Building for Access: Introductory Letter

Dear Reader,

Massachusetts has much to be proud of regarding the breadth and depth of resources for our residents living with disabilities. We rank highly among other states for access to longterm services, home-based supports and disability services linked to MassHealth. We have the largest public housing stock in the country per capita and have made significant investments in accessibility upgrades across the state. But we know the crisis of finding accessible and affordable housing is as daunting as ever.

This commission’s report was developed in tandem with the Special Commission on Senior Housing and the Special Commission on Extremely Low-income Housing. The intersections with those reports are clear. An aging population increases the need for more accessible housing. Individuals with accessibility needs have lower incomes on average. Massachusetts’s statewide housing shortage has resulted in housing that is hard to find, hard to afford, and insufficiently accessible.

Proposed federal policy priorities have canceled, significantly reduced, or imposed new conditions on funding for housing for persons with disabilities and forced impossible trade-offs on the Commonwealth to determine where to invest. The Healey-Driscoll Administration is responding to these changes forcefully to defend access to the federal resources on which residents rely, and which our residents’ tax contributions to the federal government have long supported. However, even as we deploy all of the tools within our legal power to resist and reverse these changes, we must recognize the severe impact these changes will have while they remain in effect.

The recommendations of this report are ambitious and essential. As the federal government continues to neglect the needs of our most vulnerable residents, we must redouble our efforts to fight for the federal resources those residents need and to provide as strong a safety net as we can in the absence of those resources.

We are grateful to undertake these efforts with such strong and committed partners, and we thank them for their work to develop these recommendations. We look forward to partnering with them both to protect the resources we currently provide and to achieve the aspirations laid out in the report that follows.