Do you know if they've cleaned up this area yet or not? i thought it was over. it hasn't really been on the t.v. news that i've seen. my father has that on all the time... i see you are posting about it and live in boston area, so i'm thinking it's actually still going on.. crazy stuff.. i heard the government was trying to pass a law making homeless illegal through out the US, but google says it didn't pass and got deemed cruel and unusual punishment to not let a person sleep on the streets if they have no where to go.. i dunno. i think it'd totally suck to be stuck in a homeless shelter and not be able to leave for a couple days at a time. as
I live and work in the Boston area and I've been, until recently, providing addictions and mental health treatment to housing this city's poorest and most unstably housed residents (I moved into a director-level prevention/harm reduction role a couple of months ago). I've been homeless and addicted to heroin myself, got clean in 08 and went back to school in 2010. I've seen this crisis emerge and evolve over time as heroin became fentanyl and the city's primary shelter and treatment complex was abandoned due to bridge access to the island being deemed unsafe (some suggest that then Mayor Marty Walsh wanted to leverage the closure into a means to attract the Olympics in 2024, using the abandoned property in a bid for developers to refresh the island for use during the games which would then free up the property to turn into attractive real estate).
i'm googling and it says this situation is still going. all the recent results are 2023..
They have blocked the sidewalks where encampments had been setup, and informed people that they needed to leave the area. They made it difficult to set up tents, and harassed people who attempted to do so. As the shelter these encampments were next to is full, this caused a migration to a number of different areas both in Boston and to some of the outlying areas. It also made it difficult for outreach workers and medical professionals to follow-up with people who are living outside as many of the resulting camps are more dangerous and harder to find. It's caused ripples of disruption to the new areas that people have moved to, but given that they're smaller, it hasn't lead to nearly as much attention. Somerville borders Boston and Cambridge to the north/west has had some issues with small camps setting up in parks and under a highway overpass. It's also lead to syringes showing up in smaller but more widespread areas around the region. It's hard to know what the full impact is as this continues to be an evolving issue. A number of patients have been lost to follow-up during this time, many of whom have significant medical and mental health issues. Those who die or disappear as a result will likely do so anonymously.
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i used to work at costas provisions in roxbury which is connected to the mass cass area on a bunch of roads, i used to walk around that area before work in the day and also at crazy hours of the night if i got out of work early, this was like 2011 and 12. i didn't see a lot of homeless people in that area at all.. maybe it's only on specific streets i didn't go down. that vid says it's around a methadone clinic from what i watched.
It was an area that attracted people to stem/pan handle at the highway off/on ramp, and during the day there would be some degree of traffic due to the proximity of several shelters, methadone programs, clinics, the public health commission, and Boston Medical Center. There were about 1000 beds on Long Island in Boston Harbor that offered shelter and substance use services, but was far enough away to keep many folks out of the city unless they had reasons to go there. It wasn't until 2014 that Long Island was closed down which resulted in the explosion of homeless in the Mass/Cass area. The emergence of fentanyl and the resulting devastation that has contaminated the street scene along with meth more recently has deteriorated quality of life for many folks, and strained the workforce substantially. Further, the increased cost of living in the Boston area as lead to an increase in total homeless individuals despite increased death rates for most of the last 10 years.
