-It’s not surprising that the only thing that the director
seemed to take from the July 24, 2019 meeting was that one of the guests said
that she thinks that there are guests who are taking too many blankets in the
dormitories at night. If there are
guests who put a blanket on the mattress and sleep on the blanket, that’s to make
the bed more comfortable. Not only are
the mattresses plastic, which is understandable but not particularly
comfortable, some of the mattresses have been reported by other guests as having springs
very close to the surface of the mattresses, which makes them difficult to
sleep on.
Some of the mattresses are too wide for the bed frames that
they’ve been crammed into by the shelter’s maintenance staff. That makes it impossible to put sheets on
those mattresses.
When I went back to the shelter on the evening of July 24,
2019, several hours after the community meeting, there was a new sign on the
linen closet in the 2nd-floor dormitory. The sign says “STAFF ONLY.” That wasn’t the first time that it has seemed
to me that the director would like to make the entire shelter a place where
only staff are allowed to be. I really
don’t think that she likes homeless people.
-While I’d rather not single out individual guests when I
can help it, Guest 7 rarely attends a community meeting without making a speech
to the effect that guests who criticize the shelter are doing something
wrong. Perhaps she has never read the
list of guests’ rights which are printed in the Pine Street Inn’s brochure; one
of those rights is to make suggestions to improve the shelter. At the July 24, 2019 community meeting, Guest
7 characterized as a “gift” the recent policy changes and pilot which have stopped
the women’s shelter’s previous practice of making guests line up outside the
building, on the sidewalk, for an hour or hours before being allowed into the
shelter at 3:15 p.m. The policy which
changed the shelter’s opening time to 1:00 p.m., and the pilot which is allowing
guests to stay in the shelter’s small, walled garden from 8:30 a.m., when the
shelter closes, until 1:00 p.m., are both the results of years of advocacy by
other guests. Many of the guests aren’t
aware of the efforts that a few guests have made to encourage the shelter to be
less punitive. I don’t need to take credit
for that advocacy, but it was typical of the director to stand there smiling
while Guest 7 ranted about how ungrateful other guests are.
-Although the Pine Street Inn describes itself at its
website as “New England's leading provider of housing, shelter,
street outreach and job training to homeless (people),” it is totally dependent
on shelters which are open during the day, such as Woods-Mullen, Rosie’s Place,
The Women’s Lunch Place, and St. Francis House.
The Pine Street Inn has cast the burden of what to do with homeless
people during the day onto those other providers for decades, although it doesn’t
say that at its social media. More
recently, the Whole Foods which was built on Harrison Avenue a few years ago has taken on the
burden of babysitting the homeless people whose major issues the Pine Street
Inn doesn’t even try to address and whom it throws onto the street when the
Pine Street Inn closes at 8:30 am., Monday-Saturday. I’m sure that nobody from the Pine Street Inn’s
administration has told anyone at Whole Foods “Thanks for providing tables,
chairs, bathrooms, air conditioning in the summer, heat in the winter, and a
roof year-round to the people whose needs we’re neglecting as much as we can.”
Although the Pine Street Inn is enabled to
shut its doors to homeless people every morning by the day shelters and one
overnight shelter which I have just mentioned, all of those shelters are almost
a mile away from the Pine Street Inn.
You can verify that statement by using Google Maps. The Pine Street Inn women’s shelter provides
a one-way van ride on some mornings, for a limited number of guests, to the
Women’s Lunch Place and to Boston Medical Center, which is also near
Woods-Mullen. The Pine Street Inn women’s
shelter doesn’t provide any van rides to those places for physically disabled
guests; it will, upon request, provide a one-way cab voucher. I have heard that the cab voucher is not
really feasible, that waiting for the cab takes forever and also that it’s
difficult to get a walker or wheelchair into the cab. I have also often joked with other guests
about the one-way transportation which the Pine Street Inn provides to the
shelters which do the Pine Street Inn’s work for it during the day; what is the
Pine Street Inn saying to its guests, “When those other places close in the
afternoon, just keep going in whatever direction the van/cab dropped you off in
this morning?”
-I was struck by the director of the women’s
shelter responding to what I had to say during the meeting by telling me “We
don’t have to have community meeting at all.”
The monthly community meeting is one of the only times that the director
of the women’s shelter is around to interact with guests as a group. She does meet with guests individually or
otherwise communicate with them individually, and she does occasionally
participate in shelter operations that are normally run by staff and
supervisors, but I have yet to talk to any guest whose primary description of
the director has included the words “down to earth,” “easy to talk to,” or “really
caring.” Apparently, she considers
having a monthly community meeting to be a special privilege that she is giving
to the guests.
-It was also interesting when the director
admitted that the Woods-Mullen shelter is a really awful place to have to spend
any time. That’s known throughout the
Pine Street Inn shelter and the homeless population at large; it’s not known to the public, which assumes that, because the Woods-Mullen shelter is run by the Boston Public Health Commission, it must be fit for human habitation. Someone once told me that the building which is now the Woods-Mullen shelter used to be the city morgue; I can't confirm that. The Woods-Mullen shelter is where most of the guests of the Pine Street Inn women's shelter go when they are given Suspensions of Services by the Pine Street Inn. You'd think that knowing how bad the conditions are at Woods-Mullen would deter everyone who works at the Pine Street Inn from threatening guests with SOS's except as a last resort to a situation that can't be de-escalated despite all efforts, but it doesn't. Far from it.
-As I wrote the last time that the Pine
Street Inn women’s shelter had a Narcan training, I don’t argue with having
those trainings at the shelter. I do
think it’s deplorable that the Pine Street Inn does NOTHING substantial to
address substance abuse or support recovery other than to send the message that
it knows that people are going to overdose.
It would be nice if there were a methadone clinic at the Pine Street
Inn, rather than the closest clinic being 1.4 miles away (Google Maps). At the very least, there ought to be daily
meetings and support groups for substance abuse and for the other major issues
that keep homeless people homeless, including but not limited to trauma from
sexual abuse, domestic violence, loss and grieving, having a criminal record,
mental illness or being perceived to have mental illness, disability, and aging. If you want a job that is one-dimensional,
work with some other population, but don’t blame homeless people for the total
systems’ failure to treat us as if we are people who have problems rather than
as if we are a subspecies whose problems you have no obligation to address
because they’re too much for you. If you
think that our problems are too much for you, what do you think those problems
are for us, particularly in settings whose administrations are happy to think
that we’re a bunch of losers who really want to spend the rest of our lives in
homeless shelters? Yes, I know; no
administrator of a homeless shelter is going to call homeless people “losers”
in front of anyone. That doesn’t mean
that’s not how we’re treated.
-I think there ought to be a lot more effort by the Pine
Street Inn women’s shelter to encourage guests to look for work and to connect
them with resources to help them get work.
It’s not judgmental to do that; we’re subjected to plenty of judgmental
behavior without it. I don’t object to
giving homeless women coloring books and board games for recreation, but I don’t
think that should be a substitute for taking their potential for independence
seriously, even if they have forgotten or never knew how to take responsibility
for their lives.
Copyright Homeless Humans, July 31, 2019
Copyright Homeless Humans, July 31, 2019
