A columnist learned about loopholes in Massachusetts’ housing rights law. Thus he showed human consequences. –Poynter

In 2023, Massachusetts experienced a significant arrival of Haitian immigrants looking for work and a place to settle with their families. Columnist Yvonne Abraham found that they met with a hostile reception in the United States. Many of the immigrants had first arrived in Florida and Texas before heading to the Bay State.

“In Massachusetts, we have a housing rights law that is the strongest law in the country and goes further than other states,” Abraham said. “And according to that law, every family with children has the right to emergency shelter. “The law is designed to protect children who end up on the streets through no fault of their own, no matter what you think about the choices their parents make.”

This law applied to this new group of immigrants, the vast majority of whom Abraham said had legal status while their immigration cases were pending.

But then the system became overloaded, and in mid-October, Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey announced By the end of that month, the state’s emergency family shelter system will reach capacity. Healey cited the increased demand for emergency shelter as “the number of newly arrived immigrant families is increasing and the rate at which families are staying in long-term emergency shelters is slowing down.”

Abraham, a longtime award-winning columnist for The Boston Globe, wanted to know what would happen then. So he started calling on advocates for the homeless.

“They assured me that I didn’t have to imagine this,” Abraham recalled. “Even though we have a right to housing law in Massachusetts, hundreds of families each year are excluded from housing in ways we might think are their right.”

Over the years, Abraham wrote about many topics: national politics, local politics, immigration. As someone who has covered inequality many times, he said he is particularly sensitive to issues that illuminate inequality.

Abraham was surprised to hear from these advocates that many families were being turned away from emergency shelters. He met with employees of the nonprofit organization Family Promise North Shore Boston. The columnist said the organization’s energetic caseworkers are helping families in Massachusetts who are left without the emergency shelter safety net.

“So I sat down with them and asked them, ‘What are the stupidest holes in the safety net that we should have in this state?’ “I asked,” he said. “And they came with a group, and I decided to focus on the four of them.”

These areas included: income requirements; savings restrictions for those seeking emergency housing; Eviction exclusion, which prevents a person from accessing emergency housing if they are evicted from public housing and the state determines it is their fault; and finally, the massive amount of paperwork required to complete any application.

Abraham began working tirelessly on a series of pillars. He spoke to many affected people before deciding on four families. As a reporter, he said, you want the people you write about to feel comfortable talking to you, to feel comfortable to have you use their name, to feel comfortable having their photo taken.

“That’s a pretty tall order. “It’s a lot to ask of people, and I don’t blame anyone for being unwilling to do it,” he said. “So in addition to being willing to put themselves out there and potentially be open to criticism from readers and others, their stories also had to be easy to document. “So I needed documentation to back up everything they told me, to make sure everything was true.”

It was a crazy two months from the beginning of Ibrahim’s reporting to the publication of his columns. She worked with Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Jessica Rinaldi at the Globe to document the families’ struggles.

first columnReleased in late November 2023, it set the tone. The plot focused on a woman named Stacey, who had been staying at a hotel in Woburn, Massachusetts, with her 12-year-old daughter and two dogs since the end of that summer. He owed the organization $5,333.30 and had received a letter ordering him to leave the premises immediately. The notification came on the same day that emergency shelters in Massachusetts reached their capacity limit, according to Abraham.

“In no rational and caring society would Stacey, 46, and her daughter be in this difficult situation,” Abraham wrote. “They are exactly the kind of families for whom this state’s leading right-to-housing law seems designed: desperate, unlucky souls who can’t afford housing, and homelessness has triggered a cascade of disastrous and costly consequences for their health and futures. But they’re still here.”

A few days later, a manager showed up at Stacey’s hotel room door accompanied by a police officer, Abraham wrote. Stacey was told they had three days to leave.

“This is a housing rights case in name only,” Abraham wrote in the first column. “This is a kept promise for families who manage to meet stringent — for many, ridiculously stringent — requirements to qualify for government-funded emergency shelters.”

In addition to telling Stacey’s story, Abraham said he also planned for the disaster ahead. “I’ve always had very, very strong opinions on these issues, and all of my research has further convinced me that what’s going on here is unfair,” the columnist said. “And so I knew I had to make it very strong in the first story.”

Abraham stated that the recent arrival of thousands of immigrants to the state has placed an unprecedented burden on the emergency shelter system. “But make no mistake; this system was broken from the beginning,” the columnist wrote. “And not by accident, but by design: To prevent precisely the kind of overload our shelters are currently facing, the system has been set up to ensure that not everyone who needs help for a long time can get it.”

According to Abraham’s column, Stacey’s mother sold the family home where they all lived in the fall of 2021 and died of COVID-19 that December. Four months later, Stacey and her daughter were evicted from the house.

Stacey, who is overweight and diabetic, has not worked for years. Abraham wrote that the woman was also deeply depressed. “I was in such a hole, such a dark place throughout this whole thing, that I lost the ability to care about anything,” Stacey told Abraham in her column. “Any energy I had to give should have gone to my daughter. I don’t go out, I don’t talk to anyone because it’s humiliating. I can’t interview for a job that looks like me.

Abraham said emotionally this was the hardest job he’s ever done in his career because of the time he and Rinaldi spent with Stacey and the other people in these columns.

“Especially with Stacey, who so eloquently describes her pain, her pain and her disappointment. And he felt so lost, didn’t he? Abraham said. “And so it was especially hard to leave Stacey at the end of a reporting day because of the pain she was going through and how frustrating it was for her and how hard it was to witness that without being able to fix it.”

For the other pillars, Abraham followed this path: 65 year old woman A woman living in a hotel room with her three teenage grandchildren 32 year old mother From two people who have been living in hotels for a year a pair of and their eight children who were denied emergency shelter and defenders at a non-profit organization that works to help families.

Abraham said he requested that comments be turned off in preparation for his column to appear on the Globe’s website. He was afraid that readers would judge his sources and write hurtful things. He was glad he did this.

“On the other hand, almost all of the emails I received were very supportive and very enthusiastic about helping families,” he said, “and so I was able to direct them to nonprofits that could best tell families how they could help.”

Abraham said that what he hopes to achieve through this series is to give all four families he features “a humanity that makes them immune to people’s quick judgments and disapproval.”

“And even if you’re trying incredibly hard, even if you’ve done nothing wrong, even if you have children who have never made choices that you might not approve of, the way the system, the way our Country is set up, the way even a well-intentioned state like Massachusetts is set up, predisposes them to defeat after defeat. ”

In April, Abraham was named the winner of the inaugural Poynter Journalism Awards for her series of articles about homeless people in Boston. He received the Mike Royko Commentary and Column Award, sponsored by the Chicago Tribune in memory of legendary columnist Mike Royko, who died in 1997, which recognizes excellence in writing by an individual who expresses a personal point of view.