For years, the Days Hotel on Western Avenue and the Charles River Hotel on Soldiers Field Road have served as de facto shelters for dozens, sometimes hundreds of families experiencing homelessness.
If there's one thing most state officials, advocates for the homeless, and homeless families themselves can agree on, it's that the hotels and the rooms they offer—cramped, unequipped for cooking or other necessities of everyday life—represent a failure of the state to both meet its legal obligation to house families in crisis, and to provide those families with the services they need to move forward.
In his campaign for office, Gov. Charlie Baker pledged to do away with the "homeless hotels" once and for all. And in the 18 months since, the number of families living in those hotels has dwindled from nearly 2,000 to fewer than 350 this week.
The number of families living in the two Brighton hotels has declined as well, but especially in the past few weeks. At the end of June, 113 families resided in the two hotels; as of this week, the number was down to 74. The Charles River Hotel has only 15 families living in it; and officials said today they hope to move all of those families to other locations by September 1.
The push to move families out of hotels, even if welcomed in principle, has nonetheless caused some families, city officials, and advocates concern over where those families are ending up and whether their childrens' needs, especially educational, are being met.
On Tuesday, Boston City Councilors sought answers to some of those questions in a hearing chaired by At-Large Counselor Anissa Essaibi-George, who chairs the Council's Commitee on Homelessness.
Deputy Undersecretary of the Department of Housing and Community Development Rose Evans acknowledged that the state plans to sever its ties with the Charles River Hotel by September 1, and that they expected that all 15 families currently living there would presumably be relocated to housing, state shelter, or possibly a different hotel. If those 15 families do not have housing by that date, they'll continue to live in the hotel until the state can rehouse them, according to EOHED. No timeline was given for the Days Hotel on Western Ave, where 51 homeless families currently reside.
Evans said that case managers who contract with DHCD are responsible for ensuring that school-aged children are enrolled and able to attend school.
DHCD, she said, does its best to help families find accommodation least disruptive to their lives and to their children's education.
But other testimony suggested that the rapid pace at which families find themselves leaving these hotels, often after months of living there, can have its own consequences for them.
Anna Leslie, a coordinator for the Allston-Brighton Health Collaborative, said that the families her organization works with can be re-traumatized by sudden relocation and the anxiety of not knowing where they'll be next.
That anxiety found a voice in Ashley Jarrett, a Dorchester parent of three who is homeless and residing not in Boston, but in a hotel in Danvers, and described what relocation has felt like for her.
Saying that she and others had been given as little as a single day's notice, Jarreett said that her family's life was being constantly disrupted by uncertainty.
"My nine-year-old has been to six different schools," despite having special learning needs. Jarrett said emotionally in testimony before the Council committee.
"I do everything alone, with three children," Jarrett said, adding that she brings them everywhere she goes, "because I don't know when I'm going to be moved."
