A TROUBLED ZONE
Roundhouse programs ending
Boston Medical Center is winding down the controversial Roundhouse Hotel shelter-clinic initiative at Mass and Cass, citing a “lack of long-term funding.”
BMC, the big South End hospital right near the troubled area, has been operating a multi-pronged operation out of the vacant Best Western Roundhouse Hotel at 891 Massachusetts Ave. in the middle of Mass and Cass since December 2021, housing homeless, providing clinical addiction services and doing outreach.
But now, “Boston Medical Center is planning to close its clinical programs at 891 Massachusetts Avenue by March 31 due to a lack of long-term funding,” a spokesman said in a statement to the Herald on Tuesday. “Funding for transitional housing at the site has been identified through June. BMC remains committed to continuing to provide a range of clinical services to treat substance use disorder at the hospital.”
The hospital didn’t put a firm end date on the transitional-housing initiative, but community leaders told the Herald the hospital had informed them that June would be the end of it.
The Roundhouse costs $7,487,000 a year for shelter services and $5,600,082 for the clinic, cash that comes from a combination of city funds and federal dollars. Last fall, Boston’s Mass and Cass coordinator said the lease and the funding both run through June, the end of the fiscal year, but no further information about the longer-term future of the site was available.
At the time, Tania Del Rio, Mayor Michelle Wu’s Mass and Cass pointwoman, said the roundhouse had been a “valuable resource” for people on the street there, but as for post-June, “We are actively looking for new sites so that we can decentralize” services from Mass and Cass.
That continues to be the city’s position, and it will evaluate the programing at the Roundhouse as the new fiscal year approaches.
Plans for the privatelyowned Roundhouse go back to the Janey administration in summer 2021, when the city and recovery provider Victory Programs hatched a proposal to use the hotel in a similar fashion. VP, though, changed its mind in the face of heavy opposition from community members and local elected officials who worried that placing this in the already service-dense corridor would just exacerbate the problems there.
But when Wu took office later that year, she revived the plan, partnering with BMC, and it’s been in place since. the city and the hospital have said it’s important to have this kind of outreach and shelter right there in the heart of what’s sometimes called Methadone Mile, where an openair drug market continues to flourish and people come from all over the state to use and buy drugs and live on the streets.
Neighborhood leaders who’d opposed the program from the start sounded notes of measured optimism.
“The programs and all were good — just not here,” said Sue Sullivan, head of the New Market Business Improvement District. “What this will do is push to get people housing rather than staying in the Roundhouse indefinitely.”
Sullivan, who said hospital officials called her over the weekend to tell her that the BMC board had made this decision, said her “understanding is that between now and May, housing will be found for the 60 people who are in there currently.”
Steve Fox of the South End Forum neighborhood association, who said he’d also been called by the hospital, said the locals are “more than relieved.”
Like Sullivan, he said both the addiction-recovery and shelter components are “essential,” but, “The worst place in the world to locate those is Mass and Cass.”
Neighborhood groups negotiated with BMC for months to try to come to a memorandum of agreement around the use of the Roundhouse, but the two sides still never have signed one.
The Boston Public Health Commission said in a statement that they’re “grateful” for BMC’s work.
“The Boston Public Health Commission will continue to serve residents with substance use disorders through comprehensive harm reduction efforts through our AHOPE program and outreach and clinical services at the Engagement Center in partnership with Boston Health Care for the Homeless,” a spokesman said. “Additionally, BPHC continue to work with Victory Programs and Whittier Street Health Center to direct individuals to their day spaces so they can access the wraparound services they need.”