On Washington Street in Jamaica Plain, a modern-looking apartment building is Pine Street Inn’s latest bid to end homelessness in Boston.
The five-story building looks much like the luxury apartment complexes cropping up across the region, where rents regularly top $3,000 a month. But instead of well-off 20- and 30-somethings, this place is home to people who were chronically homeless not long ago, the sort of people cities such as Boston have long struggled to help.
Here, formerly homeless people live in their own apartments, and have access to supportive services like case workers and counseling, all under the same roof. This model of pairing housing and support services — most commonly known as permanent supportive housing — has successfully housed some of the city’s most vulnerable residents, keeping people with severe mental and physical disabilities and those who struggle with addiction off the street and out of shelters, Pine Street said.
But the federal government no longer wants to pay for these projects: The Trump administration’s Department of Housing and Urban Development is pushing to slash funding for permanent supportive units.
The cuts — which are being challenged in federal court by a group of cities — would shift most of the money that pays for permanent supportive housing to transitional housing programs designed for shorter-term stays. The changes, service providers said, would likely put more people on the street, because the funding pays for thousands of leases across Massachusetts for formerly homeless people. Without it, they said, some of the state’s most vulnerable people will likely be evicted and end up back in the temporary shelter system.
“This is going to be a major crisis,” said Lyndia Downie, Pine Street’s executive director. “We are going to have more people in shelter and more people on the street.”
Cities have long developed their own homeless strategies, but many of the resources people rely on — overnight shelters, transitional housing, and permanent supportive units — are funded with federal money. Last year, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development distributed $3.6 billion in homeless funding nationally, $136 million of which went to Massachusetts. The vast majority of the state’s funding — some $91 million — went toward leasing and maintaining nearly 4,000 permanent supportive housing units.
Cities apply to the program each year for renewed funding, and in late 2025, HUD indicated it would no longer fund most supportive housing efforts.
The agency didn’t give an explicit reason, but in an executive order last year, President Trump sought to end funding for those sorts of units altogether, saying that they “deprioritize accountability and fail to promote treatment, recovery, and self-sufficiency” by allowing tenants to stay long term. (Unlike permanent supportive housing, federally-funded transitional housing units and shelter beds typically have limits on how long people can stay.)
Late last month, a federal judge issued a temporary injunction against HUD’s decision because Congress had already approved this year’s funding application for the program. But advocates fear the federal government will continue to target supportive housing.
It would be a huge blow to Massachusetts anti-homelessness efforts, advocates and providers said. The state’s supportive housing portfolio totals more than 3,800 units, some in dedicated developments such as Pine Street’s Jamaica Plain building, and many leased from private landlords.
Several prominent service providers who did not want to be named for fear of retribution from the federal government said the reduced funding would leave them unable to continue paying for apartment leases and the services that come with them. The scale of the cuts, they said, would likely force agencies to choose which leases to maintain based on which residents are at greatest risk of severe health consequences or winding up homeless again.
“This is unimaginably inhumane,” one of the providers said.
Cities across the US have long struggled to address homelessness, and typically expand temporary shelter beds to keep people off the street during times of higher need.
That can work for some people. Many who are homeless at a given time will only remain so for a short period, after an eviction or job loss. But it’s less effective for chronically homeless people, especially those living with severe mental or physical health issues, substance use disorders, or developmental disabilities.
Simply providing shelter beds to those people frequently results in them ending up back on the street, said Danielle Ferrier, CEO of Heading Home, one of the region’s largest homeless services providers. Permanent supportive housing provides not just a bed and a roof over their head, but services aimed at addressing the issues that put people at risk for homelessness to begin with, all in one place.
“We are housing folks through this model who are really struggling with daily function in a way that keeps them from making it in society,” said Ferrier. “The reason this kind of housing exists is because there isn’t another system for people with this kind of complexity.”
Downie, the Pine Street director, cited a man who lives at the nonprofit’s Jamaica Plain building who is paralyzed, uses a wheelchair, has a heart condition, and struggles with mental health issues. He used to sleep on the street in his wheelchair, and would frequently end up in the emergency room. Now, Pine Street staff take him to regular medical appointments.
Addressing the issue has proved challenging: Boston’s chronically homeless population has remained relatively flat over the last decade. The city’s Point In Time Count — the annual, one-night survey of the homeless population — counted 815 people in 2014 who were considered chronically homeless. In 2024, the last year for which data is available, the tally was 727.
Over the past decade or so, service providers have increasingly turned to supportive housing as the solution. And, at least for those who can get a spot, the efforts have been effective.
More than 90 percent of the formerly homeless people living in Heading Home’s permanent supportive housing have remained there, Ferrier said. On average, people stay in those units for more than six years.
The model’s detractors argue that it can be expensive, because it requires the government to pay for both long-term apartment leases and services like case management and counseling. And they say that it encourages people to languish in the system because supportive units do not limit how long residents can stay.
The potential cuts come at a time when homelessness is surging across the US. After counting 4,439 homeless people in Boston in 2022 — the fewest since HUD began tracking that figure in 2005 — the city counted 5,898 just two years later, in 2024. In a federally designated area south of Boston that includes Brockton, Quincy, Plymouth, and Weymouth, the counted homeless population more than doubled between 2021 and 2024.
The reasons are many: soaring housing prices, rising rates of addiction and serious mental health diagnoses, and a surge in migration to Massachusetts from Central and South America in 2021 and 2022.
Advocates fear funding cuts could exacerbate the increase, and undo years of progress.
“We are so desperately short on affordable housing as it is,” said Downie. “If we take away this resource, the need is only going to be greater.”
Andrew Brinker can be reached at andrew.brinker@globe.com. Follow him @andrewnbrinker.