A group of Mass and Cass-area neighborhood groups is planning to bring the city a list of proposals designed at reining in the issues flaring up in the area, including pushes to permanently close the engagement center, further decentralize services and set an end date for the use of the Roundhouse Hotel services.
The South End-Newmarket-Roxbury Working Group on Addiction, Recovery, and Homelessness, which restarted last year as a community effort after the city-run Mass and Cass Task Force ground to a halt and collapsed, intends to hash over 10 recommendations to them deliver to the powers that be at the city and state.
The recommendation draft, which is planned to be discussed at the next meeting, on June 14, is “a product of inclusive, extensive, and timely discussions within and among the abutting neighborhoods of Roxbury, Newmarket, South End, South Boston, and Dorchester as well as our partners and institutional providers,” according to the group.
“Nothing in this document is a surprise,” said Steve Fox of the South End forum umbrella neighborhood group, one of the hosts of these periodic meetings. “We’ve been talking about these issues for eight to 10 years.”
Fox told the Herald that the city needs to move from being “reactive to responsive” to the problems of open-air drug dealing and use abound in the sometimes-dangerous Newmarket area where sometimes hundreds congregate every day. He’s “not optimistic” that they’ll take much heed of any submitted requests, though he said he’s appreciated Housing Chief Sheila Dillon and Mass and Cass czar Monica Bharel periodically showing up to give the groups updates, even if they disagree.
“We need to be able to change the conversation from updates from the city of all the wonderful things being done to what are the objectives to create a healthy Mass and Cass neighborhood environment,” he said.
One of the most eye-catching requests is a call to permanently close the Boston Public Health Commission-run Engagement Center, replacing it with smaller outposts around the city. The new building on Atkinson Street in the heart of what’s known as Methadone Mile is supposed to be a portal to get homeless and drug addicts connected with services, but there’s periodic violence and dealing there, to the point when it temporarily closed.
That request from the neighborhood groups is one of several that has to do with getting services out of the area and spreading them around the city with an eye on stopping the clustering effect many of them being in one place has. Among the others are calls to decentralize needle exchanges and methadone services.
And there’s the call to put a hard cap on Boston Medical Center’s use of the former Roundhouse Hotel in the middle of the area to provide services including beds. The locals say the place is becoming a hotspot for lawlessness, though BMC officials said this week that they’ll take steps to make sure that’s not the case. There currently is no hard end date from the programs there, where were unpopular among residents the various times they were proposed.
The group also says the city needs to “use a ‘Refugee Crisis’ model to create initiatives, provide resources, and design policies that will treat the Mass and Cass geography for what it is: a complex refugee environment for those seeking to buy, sell, use and traffic in drugs and human beings.” It also calls for cops on bikes in the area, and more focus on ending the obvious drug dealing in the area.
Police earlier this week said reports of crime and arrests both are up this year. The area splashed into the headlines last year as a tent city popped up, which the Wu administration eventually cleared out in January. That was counted as a win at the time and has remained successful in keeping people from putting up new structures, but locals say the overall situation is again worsening as the weather improves.
