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Wu acknowledges ‘pain’ of state plan to use Roxbury rec. center as overflow shelter site
The Healey administration could use the Melnea A. Cass Recreational Complex in Roxbury to accommodate some of the hundreds of migrant families waiting for shelter.
Boston Mayor Michelle Wu responded to Gov. Maura Healey’s potential plan to use the Melnea A. Cass Recreational Complex in Roxbury as an overflow shelter site for migrants. Wu said she is working closely with the state to find solutions amid the ongoing migrant crisis, but expressed some frustration around the idea of using the Cass complex.
“For the first community where this is being proposed to be Roxbury, a community that over so many decades has faced disinvestment, redlining, disproportionate outcomes, it’s very painful,” Wu said during an appearance on WBUR’s “Radio Boston” Monday morning.
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This pain, she said, is rooted in familiarity. That sentiment was relayed to officials clearly during a listening session Friday about the proposal.
Amid historic levels of migrations, the emergency shelter system in Massachusetts has been under stress for months. Healey declared a state of emergency last year, and instituted a 7,500-family cap on the system. For months she has been pressuring federal officials and lawmakers to give Massachusetts more funding to deal with the crisis and make it easier for migrants to obtain work permits.
But the flow of migrants into the state shows no signs of slowing. More than 600 families were on a waitlist for emergency shelter as of Friday, and dozens of families have been forced to sleep at Logan Airport.
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“There are no good options,” Wu said.
Overflow space for those on the waitlist is necessary, officials say, and the Cass complex could host about 100 families, The Boston Globe reported. The complex, with its 24,000-square-foot indoor field house, is the state Department of Conservation and Recreation’s only year-round indoor facility. An overflow site could be set up there as soon as mid-week.
Healey is doing “her very best,” Wu said, but the move to use a location like the Cass complex is notable.
“It feels like a particular inflection point when we are now taking offline buildings that are beloved and well-used and dedicated to community programming because we now have such a crisis,” Wu said.
City officials worked with the state to assess all options for a potential overflow site, but nothing besides the Cass complex was found to meet the specifications outlined by the state, Wu said. Her administration largely knew this, having similarly evaluated many locations soon after she took office in an effort to find low-threshold housing for homeless people.
“We’ve done this already, we knew what the spaces were, none of them worked very well, and the ones that did work well we used already for the shelter that was needed,” she said.
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Boston is already hosting about 1,400 of the roughly 6,000 emergency shelter units that the state has, the largest of any community, Wu said. The state’s “right-to-shelter” law ensures shelter for pregnant women and families with children, and Boston is working to help the individual adults not guaranteed shelter at the state level. About 25% of the spots within city-run shelters or those operated by partners like Pine Street Inn are currently occupied by recently-arrived migrants, Wu said.
The city will continue to “step up” to help, she added. But when asked if her administration had a choice regarding the use of the Cass complex, Wu clarified that it is under the jurisdiction of the Healey administration.
City officials are preparing for the likelihood that the Cass complex is used as an overflow site. It will fall on the city to manage the public works implications of such a move, to replace the programming at the complex, and to ensure residents have as little disruption to their lives as possible, Wu said.
Residents have told officials clearly that they want a commitment for this to only be a temporary measure during the colder months of the year. The Cass complex is a vital resource year-round, but accommodates more people during the summer when its outdoor pool opens up.
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Local officials need to keep up the pressure on the federal government, Wu said. She is set to travel to Washington, D.C., Tuesday to echo Healey’s calls for more resources and to speak with Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas.
Wu touched on the national political landscape amid reports that former President Donald Trump is working to squander a deal in Congress that would decrease the stream of migrants so that he can campaign on a platform blaming President Joe Biden for the crisis.
“It can feel like this isn’t about people at all, that this is about politics, this is about positioning, this is about clicks or donations or rhetoric that’s trying to fuel this hate machine preying upon fear mongering, and then people are just falling through the cracks and it’s up to other levels of government to try to step in,” Wu said.
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