Despite ongoing, prominent concerns about Cambridge’s unhoused population, proposals from an Ad Hoc Working Group on Homelessness have languished for years, including plans for a daytime drop-in center that would give people a place to be beside city streets. Residents at the city’s homeless shelters, meanwhile, have their own complaints.
The opening of an all-day center with programming and various services, from showers to barbers and Internet access to medical support, was a priority among the 34 recommendations in a report on “Addressing Homelessness in Cambridge” that vice mayor Marc McGovern, a social worker, turned in to the City Council more than two year and nine months ago.
“Unhoused people are hanging out in parks and bus stops,” McGovern said, and that leads to complaints from residents, visitors and business owners. But a drop-in center that would ease the problem is struggling to find funding and a location. “People don’t want it in their neighborhood,” McGovern said during an October interview.
McGovern said he is talking with property owners to assess potential locations, looking at both a single large space that would allow for more services and multiple smaller spaces that could be more convenient for unhoused people all over Cambridge. It was too early to name possible locations, he said.
After finding a site, the next step would be to find the funding. Given the decline in the commercial tax rate and the need of other new city projects, less money is expected to be free for allocating to working with the unhoused. “The council has a lot of priorities; I don’t know whether this will be one of them,” McGovern said. While he “would like the project to start sooner rather than later,” there is no time frame.
There is progress on a task force recommendation for emergency housing vouchers to keep people from becoming homeless, which would be distributed to people who fall suddenly under the minimum income needed to rent inclusionary housing units. “It’s not a flat ‘no’ anymore,” but a city project, he said. Still, “this program lacks the other piece”: vouchers for people already experiencing homelessness.
“The city is doing a lot. It’s just not an easy problem to solve, and every urban area in the country is dealing with this issue,” McGovern said.
More beds, maintained beds
In the spring, a Cambridge Housing Authority building at 116 Norfolk St., in The Port neighborhood, will reopen with 62 studio apartments in response to a task force recommendation to increase the number of permanent supportive housing units.
The renovated building converted 37 units into studios with independent kitchens and bathrooms. According to the authority, all previous residents will have the right to return after construction; new residents will come from the Cambridge Coordinated Access Network’s list of people experiencing homelessness in Cambridge. The building will have four on-site social workers around the clock, as well as overnight security and a support hotline.
McGovern refers to this project as a “midterm solution” that is supposed to help residents build independent living skills and connect them with community resources.
Another city project highlighted by the vice mayor: keeping a Salvation Army shelter open, guaranteeing 35 beds nightly for the unhoused.
Committee hears concerns
But the need for more beds was just one concern raised by the homeless during an Oct. 23 meeting of the City Council’s Human Services & Veterans Committee, which is co-chaired by McGovern and councillor Ayesha Wilson. Residents of Cambridge’s shelters also voiced concerns about conditions within, and staff behavior.
“We’re homeless all year. Seasonal shelters seem to not make sense,” one commenter noted, but instances of mistreatment by staff, including arbitrary punishments and dehumanizing behavior, were dominant.
“People have been told to leave the facility in the middle of the night in the winter for three hours to take a walk because they did something wrong,” said Cynthia Doucette, whose husband is at the Transition Wellness Center, a 58-bed temporary shelter run by the city at Spaulding Hospital. “They are not children.”
The meeting also highlighted concerns about staff training and turnover. Many attendees felt that shelter workers lacked proper training to handle complex situations. “They couldn’t run a Little League team,” shelter guest Kevin Merrill remarked of some staff members.
The executive director of the independent Material Aid and Advocacy Program, Cassie Hurd, brought statements from homeless people who could not be present, describing their reluctance to go to shelters. “I haven’t stayed in shelters much. I’ve typically stayed outside with my people, where my sanity and safety aren’t at the whim of a student,” one person told Hurd. (Extending internships to university students in Boston and Cambridge to increase volunteer engagement at shelters was raised Oct. 23 as an area to explore.)
Training issues
Guests also reported issues with shelter cleanliness, maintenance and accessibility for people with disabilities, as well as a lack of accountability for stolen property and medicine.
Many attendees felt a lack of proper training had roots in turnover among shelter workers – whose pay ranges from $19 to $24 per hour, with licensed clinical social workers earning $65 an hour.
There was training throughout the year on topics from mental health to harm reduction and from HIV to overdoses, shelter representatives said. “There is a lot of good training going on. The issues discussed today do not seem to come from lack of training, but rather conflict resolution,” McGovern said.
Shelter representatives expressed a commitment to improvement. Holly Boginski from Bay Cove said that the shelter operator has terminated staff for inappropriate behavior and was working to address inconsistencies in its practices.
Adding shelter operators could help, McGovern said, but “while the city has money, not many entities want to take the responsibility of providing beds for unhoused people.”
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What’s with this “unhoused”?
Where did this come from all of a sudden?
Is the term “homeless” now out of fashion for some reason?
Hard to keep up with all the political correctness these days.