overflow sites that open in the future would need to operate 24/7 in "geographically diverse areas."

"Right now, we want to make sure that we get the results that we want, and by controlling the purse strings, we have a say in how this thing is going to go forward," Mariano said. "We want to see people moving through. We want to see people getting jobs. We want to see job training implemented into these shelters. Those are the things we're trying to get done."

Asked what would happen to families once their allotted months in shelter end and whether they might end up sleeping at Logan Airport or on Boston Common, Mariano replied, "No, not necessarily."

"Hopefully, with the training that they will avail themselves of to earn the extra three months, they may be able to get a job," he said. "We're working with folks to get papers and trying to put together groups of job-training matches with companies. We're hoping that at the end of the [allowed] months, a lot of these folks would be moving on."

The additional $245 million in shelter funding the House will consider would add to $325 million the Legislature appropriated for the system in the annual state budget and $250 million in supplemental money approved last fall. That adds up to $820 million but Healey's team has said the family shelter tab for this fiscal year could reach $932 million.

Similar to the proposal Healey filed in January, the House bill would tap into a savings account known as the transitional escrow fund to cover the new shelter spending. The governor wants to use that entire $860 million account to cover shelter needs this fiscal year and next, but the new House plan does not stretch into fiscal 2025 since annual budget deliberations are nearing.

"We are certainly going to have to address this further beyond June 30 or July 1, and we will do that in [the budget] process," Michlewitz said. "This was to get us through the remainder of the fiscal year."

Despite calls for change, legislative Democrats in the fall approved the prior injection of funding without any changes to the system's operations, other than imposing new reporting requirements on the Healey administration.

Republicans pushed unsuccessfully at the time to limit shelter eligibility only to people who have lived in Massachusetts for at least one year, with exceptions for domestic violence situations, natural disasters and other factors. House Democrats rejected that proposal mostly along party lines, and on Tuesday reiterated their skepticism about attaching a residency requirement.

"There are significant constitutional questions around residency requirements, and that was debated on the floor," said House Assistant Majority Leader Alice Peisch. "This is a crisis today, and if we were to do something like that we might be tied up in the courts for a while, so regardless of the merits of the question, it doesn't address the crisis that we're facing today."

Asked at an unrelated event Tuesday if she agreed with the House's proposed limit on shelter stays, Healey said she had not seen the bill yet and would review it before recounting her frustrations over federal inaction on immigration reforms.

"From the beginning, we have said that we need to be open to the way our system is working right now given the incredible number of new arrivals we're seeing into the system," Healey said. "We've talked about those capacity issues in the past. That's why I instituted the cap months ago. It's why we instituted the waitlist."

When a reporter pressed on whether a nine-month stay was too little or too long, Healey replied, "It could be. Again, I want to look at the whole package of what came out and talk some more with my team. But certainly we've talked about limits in the past."

Family shelter costs have exploded over the past year. The fiscal year 2021 state budget directed about $180 million to the system — less than one-quarter as much as the combined allocation in fiscal 2024 if the House's proposal becomes law.

A sharp increase in migrants arriving to Massachusetts has contributed to the trend, but many families who already live in the Bay State are also in need of shelter services amid a widespread lack of affordable housing. About half of the families currently in the shelter system entered Massachusetts as migrants, refugees or asylum-seekers, according to the Healey administration.

Massachusetts is the only state in the nation that guarantees shelter services by right to some eligible families and pregnant women. Some anti-homelessness advocates contend that the "right to shelter" would be further hamstrung by a cap on the duration of shelter stays.

"The way this right has been limited in the past few months is something we have never seen, and this proposal takes that even further by putting an artificial time limit on how long families can stay in shelter without providing the housing resources and supports that are needed to help families safely exit shelter into safe, stable housing," Kelly Turley, associate director of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless, said in an interview. "With the combination of the waiting list and these time limits, many families that need shelter the most won't have that option in their hour of need."

She added that the program already limits eligibility to "families that have absolutely no place else to go," warning that time limits will disproportionately impact people with disabilities, large families and others more likely to struggle to find housing.

Turley and Andrea Park of the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute said they will try to convince lawmakers not to impose a maximum time limit on family shelter stays and instead want Beacon Hill to focus on boosting investments in helping people find housing outside the shelter system.

"We're going to be pushing for there not to be a time limit and have people artificially exited from shelter into dangerous situations," Park said.

State House News Service's Sam Doran contributed reporting.