As Healey Moves To Close Hotel Shelters Early, Cambridge Housing Advocates Worry About Impact

Massachusetts Governor Maura T. Healey ’92 announced on Monday that the state will close all 32 remaining hotel shelters six months ahead of schedule — leading Cambridge housing advocates to worry about increased strain on the city’s resources.

Healey first announced that all hotel shelters would close in November 2024, setting a preliminary deadline to finalize the closures by the end of 2025. While there are no hotel shelters in Cambridge, local housing advocate Stanislav Rivkin said the early closures could still harm the city.

“We’re interconnected with the larger region, and we are inherently going to be affected by diminishing shelter beds elsewhere in the region,” he said. “That’s always going to put additional pressure on Cambridge.”

The hotel shelters were implemented by the state in 2022 — before Healey took office – as a response to an increase in families seeking shelter. But Healey initiated the closures in 2024 as a part of her attempt to reduce the budget and caseload of the Emergency Assistance system, which provides shelter to eligible families under the state’s right to shelter law.

In Monday’s release, Lieutenant Governor Kim Driscoll noted that closing hotel shelters would save the state “hundreds of millions of dollars a year.”

An April 30 report states that the Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities

projects approximately $410 million in annual savings following the termination of the hotel shelter program.

Since initiating the closures last November, the number of remaining shelters decreased 68 percent from its peak in 2023. The rapid pace of closures has led the state to predict that all hotel shelters would close early, and the number of families in shelters is expected to drop below 4,000 this summer.

“A hotel is no place to raise a family, and they are the least cost effective,” Healey said in a press release.

But advocates argue that while a hotel is not an ideal solution, a reduction in the state’s EA shelter capacity only shrinks the safety net for families.

“We can talk about the costs, but unless you can provide a pathway to shelter these folks for cheaper, and then build the actual shelters to do that, it feels like a little bit of a moot point,” Rivkin, who also works as associate director of admissions for the Harvard Graduate School of Education, said. “Folks still need a place to have a roof over their heads.”

Rivkin added he feels “very concerned” that families will be left without housing as the shelter closures run ahead of schedule.

As a part of the plan, the Healey administration provides families in hotel shelters with advanced notice of closures, invites them to meetings with case managers, and provides educational materials about how to access state resources for more permanent housing solutions.

Ned S. Melanson, a current Cambridge City Council candidate, said that avoiding investment in temporary shelter now may lead to increased costs for the state in the long run.

“When it comes time they say, ‘Oh, these housing costs are so expensive, these hotels are so expensive’,” Melanson said. “But what’s the actual total cost when you factor in somebody living on the street? What’s the social cost there?”

“If you want to talk about it from a pure budgetary perspective, it’s a lot more expensive to deal with these issues when they become an issues of crime than dealing with them as more of a social issue.” he said.

—Staff writer Summer E. Rose can be reached at summer.rose@thecrimson.com.