Redeveloping Shattuck Hospital right into a multifaceted campus that includes medical companies, emergency shelters and everlasting supportive housing wouldn’t lead to a Mass and Cass 2.0, in line with officers overseeing the plan.
The venture, not but permitted, would tackle a number of the largest issues which have turned the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard right into a drug-addled homeless encampment, officers say.
Shattuck Hospital would get replaced with three buildings at Franklin Park that would supply as much as 446 remedy beds and 405 items of supportive housing for people and households.
Services could be built-in, and inpatient and outpatient medical companies would prioritize longer-term look after folks recovering from opioid use, with these in acute remedy accounting for lower than 10% of the inhabitants on website, mentioned Rob Koenig, govt director of strategic packages for Boston Medical Center.
“We are confident that this site is not the next Mass and Cass because it is a different mix of programs and services that are designed to help with recovery and address the failure point in today’s model of care,” Koenig mentioned. “That failure point is the root cause of a crisis like Mass and Cass – a broken treatment and recovery continuum, inadequate housing services for people who need them.”
BMC is spearheading the proposal with six different city-based well being and social service suppliers. The Healey administration in June provisionally designated the coalition for redevelopment of the Shattuck campus, that means venture plans might begin being refined.
The BMC-led coalition once more introduced plans Tuesday in a discussion board following an preliminary assembly in late July. An in-person open home on the venture is scheduled for Sept. 19 at Lena Park Community Center in Dorchester.
Many of the deliberate choices have been profitable on the present Shattuck campus for a few years, Koenig mentioned. But the venture seems to additional enhance integration of companies in addition to housing safety for the homeless, he mentioned.
Residents in supportive housing would obtain case administration, job coaching, counseling and different help companies, whereas being chargeable for lease.
Pine Street Inn, which might function supportive housing items for people, deploys outreach staff to Mass and Cass to interact with individuals who reside there. The proposed campus mannequin might deliver a whole lot of aid to the town’s housing and healthcare panorama, mentioned Jan Griffin, the company’s vice chairman of housing growth.
“If we could solve homelessness, how would it happen? It would happen with a continuum that doesn’t have holes in it,” she mentioned. “Many of the people who have ended up at Mass and Cass have fallen through the cracks in the system.”
Koenig mentioned neighborhood security is a high precedence for the venture. BMC’s inside staff of public security specialists will kind a plan with neighborhood companions, legislation enforcement and neighborhood residents, he mentioned.
Some residents from Jamaica Plain and different close by neighborhoods are nonetheless involved in regards to the attainable risks which will come if the venture have been to change into actuality.
“There’s a lot of collateral trauma placed on children and people living in the neighborhood of Mass and Cass that not anybody has addressed,” Karen Grundt mentioned. “Why do we just want to see it get larger and in a different area?”
Source: www.bostonherald.com”