Shelter

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Today we will discuss shelter, including legislation such as ERAP and RAFT, the current policy sphere, how it has changed, how it affects cities and towns, and how Governor Healy has been engaging with this issue.

City Councilor Etel Haxhiaj joins Jordan Berg Powers, Jonathan Cohn, and Anna Callahan to chat about Massachusetts politics. This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 58. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

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Transcript

​​Hello and welcome to incorruptible Mass. Our mission here is to help us all transform state politics because we know that we could have Massachusetts policy that reflects the needs of the vast majority of the residents of our beautiful state. Today we have an amazing guest who's going to be talking about shelter policy here in Massachusetts, and we will be combining this with discussion of a lot of the more wonky sort of different kinds of programs like ERAP and RAFT. If you don't know what those are, don't worry. We're going to explain. We'll be talking about what the policy is currently, how it has changed, how Governor Healy has been engaging with this issue.
We'll also be talking about how it affects cities and towns and some of the ways that it, with affordable housing, are really combining to form a lot of the problems that we have here in Massachusetts. And so please stick with us through this whole amazing podcast where we discuss this issue. And now, before we get to that and to our totally amazing guest, I'm going to have my co hosts introduce themselves real quick.
So I will start with Jonathan Cohn. Hello, Jonathan Cohn. He him, his joining from the South End in Boston, I have been active in different progressive issue and electoral campaigns here in Massachusetts for around a decade now and always happy to be here.
And Jordan Berg Powers. Jordan Berg Powers. He him.
And I am coming from Worcester, Massachusetts, proud to have Etel on and I have been doing this far too long. And I am Anna Callahan. She her coming at you from Medford.
So excited to have another city counselor on the program. We have Etel ​​Haxhiaj,, a city councilor from Worcester who is really an amazing expert because also of her background. And Etel, if you can just tell us a little bit about that. We're going to be talking about shelters, why, you know, sort of how you got interested in this topic and a little bit about shelters here in Massachusetts and how things are changing. Sure. 
No, thank you all for having me on. I am a mom of two young boys, and I have worked in the housing and homelessness world for most of my career with families experiencing homelessness as well as individuals experiencing homelessness. And the intersection of housing and homelessness is something that's very near and dear to my heart, very relevant to today. And I am grateful to have a chance to talk about a little bit the governor's policy on the shelter as it pertains to families and also has effect in the rest of the state.
Fantastic. We're so excited to have you. Can you tell us about the governor's policy, and it sounds like it has changed what we had before.
So give us a little insight into what was the policy before and how it has changed. Sure. So, about nine months ago, Governor Healy put a cap on the amount of families that could access shelter, as well as put some limits around how long people could stay in shelter, which is nine months versus before it was as long as families were able to, within two years, be able to find housing, they could exit shelter.
What has complicated things further with this new policy is that Governor Healy also implemented a drastic rule to limit access to shelter for families experiencing homelessness who are migrants coming from other countries, as well as for native families rendered or homeless here in Massachusetts who want to access shelter. And so, according to Governor Healy, because the state is spending over a billion dollars on shelter emergency services, families now can only access these respite centers for five days. If they do, after five days, they will be essentially evicted out with no plan, and additionally, they cannot access shelter for 90 days.
That's making it even more of a punitive approach to people who are extremely vulnerable and who are coming from probably the most traumatic backgrounds. Wow. What is her excuse for this? Well, it's interesting, I think, that the right to shelter everybody says that we deeply respected.
We don't want to lose its integrity. However, this narrative that basically pits migrants, refugees, immigrants, against folks who were rendered homeless or native in Massachusetts by residency. To access shelter, you have to be a resident in Massachusetts for a year.
That's one of the rules. So it's pitting these two communities against each other. It's also just giving more fodder to anti immigrant, anti refugee rhetoric, which we know nationally has been at its highest.
And unfortunately, I wish that I would understand the logic behind it. To me, there is no logic. I'm not the only person that has said this.
When you talk to providers or advocates across the state, everybody was taken by surprise. I think Governor Healy sat down with a narrow audience of providers and advocates, and I don't believe that she's been given the right perspective, especially from immigrant serving communities like Worcester, for example, who have aton of knowledge on how to coordinate and pull resources together as much as we can to address folks in need. Can you talk, Jordan? Oh, I guess I'll just say I think there's a lot of pressure, not just on Healy, but from the speaker and other folks on the price tag for these things.
And I think it's always important to just contextualize that we have plenty of money in Massachusetts. It's just about our priorities. And we don't need tax cuts for billionaires quickly on that point as well, that it's, not only is it, when it comes to our state can often spend its money in very regressive ways by like slashing tax cuts for rich people, but also manages this system itself in a fairly inefficient way, where the state ends up spending lots of money on basically on hotel stays, not even seemingly using its leverage as being effectively of a funder of that large sort.
Like it's kind of market power in that relationship to actually get much better deals for itself, or even just buying up stocks of housing where that you would have ways that are just simply much more efficient than the way in which the state, particularly in a situation where you're rushing to get contractors last minute and ina way that then gives all of the power in the relationship to the contractor. If you don't assert any leverage on your own, the state's own actions is making the bare minimum that it's doing cost more than it should, which then fuels all of the complaints, the unfounded complaints about how much money it costs when we're happy to spend huge sums of money on like tax credits to the biotech industry. But Etel continue.
No, that's a really good point. And you know, I will give you a microscopic example of how a group, a group of us in Worcester during the pandemic were able to run a shelter for women who were trafficked and who were experiencing homelessness during the pandemic. And it was literally a group of 13 of us who had worked in the field that got together and said, wait a minute, these women have specific needs.
We need to create a shelter, temporary shelter for them. And we did with philanthropic dollars, with some of the Covid-19 era dollars. And I am fascinated that the governor, who has at her fingertips all these resources like they can, they could, right? They could not, they couldn't come up with a coordinating way to mimic what we did during the pandemic to help cities and towns coordinate a response.
It was just basically haphazardly left to this. Like you said, contractors, providers were stretched in with very little thought and little coordination, which I think would have saved the state a lot of money too. And anyway, also, yes, from a broader policy perspective, they cut rental assistance at a time when we could have prevented more people from entering homelessness, more people from entering shelter, and they put more barriers to people accessing those funds, whether it's home base or whether it's just plain old rental assistance.
When we know, for example, that during the pandemic ERAP, the emergency rental assistance program, the federal government implemented has shown results that when you lower the barriers to access and the easier you make it to put cash into people's hands, guess what they do? They use it to meet their needs. And therefore, the numbers of homelessness dropped to a good degree during the pandemic, as we saw. So there's definitely ways that we could have avoided this and managed this.
And I don't know who's advising Governor Healy, but they're not giving her the right advice. Yeah. Are you trying to tell us that the way that you address poverty is to give people money and the way to solve, like, homelessness is to give people housing, not to tell them to stop being poor and stop unhoused? Shocking, right? Well, also, this idea, you know, that you have five days to find housing.
And you mentioned a little bit before that, before we started recording that Governor Healy actually made a concession and she increased that by, like, ten days. Now, I don't know how many people here have looked for housing when they're not homeless and they're not, you know, under a gun and they have time. You know, you can look for a couple of months, and you don't. You don't necessarily always find that perfect place. And when you, especially if you're. You're on a budget.
So, you know, this idea, I think, that Jonathan mentioned about you, you simply act as if they won't exist after those five days. Right. So from the perspective, well, we're going to kick them out in five days and we're done.
Like, or 15. Whether it's five or even 15, those people still exist. They are still there.
They are still looking for housing. And I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about how affordable housing,like, obviously, the affordability of housing, which has been just out of control in Massachusetts and certain,you know, all over Massachusetts, but especially in certain areas, you know, how this really exacerbates the whole problem of shelters. Yeah.
I was talking to someone who is very close to the issue in Quincy, and I think there was a recent article that came out that the concession was, we're not going to kick you out in five business days. We're going to give you ten days. Oh, and maybe if you're, you know, if you have a disability or you have a lease in the works,maybe we'll let you stay 30 days.
And I mentioned this before, but that's just psychological torture to people that need stability need a plan, just like the rest of us do in our daily lives. And I don't know that this is a winning political strategy, but having actual people leave these respite centers because they know that inevitable is coming. A, they can get access to shelter in 90 days. They stay there, but b, they know they're going to get evicted anyway, because who can find housing in 30 days? We had. I heard there were some folks just literally being, like, sleeping in the bushes or in alleyways. And that may be invisible to Governor Healy, but I can't imagine, from a selfish political perspective, stories like this being in the media all the time, that it creates the image that she wants to portray as being different than Governor Abbott.
But the impact and the consequences of her policies are no different. We talked a little bit about housing affordability, which is at the crux of anything related to homelessness. And by the way, substance abuse and mental health do not cause homelessness.
They are symptoms of being poor and not having a stable place to sleep in. But what's so interesting about the broader policies that Governor Healy has implemented in regards to housing policies, that it's build, build, build. That's really the centerpiece of the housing policy, which is fine.
We do need to build, but no one is really talking about how it will take years before those building will trickle down to people in terms of lower rents or less gentrification. In fact, there will be more gentrification, if you wanna talk about it. So I don't know exactly how the state believes that if we haven't been able to move people from shelter in less than two years, that somehow this cohort of people who are coming here with restrictions, like they can't work in a lot of places.
That's just by virtue of the federal government rules that somehow they are going to figure this out in five days or learn the language or be faced with discrimination because they are black. Immigrants or refugees are going to experience ten times the discrimination that we see in the rental market when someone plainly has avoucher. So I'm just really frustrated at how short sighted this policy is and how they are neglecting to tell us exactly how will cities and towns that welcome immigrants, but how are those that do not welcome immigrants? What kind of repercussions will that hate and xenophobia have on these folks that are left basically to the mercy of providers or nonprofits or faith based organizations? I just want to say, too, I think it's really important because it's.
The truth is, we're not even doing things to make it easier to build housing. We're not doing the hard things.The MBTA act that passed is not on her watch.
She didn't shepherd the MBTA bill. And that's a good policy. That is a bare minimum housing policy to create more density around places around.
Yeah, to build, to require more density around MBTA communities. And that's like a bare minimum, but at least that's an unpopular policy that got pushed through that is being implemented that will result in making it easier to house. The thing that's frustrating about Governor Healy is that she's.
That it's so important to be liked and to be popular that she's not even willing to do modicum of more controversial things. And the legislature is even less desiring to do some of those things. And so we're not doing things like changing, reforming zoning or requiring more density or requiring.
Or making it easier to build or making it easier and accessible to build affordable housing. Like, we're not actually doing building policies besides giving developers free money to gentrify black and brown communities, except for that one policy, which is the thing that they always point to when they're like, oh,we're going to build housing. It's just the only policy they have is HD.
That's the, that is their, which is a bad policy with bad numbers behind it that they cannot substantiate. But That's it. And they always point to it.
They'll say, like, look, we're promoting housing. Like, look, we have these things, but it's just that program.There's actually not even doing any of the things.
So we're on one end making the situation worse by not leaning into any of the hard things, the things that may make you a little less popular to push through and make it easier to do development. And we're not putting enough money into making it to getting people into affordable housing and moving people into those programs. I can tell you, as somebody who's trying to get section eight, it's also not easy.
It's very expensive to try to get section eight. So you're not providing homeowners or other people place opportunities to provide section eight housing by, I don't know, you can, like, provide loans, things to change,to, like, make your things more accessible. Right? Like, there are pro, like, you could be tackling this issue of homelessness and unaffordability in systematic ways, saying, like, we need to build more.
We need to also make it easier for people to move off the lists to get housing. We need to provide more housing stock, we need to make it easier. And like ADUs in HDIP are the only two policies that you can point to that are like, yes, these are clear housing production policy, and that's not enough to meet this moment in anystretch.
And that's also not a plan. Yeah. And to that point, Jordan with HDIP is the housing development incentive program that was meant for gateway cities to support development ten years ago.
And when you look at the numbers, like Worcester has received probably the second highest number of HDIP tax breaks in terms of dollars, and yet we are at 1.3% vacancy rate, our homelessness is increasing, rents aren't coming down. So clearly these development programs aren't doing the thing that they tell us that they will do.
And, well, what they're doing is they're subsidizing extremely unaffordable rents with amenities that they're great for the people who use them, dog spas and ride plumbing walls or whatever. But for my constituents, that means absolutely nothing. It just means that rents in the rest of the city in naturally, according affordable housing, are going up and no one is ripping the benefits other than the developers who are getting this tax breaks.
I would love to hear you talk a little bit about cities and how this impacts cities specifically and also your efforts to get cities city councilors to sign up. Yeah, great question. So the number one, I think that we're going to get impacted is a small example.
About a month ago, we found ten individuals with small babies, ten Haitian residents who came, who were basically taking refuge at an abandoned storefront in my district, came straight from Logan, were told Worcester is a good place to go, found a slum landlord. The church was able to pay rent to the Islam landlord, and during the night they would house them at their homes, during the day that were stuffed in this storefront.That's just a microcosm of what's going to happen, I think for a lot of other cities and towns.
I have asked the city manager and the mayor, pick up the phone, call the governor, let her know what is the plan. And we have received zero communication, consideration, thoughtfulness, reach out. And so citizen towns are going to left to scramble as they have really just in the last ten months.
Some communities are really good like ours, and some are having the neo Nazis protest in front of shelters.There's no protection at all, no guidance, there's no coordination. There's no saying, let's do this together and try to figure this out together.
So Councilor Nguyen and I started a letter inspired by the Chelsea, Boston counselors and the Boston city councilors. And we thought that it would be a good effort to try to get as many electeds signed on also, not just signed on, but also take the next leap of action, call the governor, put pressure on her and her administration to tell us and answer the question of where does she think people should go? I don't really know where that's going to go. I know that we're trying to get at least 100 elected on this letter and continue the public media pressure campaign.
I don't really think there is any other way to have her rescind this policy unless we have a group of people from cities and towns like myself and yourself, Anna, who can say, as elected municipal leaders, we have a responsibility regardless where people are coming from. And I don't have much hope because GovernorHealy seems unmoved. But I'm hoping that the pressure doesn't fall just on the shoulders of advocates who are, who are doing their best to really raise the alarm on this issue.
Yeah, absolutely. There's two things I just want to chime in with. One, I feel like the kind of the total indifference to the struggles of cities and towns.
This reminds me of some of the annoyances seen recently with, let's say, like the fight around the transit,which I know that you've also been involved with when cities and towns want to do something to address their housing crisis and the state says, no, you can't with that, or things like rent control, but then, like, not actually offering any supports for them when they need it, is just a very, like a very terrible approach, for lack of other creative words, for how the state interacts with municipalities that it should be viewing from. How do you, how do you support cities and towns in addressing problems that they face locally, rather than either blocking them when they try to do things or say, sorry, it's all on you. And the other thing that I think somebody had alluded to earlier, but it definitely feels like with particularly the underlying xenophobia in any of the things coming out of the Heely administration on this, is that if this were happening, if former governor, Republican Governor Charlie Baker were the one kicking out families, you probably would see more like, even if I don't have that high of hopes of certain legislators suddenly, although they still, even in some cases, like to view themselves as, like, the better ones against him, at least on occasions, you would see a much stronger kind of criticism of that, of trying to compare him, as you noted, to, let's say, governors like DeSantis or Abbott, who are blatantly xenophobic and just hateful people all around, whereas Healy isn't experiencing that same degree of criticism, although the underlying roots of the policy are the same.
Absolutely. So I'm very excited about the letter that you have going around. Are there things that people who are not elected officials can do? Well, I would think that apply pressure to your city council to sign on to the letter, but I think that the target, the pressure should be on Governor Healy.
There is no other way. I know that the mass. Coalition for the homeless, city life, Vida Urbana homes for all,mass.
Law Institute reform, they're all organizing. And again, it shouldn't really fall on the shoulders of advocates all the time. And I know that some citizen towns aren't as concerned.
So I think that whatever means of public pressure we have, they need to be applied right now. And the ask is rescind the policy, sit down with a broader array of advocates, providers and organizers, and come up with a thoughtful way to manage this and also change your housing policies. That should always be the ask relying problem.
That's all the underlying problem. Yeah. I just want to say also, we did a podcast.
We did a one on doing things that are sort of in the gray areas of rules to allow, because republicans do this all the time, right wings, conservative folks do this all the time. They sort of push the envelope and then ask the courts to weigh in. And one of the things that I think that I'm stuck with all the time is that, like, a lot of people want, not a lot of people that they come here and they want to work, they want to make a life.
They want opportunities at the very things that sort of draw people to America. Opportunity. And Massachusetts would be struggling in its economy were not for immigrants.
We have had an outflow of people. The only inflow have been immigrants and migrants. And so we should embrace that as a part of our core story and allow people to just work, people who otherwise might be in the sort of system federally.
The argument is always like, oh, there's constraints on the system, so let people work. Let people work. Give Them Massachusetts work permits.
Let them tell employers in Massachusetts, we will protect you with our attorney general and let them gethired. You know, we have huge swaths of jobs that we're not able to fill because of the drain on our economy from the lack of housing opportunities. Let's allow people to work.
That's just the easiest thing we could do immediately and let the federal support sort it out. Yeah. And I just want to put a point on this because people have probably gathered this, but, you know, folks may not listen to this, may not realize that there are, for different kinds of immigrants coming into the United States, there are actual prohibitions.
They are not allowed to get a job for a certain period of time. Like we alluded to this earlier, but we didn't like say it, point out loud, this is what Jordan is talking about is why don't we in Massachusetts just defy the federal government and say we believe they should be allowed to work right now. We are going to allow them to work.
And if you don't like it, take us to court. Yeah, I think that's a really good point because, you know, again, the gap between housing and income is so wide, especially for someone who's not allowed to work. It's near, it's impossible.
And in some cases, they also can't access public benefits either. So, yeah, I'm with you. They should explore everything and anything possible to support these folks.
Well, if you are still here listening to this, we love you so much and we know that you probably already donate, but we're just going to go ahead and point you to the link below where you can always put in a few bucks and support the show. We are one of the few places that you will really hear about these issues as they are happening here in Massachusetts. And so we encourage you to encourage us.
And with that, I want to thank Etel so much for being here. It is just such a pleasure to talk to you with all your wealth of experience. And I really appreciate you putting that letter to electeds.
I'm so excited to sign on to it. And with that, I want to thank everybody for listening. And we are excited to chat with you all next week.
Thank you so much all. Bye.