The UniLu Shelter, which Kuo directed, is a so-called “emergency shelter”—it cannot serve any single individual for more than two weeks.

After that period, Kuo says, people must find shelter elsewhere.

She says the staff often had to turn away more than 10 people over the course of a day.

“Every day we would turn away people in the morning and people at night, which was horrible,” she says. “It was pretty bewildering to turn people away every day....In winter you really felt you had control over whether someone would die or not, and that’s a feeling no one should have.”

Kuo says her experiences at the shelters reflect the dearth of available care in the Boston area—a condition that she attributes in part to recent cuts in state funding for shelters like the UniLu.

Combined with unusually high real estate costs in Cambridge, a “very poor social safety support network” and frequent instances of domestic violence, Kuo says, the budget cuts have left few venues available to homeless individuals.

“The homeless system has been running at 150 percent capacity for years, and now it’s on the rise,” says Irene Wachsler, development director for Solutions at Work, a local organization founded in 1989 to help homeless individuals hoping to get out of the shelter system. “A lot of homeless people have anger against the system.”

Wachsler says that, even for a homeless person who has successfully garnered a job, being able to rent an appartment—particularly in Cambridge’s bloated real estate market—is still a distant hope.

The best solution for the moment Maher says, lies with such local non-profit initiatives.

“I do think you have to look increasingly to non-profits and how non-profits affect community needs,” he says. Still, he adds, recent fundraising and grant efforts suggest that support for homeless aid in Cambridge has actually diminished recently.

“Focus shifts,” he says. “Homelessness was a very sexy issue in the past and its not as sexy today, so there’s not as much money and funding opportunities that are available.”

—Zachary Lane and Michael A. Mohammed contributed to the reporting of this story.

—Staff writer Nathan J. Heller can be reached at heller@fas.harvard.edu