New Haven Homeless Shelters Face Funding Crisis
Homeless service providers in Greater New Haven demand $30M in state funding as 1,700 people face housing instability and shelter beds hang in the balance.
Roughly 100 people in a converted New Haven hotel could lose their shelter beds this spring unless Continuum of Care finds another $1.5 million to keep its Foxon Boulevard program running. That’s the most urgent number in a much bigger ask that homeless service providers laid out Friday at a press conference that put a human face on what they say is a system at the breaking point.
Theresa Kennealy sat in the back of the lobby at 270 Foxon Blvd. while the nonprofit leaders spoke. She didn’t have a microphone. At 62, a thyroid cancer survivor, she’s spent the past year sharing one of the shelter’s 51 rooms with her adult son after a sequence that’s become grimly familiar: eviction from her West Haven apartment, job loss at Family Dollar, and months sleeping in a tent off Quinnipiac Avenue. “If it weren’t for this shelter and for the help of my son,” she said after the press conference, fighting back tears, “I wouldn’t be alive.”
Her story is one of 1,700 in Greater New Haven right now.
That figure, speakers said Friday, has grown sharply as housing costs have climbed and wages have not. The leaders of Continuum of Care, New Reach, the United Way of Greater New Haven, Milford’s Beth-El Center, and New Haven’s Community Services Administration all gathered at the hotel-turned-shelter to call on the state to deliver a $30 million boost for homeless services statewide. The ask is specific: $12.3 million for extreme-weather housing support, $10 million in flexible funding for homeless services, $6 million to increase staffing at existing providers, and $1.5 million to keep the Foxon shelter open.
Not a vague line item. Real numbers with real stakes behind them.
An Aging Crisis
Speakers returned repeatedly to what they called the “changing face of homelessness.” More older adults. More people with serious medical needs. More people for whom a congregate shelter, the traditional fallback, simply isn’t a safe option. Kennealy fits that profile exactly, and service providers said she represents a growing share of the people showing up at their doors.
New Reach CEO Kellyann Day put it plainly: “This can happen to anyone.”
That framing matters for how Connecticut thinks about this problem. Homelessness has long been treated, politically, as someone else’s issue. The National Alliance to End Homelessness has documented the same demographic shift playing out in Connecticut across the country, as Baby Boomers age into poverty and the supply of affordable housing fails to keep pace. This isn’t an abstraction on Foxon Boulevard.
Continuum of Care CEO James Farales, speaking directly about what happens without additional state funding, said: “It’s only going to get worse.”
What $30 Million Actually Covers
The Beth-El Center’s Jennifer Paradis walked through the breakdown Friday. The $12.3 million extreme-weather component addresses a gap that’s become harder to ignore after several brutal winters and summers. Connecticut’s current shelter infrastructure isn’t built to handle surges in demand during dangerous weather, and providers have had to scramble. The $6 million staffing line is about retention. Nonprofits running emergency shelters compete for workers against employers who can pay more and offer better hours, and turnover undermines care quality.
The $1.5 million for the Foxon program is the most immediate cliff. The shelter operates out of a city-owned hotel, converted to non-congregate use, which gives residents more privacy and stability than a traditional floor-mat setup. That model costs more to run. Without the funding gap closed, the people currently housed there, including Kennealy and her son, face displacement.
Carlos Sosa-Lombardo, deputy director of New Haven’s Community Services Administration, was among the city officials present Friday, underscoring that this isn’t solely a nonprofit problem. Cities carry costs when shelter systems fail. Emergency rooms, jails, and police calls all absorb what shelter beds prevent.
The Connecticut Department of Housing has not yet responded publicly to the $30 million request. The General Assembly is in session, and budget negotiations are ongoing. The Coalition to End Homelessness has been pushing similar funding priorities for months.
This reporting draws on coverage originally published by the New Haven Independent.
The question now is whether the Capitol responds before programs start closing. Kennealy isn’t waiting for an answer. She’s just trying to stay housed.