Last Friday, Bob Pulster shared data on last week’s shelter admissions. In his email, Bob said:
Hello friends and colleagues,
In an ongoing effort to provide real time data as to what is happening on a daily basis in the family emergency shelter system, I am sharing this week-ending aggregated report that identifies number of entries by office and reasons for homelessness. This will inform you as to what is occurring in your local region and assist in your efforts to help families and the Division of Housing Stabilization to prevent and end homelessness.
We are able to roll up these reports to show weekly and monthly data but the true impact to families is observed on a daily basis. Obviously, this underscores the need for coordinated diversion and rapid rehousing. We continue to see growing numbers entering our system but the movement from the family shelter system into housing is very slow to state the obvious. This of course is the focus of our ongoing work.
Thank you for your ongoing concern. Bob
The overall picture is that the motel number of families increased last week from 836 on Monday to 863 on Friday, a staewide increase of 27 families in one week.
In Western Mass, all new families entered through the Holyoke and Springfield offices: 16 from Holyoke and 14 from Springfield. (The Holyoke and Springfield offices are the only offices in Hampden County; the next nearest office is Greenfield–so these numbers do not necessarily mean that all these families became homeless in these two cities.)
A little context for these local numbers: fairly recently, Yasmin Otero (from DTA) calculated that, over the past several months, the average number of families from our region entering shelter each month has been 28-30. Bob’s number indicate that 30 families in our region entered last week. The numbers certainly create a sense of urgency for me!
In our region, the reasons for homelessness last week were: 7 families asked to leave private market housing; 9 families asked to leave subsidized housing; 2 families due to domeastic violence; 1 family for health & safety reasons; 2 families evicted for nonpayment of rent; 1 family left an overcrowded situation; and 8 families reported on the first day of the week, before the report tallied reasons for homelessness.
