I support it.
From Vice President Pence's Twitter:
During one of the years that I was homeless in Boston, I talked to a woman who had had 10 children. She'd given birth to one of them at the Pine Street Inn women's shelter; the ambulance hadn't gotten there in time.
The shelter used to have a Pregnant Women's Program. It wasn't cushy by any means. It was a small area in the open dormitory that was set aside for pregnant, homeless women. They were guaranteed a bed to sleep in every night instead of having to spend the entire afternoon waiting to be given one every day. Each also had a bureau instead of being on the waiting list for a high-school-sized locker or having to carry all of her possessions around with her.
For many homeless women who experienced pregnancy, that program gave them some peace of mind, reduced their stress, and reduced a lot of the wear and tear of homeless life. In 6 total years of homelessness, I only ever met 1 homeless woman who said she'd been through multiple pregnancies at the shelter.
In addition to having never provided support groups or any other support or even acknowledgement of sexual and domestic violence, the Pine Street Inn doesn't provide sex education and it eliminated the Pregnant Women's Program a few years ago. It also eliminated the Working Women's Program.
The elimination of these programs had nothing to do with lack of funding. The Pine Street Inn has around $50 million in assets and a yearly operating budget of around $70 million. The programs were eliminated because the Pine Street Inn is trying to make the transition to being a landlord and is investing as little as possible in its shelters so that it can fund buildings where it can charge rent.
As I have said before, there are 6,000 homeless people in the Boston area every year. The Pine Street Inn does a lot of fundraising, in addition to using homeless labor to staff its catering and laundry businesses and to do the cleaning in the shelters. A few hundred units of what is called permanent, supportive housing are built every few years. Considering how unsupportive the shelters are, I have my doubts about the support provided at the Pine Street Inn's permanent housing buildings. Some homeless people don't need support; they just need a place to live that isn't a homeless shelter. If the homeless shelters and the entire housing system weren't so badly managed, a lot of people could be housed in regular apartments without paying rent to be supervised in Pine Street Inn buildings. I don't know if pregnant women are allowed to move into Pine Street Inn housing.
When I moved to an apartment in 2019, homeless, female workers weren't guaranteed beds to sleep in at night. Homeless women weren't allowed to use the women's shelter's washers and driers to wash their own clothes. This was a particular hardship for disabled women, since there were no handicapped-accessible laundromats within a reasonable distance. I don't know if the shelter has changed those policies or not.
