South End leaders against plan to utilize old hotel near “Methadone Mile”

BOSTON — With temperatures dropping and winter right around the corner, Mayor Michelle Wu said the city is running out of time to help people camped out along Boston’s Methadone Mile.

“This is a matter of basic health and life safety,” Wu said. “It is a failure of our systems for people to be living in the cold with no access to running water and heat.”

Wu said her goal is to have hundreds of beds available this month for men and women sleeping along Mass Ave and Melnea Cass Blvd, an area notorious for open drug use, homeless camps, and crime.

“My charge has been by mid-December we need to have 200 beds that will house all the residents currently in the encampments,” Wu said.

But South End leaders say the city’s proposal for using the old Roundhouse Suites hotel is a bad idea.

“I applaud that they’re looking at different places. I just can’t have them look here,” said Sue Sullivan, executive director of the Newmarket Business Association.

Sullivan said she participated in a meeting this week in which the mayor’s team proposed using several dozen rooms inside the Roundhouse to shelter people battling addiction. The Roundhouse, most recently known as the Best Western Plus Boston Hotel, is a vacant building on Mass Ave, several hundred yards from the homeless camp on Atkinson St.

Sullivan said using the Roundhouse doesn’t fix the health crisis because she worries drug dealers will continue to sell and tenants will continue to use in that area.

“I can’t support this,” Sullivan said. “There is no commitment right now that if we put these people in this hotel, that twenty more people aren’t going to show up and set up tents and we’re going to stop them.”

South End Forum Chair Steve Fox said using the Roundhouse is the same as adding a shelter to Mass & Cass, and goes against the goal of “decentralizing” the area.

“The Roundhouse is precisely the wrong location to put people who are struggling with addiction,” Fox said. “Every single neighborhood representative [at the city’s meeting] was opposed to the use of the Roundhouse. I’m increasingly concerned that even bringing up the Roundhouse as a possibility makes it a fait accompli.”

When asked about the controversy surrounding the Roundhouse, Wu said every solution is on the table.

“The primary barrier right now isn’t that people don’t want to go. It’s that there’s nowhere suitable for them to go. So that’s what we’re trying to solve and we’re getting very close to having all that fleshed out,” Wu said.

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