State spent $471K in 2022 to house a single homeless family in emergency shelter
Average of $65K spent per homeless family
The Commonwealth spent $471,145 to house one homeless family in late 2022, with an “average household cost” of $65,423 according to reports acquired today via a public records request to the state’s Executive Office of Housing and Livable Communities.
The average stay in the Emergency Assistance shelter program was 428 days in shelter, just over 14 months, for an staggering average of $4,587 per month in the second quarter of FY23 (Oct, Nov and Dec of 2022). The least spent on a single household in FY23Q2 was $153 (assumingly one night in a hotel/motel).
The state had not posted a “Quarterly Emergency Assistance Legislative Report” at mass.gov since the months of July, August and September 2021, so we filed a request for the more recent reports. The reports released today cover up until December 2022.
Reports covering 2023 “are still being drafted and will need to be reviewed before dissemination,” according to EOHLC. In the spirit of transparency, we are making all the reports available on Google Drive.
In the first quarter of FY 2022 the average household cost was nearly the same at $65,648 with a low of $153 and a high of $354,047 for a single family “completing an episode of homelessness.”