Revamping Central Square

would any first-world urban area look to Downtown Crossing for style improvement tips?

The problem facing Central Square is fairly simple: CASPAR. It's one of the region's few "wet" shelters. It has a nominal capacity of 107 beds, but routinely hosts as many as 130. And after the sun rises, it turns those residents out into the surrounding streets. That is, into Central Square. They drink. They litter. They commit petty crimes. They urinate and defecate in the streets. They stew cigarette butts around themselves. They sleep on the benches. They fight. They yell profanities.

It doesn't make for the region's most attractive shopping district.

On paper, the shelter serves five communities - Cambridge, Somerville, Arlington, Watertown and Belmont. In practice, it attracts homeless individuals with chronic substance abuse problems over a substantially greater range. Even in those communities, that's 275,000 people who manage to rid themselves of the daily hassle of confronting homeless drunks by dumping them in the laps of the few thousand residents of Central Square. Those communities pitch in to cover the operating costs of the shelter. But they don't pony up for the ancillary costs.

There's absolutely no reason that Central Square businesses ought to have to cover these costs themselves by forming a BID. There are better and more cost-effective solutions here than employing 'greeters' to roust the homeless and make them feel unwelcome. For starters, the five communities that are dumping their drunks in the square could pay for full-time workers to keep Central Square clean, and for a full-time police patrolman to walk the beat while CASPAR is closed. CASPAR itself could behave more responsibly, denying admission not just to those who engage in abusive behaviors in the shelter - which they do already - but also to those who engage in similar behaviors in the surrounding streets. If a resident can lose his bed by assaulting a staff member in the shelter, shouldn't he also lose his bed if he assaults another homeless man on the street?

When Cambridge began to overhaul Harvard Square, it expanded the shelter beds available in Central, in a deliberate effort to shift its problem population. Well, now it's time to pay the piper. Central is similarly poised for revitalization. There's no place to kick the can further down the road. The solution is to pay all the indirect costs that have been foisted onto Central Square. It's in the city's longterm interest to do so. And it's in the interest of the surrounding communities to make the burden of CASPAR more sustainable, because if they don't ante up, they may very well face a backlash sufficient to shut CASPAR down. And the very last thing that the hipsters of Somerville or the yuppies of Arlington want is a wet shelter in their own neighborhoods.

Central Square is just gonna become what Harvard is now, a sanitized boring hangout for pretentious yuppie douchebags and idiot tourists. Woo.

I lived near Central Square (aka Central Scare) in the distant 90s. It struck me as Cambridge's area to find the feeling of urban grit. What was always impressive though was how quickly the grit gave way to an old urban New England neighborhood feel as soon as I passed First Baptist Church on Magazine Street.

On weekends there was a group of fellows who preached some strange interpretation of the Pentateuch. They even wore costumes which I supposed was to evoke some ancient Hebraic tribe. While I thought they were odd I enjoyed watching and listening to them. They made Central Square a Speaker's Corner. We could use more of that. It made the public space something that was more than merely a place to pass through to get to work or store.

What I liked most about Central Square, but don't know if this applies now, is that it was an area where urban flora and fauna was an appropriate phrase. Gritty rather than shiny, more down to earth than highfalutin. I don't remember if the clothier at Magazine Street which was forced out when the overscaled building was built sold custom made clothes, but I am sure they would have sold custom made and not bespoken clothes.