Mayor Wu’s new 4-point plan for Mass and Cass: What’s in it, why she is proposing it — and what’s wrong (and right) with it.

In August 2023, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu announced a plan for changes at “Mass and Cass”, in response to escalating violence and danger that have caused key City social services partners to pull staff from Atkinson Street, the heart of Boston’s concentration of homeless shelters and addiction/mental health services and host to the region’s biggest number of people contending with addiction or unmanaged mental illness—and those who prey on them. We support and commend Mayor Wu in recognizing the need for a major course correction in Boston’s Mass and Cass strategy, one with far greater emphasis on everyone’s safety and public order.

Mayor Wu’s announced plan boils down to four key points, outlined below. Unfortunately, her new plan amounts to a fire approach drill approach on one siloed issue, how to take down the latest tent encampment on Atkinson Street, while making other Mass and Cass problems even worse in the process. It’s the same recipe for failure we’ve seen time and again: Mass and Cass deteriorates, a crisis is perceived, and the City responds with narrow actions that are supposedly “temporary” to address an “emergency.” Sometimes, taken in isolation, the actions sound as if they may help on some particular piece of the issue, but very often they prove to have all sorts of negative downstream consequences and/or just push old problems into new places —and usually turn out to be permanent..

While we share and respect Mayor Wu’s concern for eliminating tents and providing safety on Atkinson, a plan like hers with the foreseeable effect of shifting even more drug use into the South End, opening up yet another shelter and additional services here and transforming Mass and Cass into “Mass and Albany” is not the answer. If Mass and Cass is truly a crisis—and it is—then it is time for others to step up and be part of the solution, as for years we already have.

The four key elements of Mayor Wu’s plan —and why it’s a recipe for creating “Mass and Albany” in the South End.

(To see more detail about each element, just click on it)

  • The stated centerpiece of Mayor Wu’s plan is to permanently clear Atkinson Street of all tents and congregations of people, and limit access going forward only to individuals coming/going to beds at the men’s shelter at 112 Southampton (whose front door is on Atkinson). The once-heralded Engagement Center low-threshold homeless and drug use services facility at the end of Atkinson has been closed, effective immediately, and may or may not ever reopen.

    While it sounds good on paper, clearing Atkinson will necessarily displace the approximately 200 people there whose addiction disease compels them to use drugs, causing them to seek some other nearby place to sit or stand while they use and (if they decline shelter, sleep), along with the dealers.

    Mayor Wu’s plan contains no discussion or mention of this inconvenient but inescapable question: Where will New England’s biggest drug scene go if/when she closes down its longtime home on Atkinson Street? But other elements of Wu’s Plan tell us the answer: The South End.

  • Mayor Wu is directing the City to open a new shelter—which they are calling a “Safe Sleeping Space”—in the Miranda Creamer Building located at 785 Albany Street in the South End. (This is the building at the corner of Mass Ave and Albany, opposite BMC and connected to BMC by the overhead bridge.) 

    The shelter, which would be the fourth shelter in or around the South End, is supposed to persuade people living in tents in Atkinson to come off the street by being a “low barrier” shelter more amenable to those with drug use or mental illness conditions than traditional shelters (which, in Boston, do have sufficient beds for them and everyone unsheltered, unlike most cities). As explained by the Wu Administration, this kind of shelter “lower[s] barriers for unhoused people who use drugs” by, for example, allowing flexibility to enter and exit at will, rather than imposing curfews. The new shelter will also accomodate people who have been banned from all the other shelters in the city, according to her Administration.

    According to the Wu Administration, no other site for the new shelter to be placed in the South End could be found anywhere in the city. Yet in reality, the almost-brand new Engagement Center, which the City spent millions of taxpayer dollars to construct and open only two years ago, now sits empty and available for the new shelter and services uses the Wu Administration insists can only be in the South End.

  • Under Mayor Wu’s plan, drug use-related services that up to now had been offered at locations in the heart of Mass and Cass are being moved to sites in the South End. Medical services formerly provided by Boston Health Care for the Homeless Program out of the Engagement Center now are accessed by going to 774 Albany Street, which is already home to the City’s AHOPE clean needle distribution program. Other services are to be provided at a new services facility located at 727 Mass Ave, next door to the new Creamer Building shelter. The Wu Administration initially said the 727 Mass Ave services facility would be open to the homeless population generally but now maintains services there will be only for those staying at the shelter (with silence so far on where other services once planned for 727 will go instead).

    While the services are important and needed, the City has never been able to successfully control conditions around the places these services are offered, which have become magnets for drug dealing and use, and worse. The Engagement Center has been shut down repeatedly over the past several years in failed attempts to reset and quell dealing and violence. In its brief existence, the former Mass and Cass “Roundhouse” clinical services/shelter site saw over 3,000 calls for illicit or illegal activity affecting its immediate abutters, pervasive drug use and open dealing on its exterior grounds and, in summer 2023, an attempted murder.

  • Mayor Wu has just filed a proposed ordinance to provide the City with the legal basis she believes it currently lacks to remove tent encampments on Atkinson Street or elsewhere. We support the City having the legal and practical tools needed to effectively end and prohibit encampments of all kinds, including a new ordinance. But we reject the Wu Administration’s contention such an ordinance can only pass and be enforceable legally if the City horse trades with outside groups such as the ACLU that often try to stymie encampment clearance efforts, by promising them more “low barrier” beds and putting those beds in a new shelter in the South End.

    And ironically, the proposed ordinance likely won’t be much use on unsheltered living as it typically occurs within the South End neighborhood. The ordinance is narrowly written to target situations where a person is utilizing a tent or similar “structure” and/or has brought in cooking equipment or large furniture. But where people are living in doorways, bus shelters or on blankets and boxes and decline offers of shelter and help, the ordinance doesn't appear to apply

The Creamer Building (785 Albany Street at Mass Ave) where Mayor Wu is planning to create a new “Safe Sleeping Space” shelter and shift services from Mass and Cass into the South End. Access will be via doors on Mass Ave located underneath the overhead bridge seen behind the scaffolding.

The AHOPE needle exchange (774 Albany Street) where Mayor Wu’s plan is shifting services from Atkinson Street into the South End.