Opponents of closing a 58-bed homeless shelter in Cambridge made final pleas Monday while acknowledging the decision was not theirs, reluctantly directing more attention to the next fiscal year’s budget. Its expected inclusion of a $5 million Federal Funding Stabilization Fund could help make up for the June closing of the Transition Wellness Center.
Councillors had in front of them a memo in which city manager Yi-An Huang asked and recommended that they support closing a shelter always meant to be temporary and paid for by federal money that was now cut off; and urged them to instead prepare to talk about the stabilization fund. The councillors’ only moves were procedural – it made no difference to staff actions whether they placed the report on file, as they did unanimously, or rejected it.
But before accepting the report and decision, councillors continued to nudge. Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler said what “disagreement between the council and administration ultimately comes down to is a difference between ’no, but’ and ’yes, and’” and Ayesha Wilson noted that “when you are in unprecedented times, we need to do unprecedented things,” because she didn’t want the city to be in a position in which it “could have been doing better and doing more and we kind of chose not to because we decided to pick some other things to focus in on.”
When councillor Patty Nolan asked if more clarity was needed, as delaying a decision was “not a respectful way to deal with people who are really struggling,” the mayor gave an exasperated answer.
“The city manager is really clear – not once, not twice, but three times – that it’s not something that he would recommend,” E. Denise Simmons said of keeping the center open. She noted that city managers are appointed by the council, shielded from public elections, for this purpose. “Whoever is in this position is hired to do their best job and give us the best recommendation based on the circumstances that are before us, unpleasant as they may be.”
One among several
The 58-bed Wellness Center opened in two empty floors at Spaulding Hospital on Cambridge Street late in 2020, during the Covid pandemic, with the idea of giving more room and privacy to residents – a “noncongregate” shelter that helped prevent the spread of disease and was more humane than most. After an initial $3.4 million to outfit and open it, paid for by the city for reimbursement by federal Covid crisis funds, the shelter cost $3 million annually. The ongoing expenses also were paid in short-term federal Covid-relief funds. Its wraparound services and semiprivate rooms made it ideal for helping residents who were in several cases longtime Cantabrigians going through hard times.
It was just one among several city efforts helping the unhoused, though, as enumerated in Huang’s memo:
Since 2018, the city has funded the operation of a 30-bed low-threshold winter warming center. In 2023, the City stepped in to directly fund the 35-bed Salvation Army shelter, which had lost its state funding. This $1 million per year commitment continues to be part of the city’s operating budget … We invested over $20 million of [federal Covid-aid] funding toward housing and homelessness, and we are planning to continue funding $1.6 million of programming. The city plays a key coordinating role across major federal grants to provide homeless services, and directly funds street outreach, rental assistance to prevent evictions and housing navigation. And as part of providing pathways out of homelessness, the city has committed $18.5 million into the creation of 96 units of permanent supportive housing with services, which opened over the last year and now house many of the people who stayed at the TWC and other shelters in Cambridge. In terms of scope and depth of services and programs, Cambridge is doing more than any other municipality in the commonwealth.
Now the work has turned toward finding new placements for the 20 final residents at the center who will accept help, officials said.
An expensive approach
At a time the economy and political vengeance from the Donald Trump administration was beginning to strain Cambridge, the center at Spaulding was looking glaringly like “an expensive model that was created during a crisis,” Huang said. “We have spent over $10 million on 58 beds of temporary shelter while with a one-time $10 million investment at 116 Norfolk St., we leveraged additional public and private funding to create 62 beds of permanent shelter that will continue to serve people for decades.”
Councillor Cathie Zusy said she had another point of comparison from talking with leadership at the First Church Shelter, open since 1987 in Harvard Square and spending around $18,500 per resident a year as opposed to the $52,000 at TWC, albeit for a different experience.
“I want us to learn from the Transitional Wellness Center, because I think those wraparound services really provide support,” Zusy said. “I want the $5 million in our stability fund. I wish we could put more in.”
Part of the problem was Spaulding Hospital, which was “not giving us too much of a break” on renting out two of its empty floors and providing services to the center, said vice mayor Marc McGovern, a social worker who has fought bitterly for the site and on Monday made a final plea for paying for another year “so that we can then take some time to see if we can find a more financially reasonable location or model.”
“I wish we had been searching for another location sooner,” McGovern said.
Fewer beds for the future
The issue was not just the 20 people remaining, but “the folks who haven’t arrived in our city yet,” McGovern said. “This is going to be 58 beds that we’re no longer going to have” in a “really crazy and unpredictable time.”
As great as it was to have nearly 100 units of new permanent supportive housing, “we’re probably not going to see any more of those units for a couple years at best given the way the construction market is going,” McGovern said. “Nothing is really getting built.”
In addition to moving acceptance of the report along, noting the council’s responsibility to safeguard the city’s fiscal health while “entering the most significant financial inflection point Cambridge has seen in decades,” Simmons clarified – almost too late for it to matter – the actual name of the center.
“Is it ‘transition’ or ‘transitional’? Because I always want to say ‘transitional,’” Simmons asked the city manager and staff.
The name of the shelter since it was established was the Transition Wellness Center. Residents, supporters, officials and city staff have all tended to use the wrong name.
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It is a shame that the facility must be closed. The result seems to have been a forgone conclusion. I commend the Cambridge city council for making their best effort to keep it open.