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Opposition grows to plans to expand Shattuck Hospital

The Bay State Banner reports residents living near the southern end of Franklin Park are less than thrilled with plans by the state and non-profit groups to transform the hospital grounds with 405 units of supportive housing for formerly homeless people, 326 beds for people being treated for substance abuse and 120 emergency shelter beds.

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Just like the one in South Dorchester. Build this and do it asap. The location is ideal and a must. Stop with the nonsense.

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Why in the world is this location 'ideal'?

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It is a site that the existing structures are a blight, it is close to the T and right on bus lines, and it is surrounded by beautiful parkland while still being walking distance from an actual neighborhood.

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For anyone in JP or in Roslindale who is against this proposal but was all in for similar housing on Morrissey Boulevard, check if you commented here on how evil opposition to supporting housing is. Thanks.

https://www.universalhub.com/2023/bpda-approves-plan-convert-morrissey-b...

We just don’t want you to be, in the words of John Forbes Kerry, to be for something before you were against it.

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With all that opioid settlement money please stop giving it to bean counters who want to implement “new and better” programming and rebuild Long Island ASAP. It will give people work, including residents who can build from the bottom up a true recovery community w a farm, tech center, arts program, and training for any number of jobs.

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Seconded completely. The new facility here in Shattuck will largely benefit whoever gets the construction contract....not the patients nor the community.

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Weren’t you calling Neponset residents all sorts of *ist for opposing a similar project in their neighborhood?

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This is housing for people who need to be able to get to jobs, training programs, support programs, and who are reintegrating into society.

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Build what we can now, and also rebuild Long Island when we can in the future.

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I fully support this project as I supported the one in dorchester. We need more of these kinds of projects projects everywhere and those who oppose them are wrong everywhere. If you hate seeing homeless people this is how you solve it, you house them.

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In essence, I agree with you, but I will point out that the Morrissey Blvd plan is not the the same as this. This has a component of hundreds of treatment beds which is quite a bit different.

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The most laughable part of the article is when people start saying that the Shattuck is in Roxbury. Hasn't been a part of Roxbury since 1851.

Still, the Shattuck has been a human services location since it was built. It was the place where residents of Cedar Junction used to get medical services not offered locally. I used to do work at the homeless shelter right by the road. It's no Long Island, but it's a heck of a better place than the industrial heartland of Newmarket.

Count me as a YIMBY. And for the hotel plan, there's merit to it, but I can see why the residents have angst about it.

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Someone has enough balls to do some investigative journalism and find out just how a project universally opposed by everyone got approved while projects with next to zero opposition are getting shut down left and right. I guarantee some city officials got some nice fat bags of cash slipped to them under the table with taxpayers on the hook for a cool $50,000,000 worth of… check notes… fresh paint and sparkle?

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Take all the contract money that is going into this and rebuild the bridge to Long Island. With this amount of beds for people in substance abuse crisis, Franklin Park will turn into a free range prison yard. It's unfair for the community and especially to the children who can't have a say in this which will be tantamount to making Franklin Park unusable. Be the adults the kids in this community need and stand up against this plan. Honestly those who fly the espoused civil rights flags of cause celebre are sticking this blight in a community largely of color. So gross.

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...racist

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Homeless people should not actually have to be quarantined on an island in the harbor. Having supportive housing near transit, park space, and an actual neighborhood is good and I welcome it to my neighborhood, as will most of the community, just like we did with the Pine Street Inn proposal now under construction (except one Monty Gold).

It is telling you mention prisons because the existing facility is a blight that actually resembles a prison. This looks like a far better and more human design that will also expand and improve the green space, while adding housing and services we need in this city. It appears to be a genuinely good project and the kind we should be building more of not throwing fits about because of the fear of seeing people you see as less than you in public spaces you probably don't even go to in the first place.

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We can do this and the Long Island rebuild, if we have the will. God knows we need these resources.

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Much like the weather, lots of folks talk about this dilemma, but no one to anything about it, especially if the solution will be in their backyard

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When the state decided to relocate Shattuck Hospital (from where it has been located in JP since 1954) to the South End literally within shouting distance of Mass and Cass, no one in the South End was asked if this was a good idea.

We were told it was a done deal for a host of reasons but that we would have an opportunity to join with dozens of other neighbors from areas surrounding the campus as well as providers, electeds, and officials in a joint state-community-driven process to explore how this public health campus would be redeveloped to meet our most pressing public health challenges.

It should be noted that the Secretary of Health publicly told the South End that they recognized the imposition the new Shattuck Hospital would have in a location that was already heavily overburdened with services and providers and that they wanted South End neighbors to participate in the redevelopment planning process to help find campus use solutions that would ease the additional burdens they were placing on us as a neighborhood.

We were but a couple of lone voices on an Advisory Group that met for a year plus and ultimately overwhelmingly chose to ensure the Shattuck campus would be redeveloped to address the addiction, recovery, mental health, and supportive housing needs that everyone agreed constitute our greatest public health challenge. Those recommendations were accepted by the Health and Human Services secretariat and then by DCAM the agency that manages all state facilities/properties. The redevelopment plan we all put together is solid, it is focused, it has the right partners, and most importantly it is the right thing to do.

Suggestions that these desperately needed services or this plan should go to some other neighborhood or that any plan for an existing public health campus to continue to serve a public health purpose is somehow "racist" are real mysteries to those of us who worked in public sessions with JP and Franklin Park neighbors and many others who support this redevelopment plan.

To be fair, there are a few folks who have from the very day the hospital move was announced have been opposed to any redevelopment of the campus. Some publicly suggested that trees serve a public health purpose and therefore we should bulldoze any treatment or housing structures and be content that new tree growth will address our public health challenges. The Emerald Necklace Conservancy and some voices in the Garrison Trotter neighborhood have been quite consistent in advancing their view that Shattuck should be returned to open space. But after multiple open public meetings and careful consideration of all the options, that was not the recommendation of the Advisory Group and in my view as one voice on the panel, it was not the right approach to redevelopment of an existing public health facility when we are facing a serious public health crisis. By the way, Franklin Park is 527 acres and the Shattuck Campus is just a 13 acre carve out--a substantial part of which will remain open space in the redevelopment plan.

The South End has been doing its part as a welcoming community in addressing public health challenges for decades. We have more shelters per square inch than any other neighborhood in the city and we have more services offered to the most needy than any other. We were first to offer refuge and treatment in the AIDS crisis, we have done more to host unsheltered homeless than any other city neighborhood by far. No one is trying to move Mass and Cass to the Shattuck Campus (the red herring when proposals for more public health facilities are suggested). But this combined addiction/mental health/homelessness crisis is so large, so insidious, so pervasive, we need help. The South End cannot do it alone, we need help from every neighborhood and are grateful for the enormous support from the JP community. Beyond Shattuck, we will need Long Island to be redeveloped into a Recovery Campus offering soup to nuts services and treatments.

We thank all the state agencies and the redevelopment partners and providers (and rockstars like Sheila Dillon) for their willingness to work tirelessly to find sensible and realistic solutions. We are proud of what we have recommended for Shattuck and we think many others will be too.

Steve Fox
Chair, South End Forum

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the money spent on junkies and bums could be saved by investing in a bus ticket and happy meal for every one of them.

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Your selective empathy only makes sense if you view homelessness as an individual problem caused exclusively by personal failings and ignore that for example there are homeless kids. In a completely unaffordable city housing market people will fall through the cracks sometimes though absolutely no fault of their own just bad fucking luck. People should also be able to make mistakes without losing the right to shelter. I do not want to live in a society that take your attitude towards people who need help. That is the attitude of much of the country and then after shipping off their homeless people to LA and San Fransisco they act like those cities are singularly responsible for homelessness. I am glad to live in a city that generally, although far from perfectly (we need to stop the sweeps and establish a right to housing/housing first policy), tries to take a different approach, that is to actually house people who need housing. I think it will be more successful in the long run, and regardless it is the right thing to do.

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You really suck.

Why can't we have both?

Oh, but you and your family magically won't be "junkies and bums" when life throws you a curveball and you become unhoused. Riiiiiighhhhhttt.

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And what do you do when whoever gets this bus full of "junkies and bums" buys them a bus ticket right on back?

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Thank you Steve and the rest of the board for caring so deeply about our city and the people who live here.

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Unfortunately, I can’t see any comments on the banner for this article

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Before you open your mouth try living here and waking up to squatters in your car and your toddler staring at the scene of the new normal. If you want to accommodate the very people who this plan is for, then why haven't you BY NOW allowed the couch in your spare room be made available??

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That because people haven't housed homeless people on their couch we shouldn't build supportive housing for homeless people? How does that follow? If you don't want to see people so desperate they need to break into a car to avoid freezing over night, the solution is to house them. You are not more of a victim than the homeless people themselves for having to see homeless people. Get a sense of perspective, god damn.

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This plan is designed to address problems that you are yammering about.

You not getting that puts you at risk of living those problems down the line.

Oh, and I've temporarily housed multiple young people so that they don't fall into the spiraling trap that being unhoused becomes.

Please supply pictures of people squatting in your car.

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why aren't you out there with a wheelbarrow of tar doing it yourself?

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Do you feel about the city storing its tar and wheelbarrows in your backyard, needless to say without paying you a penny?

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I suspect this is the same group of people who opposed removing the Casey overpass. There are people who live in the area who support this project.

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The MBTA held a meeting regarding the rebuild of the Arborway bus garage to expand to 200 electric buses. The group of people that were there were more concerned about the DPW salt piles and the mayor not being there to speak against the project than the people who will use those buses to get around. One of protestors compared this to stopping I-95 being built in that area (and what replaced it? The Orange Line, which is now under speed restrictions after the MBTA pinky-swore they could fix it in a month and it hasn't been fixed since, along with the rest of the rapid transit lines).

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The MBTA is planning to convert and expand the Arborway garage from a temporary CNG bus garage to a permanent battery electric bus facility, able to hold 200 buses, of while there will be several 60 foot buses to supplement the overcrowding on many of the lines (such as Routes 28, 32, and 39, and possibly Route 34 and 36). It would not open until 2028, when the CNG buses are beyond their useful service life and would be retired and decommissioned.

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There’s even a way to prove things- what was the stance of the Stony Brook neighborhood association, cited in this article, towards the removal of the overpass?

Nope, the overpass haters, the bus yard haters, and the social services at Franklin Park haters have a lot of overlap.

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It seems to me that that section of JP (near Forest Hills) are full of control freaks and resisters who want to keep their neighborhood free of outsiders (of all races) and squelch any true progress.

The same amount of resistance happened when the Arborway garage was temporarily built to house CNG buses in 2003. If my memory serves, there were supposed to be 150 buses, but the residents and neighborhood groups that lived in that area threw their weight and reduced the amount of buses to 120.

Hence, they threw a tantrum when the T gave their 15% build review because they thought they should have been consulted first as they think they control the neighborhood, and all that bluster about I-95 and the mayor is BS.

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The area around Forest Hills is the area of JP that has seen the most development in recent years. What are you talking about?

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Does everyone forget the brutal assault on civil rights icon Jean McQuire by a homeless individual in Franklin Park.

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So it was just empty virtue signaling after all - talking the talk but not walking the walk. Anyone who opposed the Morrisey zombie corral was all sorts of *ist but now that there’s a potential zombie corral in JP all those bleeding hearts suddenly turned to stone.

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They are the reason why we have these problems, from the homeless problem to the T not going to places it should.

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I mean, there's a difference between supportive housing and emergency shelter. That's two separate levels of need with two separate populations. I support more supportive housing and transitional support but emergency shelter beds can really impact an area

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