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Question of fairness? Healey administration doling out millions in rental subsidies to migrant families, but won’t offer any details
A tidal wave of illegal immigration swamped Massachusetts and states and cities across the country in the early 2020s.
And when it comes to the full cost to the Bay State, let’s just say we are not getting the full story here.
The issue is not just the cost to taxpayers, but also to renters forced to compete with migrant families armed with government housing subsidies.
A case in point? The Healey administration’s HomeBASE program, designed to move people out of the state’s jam-packed emergency shelter system to permanent housing.
The overall cost of the shelter system is no secret. The state has budgeted $1 billion this fiscal year, including tens of millions for HomeBASE, which provides up to $30,000 in rental assistance over two years.
Here’s what’s not clear: How much of that rental money is going to our own, homegrown poor, and how much to the tens of thousands of migrants who flooded the state before the Biden administration’s border crackdown in 2024, when the former president finally realized he was in deep political trouble.
On April 7, Contrarian Boston reached out to a Healey administration spokesperson with a few simple questions, including how many families are enrolled in HomeBASE and of these, how many are migrants.
Despite an exchange of emails followed by a phone call to explain our seemingly straightforward request, we are still waiting for a reply.
That said, we do have some facts to work with, and they raise questions about the extent to which the HomeBASE program is being used to subsidize rental housing for new migrants.
First, there is an email, obtained by Contrarian Boston, from a Lowell nonprofit working to find housing for families in the HomeBASE program.
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