Boston Mayor Michelle Wu moved decisively last week to dismantle the tent camp at Mass & Cass while launching what her administration has painted as a revolutionary change in how Boston helps its homeless residents.
Her challenge now: following through.
Wu and her team, including former state public health commissioner Dr. Monica Bharel, deserve credit for first pouring so much effort into outreach at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard. Previous mayors were content to simply send in the bulldozers without much thought for the people who lived there or the crises that led them to that place.
Hard work by the administration lined up a series of “low-threshold” housing units, including at two leased hotels. People who would ordinarily have to sleep on the streets because of drug use or fear of the violence that sometimes visits the city’s traditional “congregant” shelters can instead find a proper roof over their heads and a safe bed to rest their bodies while they try to get back to a more stable life.
Thorough reporting by local media, particularly by WGBH News, appears to support the mayor’s contention that all of the roughly 145 people living in the encampment were housed by the end of the cleanup on Jan. 12. Some wound up temporarily in shelter beds, but many, the administration said at a Thursday press conference, were placed in these low-threshold units across the city. The 69 not immediately placed into housing, the administration said, had units reserved for them.
Wu has declared her intent to build solutions more durable than the flimsy aluminum “cabins” her administration set up in the parking lot of Jamaica Plain’s Shattuck Hospital to round out the tally of transitional housing units it assembled. But she faces a long and difficult road that would test the focus and patience of even the most accomplished team. We’ll see how much progress she’s able to make in the city, or inspire outside of it.
The city’s always-dire lack of cheap housing and this country’s joke of a social safety net mean tents will inevitably reappear on Boston’s sidewalks. But however many of these Bostonians are rapidly placed into transitional housing, it will be a challenge to help them land sustainable housing because the region has blocked substantial new home construction for decades.
Rents are soaring without enough supply in the city and its suburbs. And the same racist, classist zoning restrictions that make building market-rate apartments excruciatingly difficult in Boston’s suburbs have prevented affordable housing units aimed at people in deep poverty from rising, too.
Ultimately, Wu doesn’t command enough money or real estate do this on her own. She needs Beacon Hill and business owners to step up, like the laudable hotel owners providing most of the low-threshold units to the now-former residents of Mass & Cass. When the least among us are suffering, it’s everyone’s job to chip in and help.
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