As pandemic wears on, despair at epicenter of addiction crisis deepens

By David Abel

September 12, 2020

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Behind the Southampton Street Shelter, a police cruiser idling across a narrow road, a jittery
man in a tank top handed another man some crumpled bills, then walked into a city-run
“comfort station” and stuck a needle in the crook of his arm. A few blocks away outside the
Woods-Mullen Shelter, where dozens of unmasked people milled about recently, some
shooting up in broad daylight, a city worker at another comfort station filled a bucket with
scores of discarded needles scattered around the area.

The corridor around Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard at the edge of Roxbury
and the South End — one of Boston’s roughest areas, known widely   as Methadone Mile  —
has deteriorated during the pandemic. It has become more crowded with people who are
homeless and those suffering from addiction; also more violent, grimy, and forbidding, a
procession of despair and disability, a place where too many live, suffer, and die.

While city life has largely receded over the past six months, the crisis here has only worsened, a
fact city officials attribute to the virus. Since March, many daytime services and places for those
with addiction to receive treatment have closed, as have many public buildings and businesses
where homeless people previously could spend their days or use the bathrooms. The virus has
led to an increase in releases from jails and prisons, with many former inmates having nowhere
to go. It has also produced a surge in people living on the streets, with many homeless people
choosing to avoid the cramped quarters of shelters, where, in some cases, more than a third of
the guests tested positive for the virus last spring.

“There’s no question that there’s increased activity, in terms of people on the street and of
people coming down here,” said Marty Martinez, chief of the city’s Office of Health and Human
Services. “We see that. We hear the neighbors. We understand that, and nobody should have
to experience that in their neighborhood.” The neighborhood has changed markedly in the six
years since city officials condemned an old, dilapidated bridge that led to the now-closed  Long
Island campus, a refuge in Boston Harbor that for decades provided emergency shelter and
addiction services to more than 700 people every night. With most of those services now
moved to where Roxbury and the South End meet the Newmarket area — including new
shelters, methadone clinics, and outdoor comfort stations where homeless people can spend
time — local residents and business owners have felt overwhelmed.

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Used needles are scattered throughout the neighborhood, and those in the thrall of heroin and
other drugs can be found feeding their addictions at any time of the day. “Things are getting to
a tipping point,” said Bob Minnocci, a longtime resident of the South End and a board member
of the Worcester Square Area Neighborhood Association. “This is a crisis. The situation is
untenable.” Minnocci and other residents have raised concerns about rising crime rates.
Between 2013 — the year before Long Island closed — and 2019, violent crime in the area
surged more than 150 percent, including four homicides, according to the Boston Police
Department. Last year, there were more than three times the number of aggravated assaults in
the area as in 2013. After a deputy sheriff at the Suffolk County House of Correction was
assaulted  with a metal pipe last summer, police swept  the neighborhood, arresting 34 people,
many on warrants for previous offenses. In the first eight months of this year, there were 118
violent crimes in the area — including two more homicides  and eight rapes or attempted rapes
— 34 percent more violence than occurred in all of 2013.

Neighbors have also complained about more people sleeping on the streets or loitering during
the day. City officials estimate that as many as 300 people spent the night in the area outdoors,
including about 25 people who set up more than a dozen tents on a stretch of green space
along Melnea Cass Boulevard, until city officials forced them to leave late last month. Making
matters more tense, the Pine Street Inn this summer leased the entire Best Western Plus
Boston Hotel just south of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard, bringing 180
additional homeless people into the area. That lease lasts for a year, but residents fear it will be
extended, as local shelters remain overburdened. Officials at the Pine Street Inn said they
intend to transfer all their guests at the hotel to permanent housing and have committed to not
replacing them with new guests.

They said the hotel was their only viable option, given that they had to move out of a student
dormitory  this summer they had been leasing from Suffolk University since shortly after the
pandemic hit the city. Their main shelter in the South End had more guests than beds, which
were only inches apart. “We are well aware that this location [of the hotel] is not ideal,” said
Barbara Trevisan, a spokeswoman for the Pine Street Inn, where 36 percent of residents tested
positive for the virus in April. “We share the neighborhood’s concerns with the issues of
addiction and homelessness in that area. ... Our goal is to be a good neighbor.”

Residents also complain that the city has repeatedly failed to live up to its promises to improve
conditions in the neighborhood. Their main concern: Too many social services have been
concentrated in the area, creating what many describe as "an open-air drug market.” They also
contend the state and other towns aren’t doing enough to alleviate the burden on the city,
noting that many of the people come to the area from elsewhere. Martinez, the city’s chief of
human services, said 60 percent of the people who stay at city shelters are from outside
Boston. “This isn’t fair,” said David Stone, president of the Blackstone/Franklin Square
Neighborhood Association in the South End. “It doesn’t have to be this way. The state has been
AWOL.”

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Martinez acknowledged that Boston is bearing a disproportionate burden. “There’s no question
that other cities and towns need more services,” he said. “People are coming here, because
they don’t have them in their cities and towns. … I do think a commitment from the state to
strengthen services outside of Boston is an important piece of the puzzle.” Officials at the state
Department of Public Health said they have done a lot to help the city, providing nearly $4
million this year for needle exchange programs, urgent care for opioid patients, and a range of
other services. “The state will continue to invest in and collaborate with the city and health and
human service providers to meet the needs of individuals with substance use disorders,” said
Katheleen Conti, a spokeswoman for the Department of Public Health.

Some homeless people also feel uncomfortable in the neighborhood. After eight months at the
Southampton Street Shelter, Jonathan Rogers II began sleeping in nearby U-Haul trucks and on
park benches when the pandemic took hold in March. “Too many people were testing positive
in the shelters,” said Rogers, 37, who recently resumed working as a cook at a reopened
restaurant in the Seaport but still can’t afford to pay rent for an apartment. After the Pine
Street Inn began offering beds at the Best Western, he moved there. But he said he feels deeply
uncomfortable walking around the neighborhood, which he calls “scary” and “discouraging.”
“You feel like a cornered rat,” he said. “There are needles everywhere. It’s traumatic to see this
stuff every day."

Other residents have urged the city to disperse services to other neighborhoods and accelerate
the reopening of Long Island. They have complained that city officials have failed to fulfill
promises to improve the neighborhood. Last October, Mayor Martin J. Walsh issued an 18-page
“strategic plan ” for the neighborhood called “Melnea Cass/Mass Ave. 2.0,” which he said
“sought improved coordination and alignment of existing services, together with new resources
that will further bolster our efforts.” At the time, the main source of problems stemmed from
the opioid epidemic, Walsh said.

The plan created a task force of city and state officials, community residents, and business
owners to address problems in the neighborhood; a website  that tracked a range of public
health and safety issues; and an increase in overdose prevention measures, among other steps.
“Our intention with this plan is to strike the delicate balance we need to keep our
neighborhoods safe and focus on the quality of life issues that are being impacted, while getting
those who need us the most care and support they need to recover from this disease,” Walsh
wrote in introducing the plan. The city promised to update the plan with more specifics shortly
after the release of the report, but didn’t do so until recently — after the Globe asked for it. “So
far, little to nothing has been accomplished,” Minnocci said. “It’s as if the mayor set up the plan
and task force to appease complaining residents, without ever intending to follow through.”
Walsh “has failed miserably at bringing any semblance of order to what has become massive
chaos,” he added.

City Councilor Michelle Wu, who’s reportedly planning to challenge Walsh to become

mayor , also called the city’s efforts to address the neighborhood’s problems “a failure.” “Our
city policies have failed to approach public safety through a public health lens, and this is a very
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stark example of that,” she said. “The situation is a threat to people seeking services in the
area, and it’s a threat to the safety of residents in the surrounding neighborhood.” She called
for a more “holistic” solution that would create “a true citywide plan to managing housing
security and substance abuse, understanding our role as a regional service provider.”

In a progress report  released this month, Walsh said the city accomplished many of the goals it
established in last year’s plan. The city has created more outdoor areas where homeless people
can spend their days, providing porta potties, outdoor hand-washing stations, virtual medical
screenings, and hundreds of additional beds, according to the report. Officials have also
doubled the number of outreach workers in the neighborhood, while increasing the collection
of needles and police patrols in hot spots of activity, the report said. “As we continue to battle
the pandemic, we are providing supportive services for individuals struggling with substance-
use disorder, while also implementing public health and safety measures to improve quality of
life for the entire Boston community,” Walsh wrote in the update.

Yet Walsh acknowledged that COVID-19 “has exacerbated existing inequities and presented
new challenges.” In a recent interview on GBH, the mayor went further, calling the situation in
the neighborhood “a big problem" and “a perfect storm.” “We have to get it better under
control,” he said, adding: "We’ve had a crisis quite honestly for a long time. And pointing
fingers at me, which is fine, is not the solution, because I didn’t create this. But what I am trying
to do is find a solution.”

As far as the future, city officials said they still plan to move many of the recovery services back
to Long Island, where the city has continued to maintain the vacated buildings at a significant
expense. But they do not plan to move the hundreds of people back who previously were
bused there every night for emergency shelter services. But that plan hinges on rebuilding the
Long Island Bridge, a project estimated to cost more than $90 million that remains tied up in
litigation. Two years ago, the Quincy Conservation Commission denied a vital permit for the
bridge, and last month, the city began making its case in Suffolk Superior Court to overturn that
decision.

Even if Boston wins, it would likely be years before the bridge is complete and the buildings
ready to accept residents. On a recent afternoon, not far from where a discarded needle lay
beside an abandoned N95 mask, Rogers stood outside the Best Western. Across the street, he
watched as a stream of seemingly intoxicated people shuffle past. “It’s like a nightmare to be
here all the time,” he said.