The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated homelessness.
Mark Evans, the executive director of the Lynn Shelter Association, said shelter overflow numbers have been reduced because of social distancing guidelines, forcing the shelter to rent a motel to relocate some of the individuals and families in need.
He said they have had to remove bunk beds and add more spacing to follow the six-feet distancing guidelines advised by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
“The truth of the matter is that a lot of people are not sheltered as they should be,” he said. “We’ve had fairly significant camps around the city that we’ve tried to bring people in from, but our capacity is limited.”
My Brother’s Table Executive Director Dianne Kuzia Hills said homelessness is tied to rising rents, which have spiked significantly during the pandemic.
“One result of not being able to afford your housing is to not have any housing,” she said.
She said that sometimes rising rents lead not to homelessness but to substandard housing, with one man she knows living in a walk-in closet.
“He was achy and in pain, and he thought it was because he was sleeping in a closet,” she said. “It turns out that he had lymphoma but because of his living conditions he couldn’t tell.”
This has been an issue long before COVID-19, but the pandemic has forced some people out of their jobs, leading to struggles regarding paying rent and affording basic supplies. Evans said these factors have led to a significant increase in need for housing assistance in the last year.
“The pandemic has sort of ramped things up,” he said. “I think the shelter system is a highly stressed system to begin with, but then when you add something like this to that, it’s made it even more difficult.”
Hills said Lynn used to have more private affordable housing, such as rooming houses, where people could rent a furnished room with common spaces, saying that one rooming house burned down while the city tore some down.
“It was a way that people could afford their own place,” she said. “Nothing glamorous, but they had a place to live.”
Hills said that processing an application through Section 8 can take eight to 10 years.
“I’ve heard people talk about how there’s too much affordable housing because we’re a little above the minimum. But that doesn’t match the need,” she said. “On paper it looks like you’ve done enough, but if you look at the demographics, it’s shocking.”
Some people have waited for a Section 8 voucher, Hills said, but can’t find anywhere to lease and have to turn it back in.
“It creates this vulnerable population, which has grown in Lynn, and it seems like there’s less we can offer people,” she added.
Robyn Frost, executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless, has been working with the Lynn Community Health Center helping both people who are currently homeless and people at risk of homelessness.
“A vast majority of those at risk of homelessness are women-headed households, because a lot of the industries that have been affected by COVID are dominated by women,” she said.
Frost broke down some data, including single moms who make $16 an hour working 40 hours a week, which is barely enough to pay rent.
“We’re really in a crisis of epic proportions when rents are outpacing wages,” she said.
According to Frost, the high rents in the city have led to more housing insecurity and higher density.
“High density is one of the reasons COVID spread so quickly through Lynn,” she said. “Wages are not enough to make rents.”
Evans agreed with the latter point, stating that many people are forced to live with multiple family members in tight quarters because it’s the only way to afford rent, which ultimately increases the likelihood of a disease like COVID-19 spreading throughout the home.
Prior to the pandemic, the Lynn shelter would place about 71 individual adults into permanent housing before the pandemic, said Evans, but they were only able to place about 18 or 19 this year.
“We see the same thing on our family shelter side as well,” he said. “The real estate market is incredibly tight, especially in the Lynn area … it’s created more barriers for us.”
He said the goals have not changed. He and his co-workers still aim to get people out of the shelter and into their own home, “whatever shape that takes.”
Allysha Dunnigan can be reached at [email protected]. Guthrie Scrimgeour can be reached at [email protected].
