In 2023, Massachusetts experienced a significant arrival of Haitian migrants seeking work and a place to settle with their families. Columnist Yvonne Abraham noticed that they had faced a hostile welcome to the United States. Many of the migrants had first arrived in Florida and Texas before making their way to the Bay State.
“In Massachusetts, we have a right-to-shelter law, which is the strongest in the country and goes further than any other states,” Abraham said. “And under that law, every family with children has a right to emergency shelter. The law is designed to protect children who — regardless of what you think of the choices their parents have made — were landing on the streets through no fault of their own.”
This law applied to this group of new immigrants, the vast majority of whom Abraham said had legal status while their immigration cases played out.
But then the system became overburdened, and in mid-October Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey announced that, by the end of that month, the state’s emergency family shelter system would reach capacity. Healey cited the rising demand for emergency shelter to the “increasing numbers of newly arriving migrant families and slower exits of families in long-term emergency shelter stays.”
Abraham, a longtime award-winning columnist at The Boston Globe, wanted to know what would happen then. So she began to call up advocates for the homeless.
“They assured me that I didn’t have to imagine it at all,” Abraham recalled. “That even though we have a right-to-shelter law in Massachusetts, hundreds of families every year were being excluded from shelter that one would have thought would have been their right.”
Over the years, Abraham has written about many topics: national politics, local politics, immigration. Having covered inequality many times, she said she’s particularly attuned to topics that illuminate it.
What Abraham heard from these advocates — that many families were turned away from emergency shelters — surprised her. She met with the staff of a nonprofit called Family Promise North Shore Boston. The columnist said the organization’s energetic caseworkers help families who fall through the emergency shelter safety net in Massachusetts.
“So I sat down with them and asked them, ‘What are the most ridiculous holes in this safety net we’re supposed to have in this state?’” she said. “And they came up with a bunch, and I decided to focus on four.”
These areas included: income requirements; savings restrictions for those seeking emergency shelter; eviction exclusion, which bars someone from being able to access emergency shelter if they had been evicted from public housing and the state decided it was their fault; and lastly, the massive amounts of paperwork required to complete any application.
Abraham began to work tirelessly on a series of columns. She spoke with many impacted people before she settled on four families. As a reporter, she said, you want the people you’re writing about to feel comfortable speaking with you, comfortable with having you use their names, comfortable with being photographed.
“It’s a pretty tall order. It’s a lot to ask of people, and I don’t blame anybody for being reluctant to do that,” she said. “So in addition to being willing to put themselves out there and potentially expose themselves to criticism from readers and others, their stories had to be easy to document. So I had to have a paper trail to back up everything they were telling me, just to make sure everything was accurate.”
From the beginning of Abraham’s reporting to the publication of the columns, it was a frenetic two months. She worked alongside Jessica Rinaldi, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist at the Globe, to document the families’ struggles.
The first column, published in late November 2023, set the tone. It centered on Stacey, a woman who had been staying at a hotel in Woburn, Massachusetts, since the end of that summer with her 12-year-old daughter and their two dogs. She owed the establishment $5,333.30 and had just received a letter to leave the premises immediately. The notice arrived on the same day that Massachusetts’ emergency shelters hit their capacity limit, according to Abraham.
“In no rational, compassionate society would Stacey, 46, and her daughter be in this predicament,” Abraham wrote. “They are exactly the kind of family for whom this state’s nation-leading right-to-shelter law appears designed: desperate, unlucky souls who cannot afford to pay for housing — and for whom homelessness has set off a cascade of disastrous and costly side effects, harming their health and their futures. Yet, here they are.”
A few days later, Abraham wrote, a manager showed up at Stacey’s hotel room door with a police officer. Stacey was told they had three days to leave.
“This is a right-to-shelter state in name only,” Abraham wrote in that first column. “It is a promise kept just for those families who manage to meet the strict — for many, ridiculously strict — requirements to qualify for state-funded emergency shelters.”
In addition to telling Stacey’s story, Abraham said she laid out the disaster ahead. “I had always had very, very strong opinions in these matters, and all of my research had just made me more certain that what was happening here was unjust,” the columnist said. “And so I knew I had to state the case very strongly in that first story.”
Abraham noted that the recent arrival of thousands of immigrants to the state had placed an unprecedented strain on the emergency shelter system. “But make no mistake — that system was broken to begin with,” the columnist wrote. “And not by accident, but by design: To avoid precisely the kind of overload our shelters are seeing right now, the system has long been set up to make sure not everyone who needs help gets it.”
According to Abraham’s column, Stacey’s mother had sold the family house where they were all living in the fall of 2021 and died of COVID-19 that December. Four months later, Stacey and her daughter were evicted from the home.
Stacey, who is overweight and has diabetes, hasn’t worked in years. Abraham wrote that the woman was also deeply depressed. “I have been in such a hole, in such a dark place through this whole thing, I’ve lost the ability to care about anything,” Stacey told Abraham in the column. “Any energy I had to care had to go to my daughter. I don’t go out, I don’t talk to anybody, because it is humiliating. I can’t interview for a job looking the way I do.”
Abraham said, emotionally, this was the hardest work she’s ever done in her career because of the time she and Rinaldi spent with Stacey and the other people in these columns.
“Particularly with Stacey, who was so eloquent about her suffering, so eloquent about her pain and her frustration. And she just felt so lost, right?” Abraham said. “And so it was particularly hard to leave Stacey at the end of a reporting day because of the pain she was in and how frustrating it was for her, and how hard it was to witness that without being able to fix it.”
For other columns, Abraham followed a 65-year-old woman living in a hotel room with her three teenage grandchildren, a 32-year-old mother of two who had been living in hotels for a year, a couple and their eight children who were denied emergency shelter, and advocates at the nonprofit that works to help families.
In preparation for the columns to appear on the Globe’s website, Abraham said she requested that comments be turned off. She was afraid readers would judge her sources and write hurtful things. She was glad she did so.
“On the other hand, the emails I got were almost all very supportive and very eager to help the families,” she said, “and so I was able to direct them to the nonprofits who could best tell them how to help the families.”
Abraham said what she hopes to accomplish through this series is to give all four families she featured “a humanity that would immunize them against people’s quick judgments and disapproval.”
“And to show all of the ways in which even if you’re trying incredibly hard, even if you’ve done nothing wrong, even if you have children who have not made any of the choices you might disapprove of, the system, the way our country is set up, the way even a well-meaning state like Massachusetts is set up, predisposes them to defeat after defeat after defeat.”
In April, Abraham was announced a winner in the inaugural Poynter Journalism Prizes for her series of columns about Boston’s homeless. She received the Mike Royko Award for Commentary and Column Writing — sponsored by the Chicago Tribune in memory of legendary columnist Mike Royko, who died in 1997 — which recognizes excellence in writing by an individual expressing a personal point of view.
