The city plans to begin using a former Mass and Cass addiction outreach center as an overnight shelter for homeless people, including newly arrived migrants, who have been sleeping on the floor at the Southampton Street men’s shelter.
Mayor Michelle Wu confirmed the temporary use of the Atkinson Street building, where 30 people will be allowed to remain each night from roughly 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. the following morning, starting tonight and extending through at least March 15, with an extension through mid-April depending on the weather.
The overflow shelter, the second since tents came down Nov. 1 as part of the mayor’s plan to tackle homelessness and clean up the area’s open-air drug market, is aimed at providing some relief for a city shelter system strained by the arrival of migrant individuals not captured by state family shelter requirements, Wu said.
“As more new families are arriving with the migrant crisis to cities everywhere, much of the attention has been on families with children who are part of the state’s shelter system,” Wu said Monday at an unrelated City Hall press conference.
“However, there are a large number of individuals arriving as well who are not connected to a family unit and who are therefore not eligible for that shelter system,” Wu said, adding that the city’s shelter system “is designed to support individual adults who are not part of family shelters.”
In “recent weeks and months,” Wu said, the city has been seeing that roughly 25% of its adult shelter beds, including those run by the Boston Public Health Commission like the new one on Atkinson Street and others run by nonprofit partners like the Pine Street Inn, “have been newly arrived migrant individuals.”
Given that there are between 800 to 900 beds in the city shelter system, that amounts to roughly 200 occupied by migrant adults, the mayor said.
“Overall, it has been putting some pressure on the capacity of our system,” Wu said. “So we need to open an overflow space.”
The new development comes as the state is considering a Seaport office building as an overflow shelter for migrant families. The Roxbury Cass Center shelter, opened Jan. 31 for families, is nearing its 400-person capacity.
The Atkinson Street engagement center, which long served as a space for inhabitants of Mass and Cass to receive services that included drug kits, will serve as that overflow space for a month for people “to get through the cold,” Wu said.
Programming at the building was shut down as part of the mayor’s plan to return Atkinson to a regularly vehicular-trafficked street, but continues to operate as a daytime space for city meetings and outreach team coordination. That use will not be disrupted by the overnight shelter, according to an email obtained by the Herald.
The “temporary” shelter at Atkinson will be aimed at homeless people occupying the Mass and Cass area and newly arrived migrants who have been sleeping on cots and sometimes mats at city shelters that “have been operating at expanded capacity already for a number of weeks,” Wu said.
She did say, however, that despite that strain, city shelters have not been turning anyone away, and that if people are sleeping outside, outreach teams have been trying to “encourage everyone to come indoors to the shelter every single night.”
The overflow shelter set to open in that building, which will be operational seven nights a week and geared toward capturing the overflow from 112 Southampton, is the second to be opened by the Wu administration since the city began enforcing the mayor’s anti-encampment ordinance this past fall.
The first, at another Boston Public Health Commission building on Massachusetts Avenue, includes 30 beds and became operational with the caveat that it would also be a short-term shelter option until those individuals were permanently housed.
Homeless individuals will be escorted from 112 Southampton to the engagement center each night, and will be walked back the following morning, Wu said, which is “not supposed to add more foot traffic or activity on Atkinson,” where much of the crime and drug use has historically taken place at Mass and Cass.
It’s “just to relieve the shelters overnight,” Wu said, noting that while the city has done better as of late with getting chronically homeless people into low-threshold and other housing options,” the migrant crisis has impacted shelter turnover.
“The hope is that it’s quick turnover, but with the newly arrived migrants and individuals, it’s been a little bit longer,” the mayor said.
MassGOP Chair Amy Carnevale criticized the progressive mayor’s decision, however, stating that opening a shelter to lone migrants “sends the wrong message” at “exactly the wrong time.” The state’s right to shelter law was “specifically created for homeless families,” she noted.
“The mayor’s action is incentivizing adult migrants to come to the state, knowing they’ll receive shelter,” Carnevale said in a statement. “While Democrats argue that these shelters are only meant for short-term stays, this perspective is unrealistic.”
“It’s difficult to expect migrants, arriving in the state with no money, family or proficiency in the language, to seamlessly integrate into the economy,” she said. “If Massachusetts is already unaffordable for the middle class, it’s undoubtedly unsustainable for migrants.”
The state is “attracting more migrants and exacerbating the crisis,” Carnevale added, “which is sure to lead to long-lasting economic repercussions, where taxpayers are going to foot the bill.”
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