Your family cannot get EA shelter more than once in a 12-month period—unless it fits into one of the exceptions described below. The 12-month period begins on the last day that the Department paid for shelter for your family. This means that if your family entered shelter in February 2008 and left in September 2009, you cannot get back into an EA shelter until September 2010.
In addition, if your family has been offered a shelter and refuses to go into that shelter, you cannot get back into shelter for 12 months after refusing the placement.
Exceptions to the 12-Month Rule
Your family cannot get EA benefits more than once in a 12-month period unless:11
Endnotes
11 106 C.M.R. §309.040(A)(4).
12 106 C.M.R. §309.040(D)(2)(a). DTA is under a court order to calculate each year what a parent needs to bring up his or her children in his or her own home. Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless v. Secretary of Human Services, 400 Mass. 806, 818 (1987). DTA is required to publish these calculations each year in a document called the “Standard Budgets of Assistance .” Unsubsidized housing is virtually never “safe and permanent .”
13 Until April of 2002, the EA program paid up to four months of back rent for low-income families in order to stabilize their tenancies. Since April 2002, rent arrears have not regularly been provided as part of the EA program, although DHCD has started using some EA funds to try to “divert” families from shelter, including by helping them pay back rent and avoid an eviction. The rules about who can get these payments are unclear and no one is eligible for them unless the eviction will happen within a few days, which makes it hard to avoid the eviction.
Produced by Ruth Bourquin and Faye B. Rachlin Last updated March 2010