The city homeless shelter called the Transition Wellness Center has by all accounts saved lives and turned them around for the better since opening in the fall of 2020. But it was always meant to be temporary, city staff say, and several officials agree saving it will come at too high a cost.
A combination of long-expected economic doldrums and a wrathful Trump fiscal policies limits what the city can do as priorities such as universal prekindergarten lock in and the city braces for whatever bad news strikes next.
“We are entering a period of hard choices. We will not be able to save every program that is losing federal funding, and we will not be able to move quickly on every new initiative as we have been able to in the last 10 years,” city manager Yi-An Huang said to city councillors at their Monday meeting.
The city is tracking programs paid for by the federal government that it could lose, Huang said, and “haven’t even really fully understood what level of programs that are state-funded that we might lose, because there’s a ripple effect – as the federal government pulls money out of states, the state may start pulling money out of different programs that will affect our community.”
“It’s highly likely that we’re going to see the programs that we really want to fund get cut,” and balancing the city’s many needs compared, they may be “more important for us to backfill funding for,” Huang said.
Patty Nolan, the councillor who heads the Finance Committee, agreed with some despair that Cambridge, as a sanctuary city and the home of Harvard University, was in the crosshairs of the White House. “We are not going to be able to fund anything, because we are going to be scrambling to catch up in a world where our city is the target of all targets,” Nolan said. The potential for city-owned broadband Internet, delayed for years by previous city leaders, now looked impossible. “I want it to happen. I don’t see how it could possibly happen, given our financial constraints now.”
“We’re two months into this administration, and we’re all totally exhausted and depressed,” Nolan said.
Virtues of the model
The 58-bed Wellness Center opened in two empty floors at Spaulding Hospital on Cambridge Street during the Covid pandemic with the idea of giving more room and privacy to residents – a “noncongregate” shelter that helped prevent the spread of disease and was more humane than the typical. In the past weeks, residents have come to the council to plead for it to continue, making clear not just the virtues of the model – which includes wrap-around services in addition to the semiprivate rooms – but that it was helping residents who were in several cases longtime Cantabrigians going through hard times.
A 16-year resident who became homeless after losing his job testified to finding other shelters overflowing to the degree that “we have to spend the night sitting in a chair, and you could get kicked out if you lie down”; an 18-year resident who became homeless after separating from his wife needs the peace of the shelter to sleep off medication prescribed after brain surgery. Another said the “stability and dignity” of the shelter had enabled him to reconnect with his 15-year-old son.
They are among the final 22 remaining residents, said Ellen Semonoff, assistant city manager for Human Services. “The longer people may believe that there’s an opportunity to stay,” the harder it will be to place them somewhere else, she said.
Vice mayor Marc McGovern, a social worker who has struggled for years to get the city to act on reforms for the unhoused, was vehement about getting the shelter into Wednesday budget discussions. “Everyone can vote however they want, but to say that this isn’t even worth getting on the list after all that we heard, that’s pretty shameful,” McGovern told fellow councillors.
His efforts succeeded: By a 5-4 vote, the shelter was referred to a 3 p.m. Wednesday meeting of the Finance Committee.
Changing the agenda
Huang reminded councillors that the call of the meeting was long-term, for fiscal year 2027 and beyond.
That brought a proposal to rethink the meeting’s agenda from councillors Sumbul Siddiqui and Ayesha Wilson, followed by a reminder from Nolan that such a late change was legally impossible: Meetings must be noticed to the public properly at least two days ahead of time.
It was also, Huang and Nolan said, unlikely to change much, as the budget for the coming fiscal year – starting July 1 – is largely in place and there would be little new information about the shelter available Wednesday.
The shelter’s initial $3.4 million renovations, lease and operations were reimbursed under the early Covid federal Cares Act. As the lease was extended to this June, funding shifted to the American Rescue Plan Act, federal short-term Covid-recovery aid. That money, now around $3 million annually, is ending. “We were clear that the Transitional Wellness Center was not among the programs that would receive funding in the fiscal year 2026 operating budget,” Huang said.
Several programs in place
In addition to the Transition Wellness Center, the city administers a federal emergency housing voucher program for 128 people. Started during the Joe Biden presidential administration, it was meant to run through 2035 – but Cambridge has “essentially been told by HUD that the program is going to be closed down,” and likely this year, Huang said, referring to the federal department of Housing and Urban Development.
With $400,000 for service providers known as housing navigators, the two programs total $7.4 million that city budgeters might have to suddenly grapple with atop an existing roughly $15 million for the unhoused.
Meanwhile, the city hosts more adult emergency shelter beds per capita than any community in the state, Huang said, and over the past two years, has opened 96 units of permanent supportive housing. In preparing for the end of the TWC, it has proposed adding $1.6 million to the city’s long-term operating budget to continue programs such as showers, meals, rental assistance, eviction prevention and housing stabilization.
With some 740 unhoused people in Cambridge, it seemed out of proportion to spend $3 million for 58 who might live at the shelter, councillor Cathie Zusy said, estimating at the current figures it was 20 percent of the budget for 8 percent of the population. “What I would say yes to is yes, we need to learn from the Transitional Wellness Center and provide wraparound services and create more welcoming places,” Zusy said.
Rejecting an either-or
McGovern told the city manager that he rejected the framing being established ahead of the Wednesday meeting.
“I don’t necessarily agree that it’s either coming up with the money to make up for the vouchers for the people who might get evicted or the Wellness Center,” McGovern said. “There’s lots of money in the budget that can come from lots of places. Why you’re making this about pitting two vulnerable populations against each other …”
“There’s money that can come from other places,” McGovern said.
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Cambridge has about $200M in free cap space under Prop 2.5 (most municipalities have zero), so among the tradeoffs that we should be clear in discussing is that we could choose to continue the Transitional Wellness Center by raising property taxes.
It’s very difficult to find space for non-congregate shelter with wraparound services in Cambridge, and non-congregate shelter is an important step for transitioning residents from homelessness back to securely housed.