Middleboro Review 2: Gov. Healey's mixed message on housing for those most in need

Sunday, October 26, 2025

Gov. Healey's mixed message on housing for those most in need

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Gov. Healey's mixed message on housing for those most in need

October 26, 2025

By Katherine Gergen Barnett

As a family medicine physician at Boston Medical Center, I have cared for hundreds of individuals and families experiencing homelessness over the last 20 years. The landscape of housing services that I can offer them continues to change, sometimes leaving me with a great sense of hope and possibility and, at other times, more hopeless than ever for my patients’ restoration to health.

Recently, this seesaw from hope to hopelessness has become more extreme, as decisions by our state leaders seem to be simultaneously pulling in opposite directions when it comes to housing help for those most in need. Two families for whom I provide medical care illustrate the mixed messages of our state’s recent housing policies affecting the state’s most vulnerable residents.

The first is a husband-and-wife couple in their seventies. I have cared for them both for over 10 years, and while they have both suffered a litany of medical concerns, the husband has been particularly unwell. He came to me with a history of long, uncontrolled high blood pressure and diabetes with an ensuing heart attack and stroke. He also was suffering from an untreated substance use disorder, which helped him paper over his years of untreated anxiety and depression.

One saving grace when I met him was that he had a safe and stable place to live. From that fundamental base, we could begin to build back his health -- delivering medications to his doorstep, connecting him to community services, and treating both his behavioral health concerns and substance use.

Seven years ago, however, this fundamental base disappeared when he lost his housing. Three years into retirement, he no longer had enough savings for a home. Ironically, he was a retired construction foreman from Boston, where throughout his 30-year career, he had poured his talent into building homes in Roxbury and Dorchester.

Despite years of working with incredible housing advocates, my patient and his wife have not been able to find a stable place to live and continue to sleep on loved ones’ couches in a distant Boston suburb. As a result, his health has begun to rapidly deteriorate again. It is harder to come in for appointments, to receive his medications when he does not know where he will next be sleeping, and to keep his diabetes medications in the fridge or his diet filled with fresh fruits and vegetables.

However, in the last few months, things have begun to look at least a little more hopeful for this gentleman and patients like him. Early this year, Gov. Healey released “A Home for Everyone,” the state’s first comprehensive plan to address Massachusetts’s housing challenge. The plan aims to build 200,000 new housing units by 2030. This ambitious goal came a year after the governor signed the Affordable Homes Act, which authorized more than $5 billion in spending and included nearly 50 policy initiatives to spur more housing. In addition, three new commissions have been established to prioritize the residents of these future homes: elderly, extremely low income (earning less than 30 percent of the median income), and individuals with disabilities (physical, sensory, intellectual, mental health or neurodivergent).

My patient and his wife fit squarely into all three of these categories. Though the housing needs among these groups far outstrip the available supply, since the launch of these state initiatives, I have begun writing letters advocating that, given his medical conditions, he cannot be living with unstable housing -- this time with greater hope that these letters will make an impact.

For another family in my care struggling to find stable housing, the situation has not turned hopeful, but is, in fact, more grim as a result of recent actions by state government.