“INTENTIONAL CHAOS” is how Springfield’s director of housing, Geraldine McCafferty, described the Trump administration’s recent attempts to issue sweeping policy shifts to the federal government’s main program that supports local governments and non-profits with funding for homelessness response efforts.
The overhaul has been temporarily and partially blocked by a federal judge, but local housing providers and coordinators like McCafferty have been stuck in limbo awaiting federal funds. Despite the court’s temporary action, McCafferty is bracing for dramatic future program changes that will alter how her team administers housing services to the homeless in Springfield and Hampden County.
“They’re dealing with the stress of: Can I reform a program? How do I do that? What am I reforming? At the same time realizing that the people I provide assistance to may all, or a substantial number of them, get evicted in the next however many months,” McCafferty said. “The stress has been really intense.”
The move is impacting local administrators of the program across Massachusetts and has threatened millions of dollars in funding for permanent housing and thousands of beds for the chronically homeless. The state received more than $136 million for the program in 2024, of which the Springfield-Hampden County team received more than $9 million. As of 2024, there were approximately 1,300 units of permanent supportive housing for families and 7,600 beds in permanent supportive housing for adults across the Bay State, but the changes proposed by the Trump administration would likely reduce those numbers dramatically.
In 1994, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) developed the Continuum of Care (CoC) program that later established local networks in each state consisting of government agencies, service providers, and nonprofits that document and address homelessness and administer housing and other resources. There are 11 CoCs in Massachusetts, and like others across the country, they each compete for federal funding.
In 2009, HUD began prioritizing permanent supportive housing programs – where residents can stay indefinitely and access long-term services like case management – for federal grants. Given that these funds became the main source of federal money for homelessness, CoCs that were previously offering temporary housing services shifted to the heavily researched “Housing First” approach to receive the funding.
Housing First provides housing by removing preconditions like sobriety that can make it harder to access. The approach stands on the idea that the security of permanent shelter is the first, necessary step before people can address the root causes of their homelessness, such as substance abuse or traumatic life events. It has also been identified as one of the most effective ways to keep individuals in housing and address chronic homelessness.
“There have been multiple randomized controlled trials – the gold standard that’s used in medicine and social science – and they’ve all shown that Housing First has a positive impact on housing stability over multiple years,” said Thomas Byrne, associate professor at the Boston College School of Social Work. “The evidence is pretty unequivocal that it is highly effective for getting people into housing and keeping them housed.”
The largest study of Housing First conducted in Canada and published in 2019 found that participants spent more days housed and were more likely to be housed nearly two years later than nonparticipants.
In places like Springfield – the third largest city in the Commonwealth where rents have spiked along with homelessness since the pandemic – permanent supportive housing has housed some of the community’s most vulnerable residents, keeping those with physical and mental disabilities off the street and out of shelters, where most people eventually exit back onto the street.
“This Housing First approach has been something that’s been embraced by both political parties – first by the George W. Bush administration, the Obama administration, and the Biden administration as well,” Byrne said.
But in November, HUD announced its plans to overhaul the CoC program, significantly cutting funding for permanent supportive housing and instead allocating the funds toward “transitional” or temporary housing assistance with participation requirements. The department scrapped existing grant applications and told providers to apply again under the new criteria.
In a press release, HUD called the reforms long overdue and said they will promote independence, referring to Housing First as a failed ideology that “encourages dependence on endless government handouts while neglecting to address the root causes of homelessness, including illicit drugs and mental illness.”
The move draws on a provision of Project 2025 that refers to Housing First as a “far-left idea premised on the belief that homelessness is primarily circumstantial rather than behavioral.” The document, which has served as a blueprint for the second Trump administration, calls for HUD to end all Housing First grants, stating that a conservative administration should shift to transitional housing.
In response, around 20 states, including Massachusetts, sued the federal government, claiming it was illegal to drastically alter the program without congressional approval and that last-minute changes would abruptly delay funding and services to vulnerable populations. In December, a federal judge temporarily blocked HUD’s decision, stating that Congress had already approved this year’s funding application for the program.
The judge ordered HUD to process eligible CoC funding renewals for fiscal year 2025 but stopped short of requiring the funds to be distributed. The National Alliance to End Homelessness has warned that nearly a third of all current CoC funding awards expire between January and June. Even if funding for certain projects is renewed, many programs will run out of money before they actually receive the new funding.
The sudden changes and court rulings have sown widespread confusion among local governments and providers. HUD cannot implement their proposed changes to the CoC program until a final ruling is made by the federal court, which is expected in the coming months.
“The timing of it gives no thought to the people at the other end of this – to the people who are trying to create a rational system that provides services to very needy populations,” McCafferty said.
In its original set of proposed changes, HUD announced that the majority of its grant funds would be more competitive, giving the department more discretion over which organizations receive funding and allowing only 30 percent of projects to be automatically renewed. In the past, nearly 90 percent of CoC program funds were automatically renewed as long as the projects met all requirements.
While the first Trump administration didn’t specifically target HUD’s CoC program with funding cuts, it did begin criticizing Housing First publicly and proposed broader funding cuts to HUD. Also among Trump’s proposed cuts to HUD in the fiscal year 2026 budget is the elimination of some $27 billion in rental assistance funding – most notably Section 8 housing vouchers, which is the nation’s largest housing assistance program – as well as other housing assistance programs for the elderly and disabled.
Permanent housing programs mainly target people who are chronically homeless. Those individuals must have a physical or mental disability, according to federal definition. The Springfield-Hampden County CoC has around 305 units of community-based permanent supportive housing, according to McCafferty, who also serves as the administrator of the local CoC.
“If we lose two thirds of our funding that can go to permanent housing, those are people who will not get the rent paid and will be evicted, and because of their histories, are very likely to be back on the streets,” McCafferty said. “They’re very vulnerable people – a lot of mental illness, multiple illnesses, comorbidities – and those people are now at risk of there being no money to pay their rent.”
CoC providers in Springfield are worried about the impending shift they will likely have to make from permanent housing services to transitional housing, which often requires sobriety, work, or service. But if HUD prioritizes temporary housing projects for funding, local CoCs will likely have to comply or miss out on essential grants.
“If that’s what they’re going to fund, we’re going to put money toward that rather than give up the money, but it does mean we still have 300 people in [permanent] housing to protect, so we’re going to try to figure out how to scrape other monies together to keep them housed,” McCafferty said. “But if you’re going to change it, at least give us time to create new programs.”
In Springfield, McCafferty said shelters are overloaded, and within the last two years, the community has seen homeless counts it hasn’t reached in nearly two decades. From 2022 to 2024, the number of homeless individuals counted on a single night in January jumped from 2156 to 3018, according to annual Point-in-Time Count data released by the Springfield-Hampden County CoC. Housing availability in Springfield is also lacking.
In response to the administration’s attempt to dismantle Housing First programs, experts and advocates have emphasized that rising rates of homelessness are largely driven by high housing costs rather than by behavioral factors like substance abuse. According to the Government Accountability Office, for every $100 increase in rent, there is an estimated 9 percent increase in the homelessness rate.
“The approach here is motivated by a long-standing ideological critique of public assistance programs, blaming people who are experiencing homelessness for the situation that they find themselves in,” Byrne said. “I think that’s at odds with what the evidence shows. In the aggregate, what drives homelessness or increases in homelessness is high housing costs. And here in Massachusetts, we have record high numbers of people who are cost burdened – spending more than 30 percent of their income towards rent.”
Byrne emphasized that transitional housing programs that require people to comply with substance abuse treatment have been found to have high dropout rates, which will burden other systems of care in Massachusetts.
People who are homeless make disproportionate use of acute care services, he said, meaning if more people lose access to housing and end up back on the street, it could have consequences for local hospitals and clinics, many of which already deal with emergency room overcrowding or staffing shortages.
One study using data from Massachusetts found that people who received a Housing First placement had a roughly $10,000 reduction in their use of inpatient care, emergency department visits, and mental health care relative to homeless people who did not receive Housing First placements. That dollar amount is enough to offset a sizeable share of the cost of Housing First itself, according to Byrne.
“We know permanent supportive housing works, and there’s already not enough of it. There wasn’t enough of it even under the Biden and Obama administrations,” Byrne said. “That’s just going to be greatly exacerbated if these policy changes go into effect, and the net result is that local communities are going to be less positioned to actually address homelessness.”