“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.