Let’s honor Carvell Curry’s memory
This winter, as temperatures plunged into single digits, those without shelter were barred from South Station, a place that once provided refuge in extreme conditions. As more people become homeless, communities across the state have opened warming centers and set up make-shift beds. While these basic accommodations are critically needed to save lives, as a Commonwealth, we are not confronting the root of the problem: a chronic lack of affordable permanent housing with support services.
The tragic loss of Carvell Curry’s life as described in Shirley Leung’s powerful column (“This should never happen again,” Business, Feb. 9) is the result of a systemic failure to provide the resources desperately needed by our most vulnerable neighbors. People without proper housing are literally fighting for their lives during this brutal winter. And our current policies and practices are failing them.
We must commit to creating housing coupled with essential wraparound services. Yes, people need emergency shelter tonight, but to end their homelessness they need stable housing. Tackling the housing crisis requires resolve and sustained funding to prevent these crises in the first place. As the federal government pulls back its investment in housing across the country, Massachusetts must do more to resolve this crisis here at home.
We can honor Curry’s memory by making life-saving investments in stable housing and support services. Otherwise, as Leung reminds us, we are just “waiting for the next Carvell Curry.”
Joyce Tavon
Boston
The writer is the CEO of the the Massachusetts Housing and Shelter Alliance.
We must green-light more recovery campuses
Former Mayor Walsh is correct that nobody wants to take responsibility (“A ‘disgrace’: No one in power wants to own the problem after a homeless person died outside South Station,” Business, Feb. 16). However, it was Mayor Walsh in 2014 who deemed the bridge to Long Island unsafe and, in the blink of an eye, closed it, cutting off access to the recovery services that were then offered on the island.
This city and state need more psychiatric beds and supportive housing. There are hundreds of acres of state-owned land occupied by closed state hospitals and schools. Why is there reluctance to create more supportive housing there?
The Lemuel Shattuck Hospital in Jamaica Plain was once the site of 18 tiny houses with services built a few years ago, which are now all shuttered. Why? The Boston Medical Center also wanted to build housing and recovery services on the campus. I believe the BMC would have run it efficiently, effectively, and safely, but that plan has been put on indefinite hold due to NIMBY issues — despite the nearest neighbor being a public park.
Some campus projects have been nixed because of the stigma associated with placing vulnerable people together, reminiscent of institutions. But I think letting those who are mentally ill and/or addicted die in the streets should cast a stigma — not on those who are ill but on the society that should be caring for the neediest among us.
Laura Logue Rood
Boston
The writer is a clinical nurse specialist, retired director at Massachusetts Mental Health Center, and former director of nursing at Bellevue Hospital Center in New York.
