PIP Shelter in Worcester.
The tour of the PIP Shelter on Main Street in Worcester on July 26 starts out as a routine, almost ceremonial, visit by Lt. Gov. Kerry Healey, who chairs the state’s Interagency Council to End Homelessness. Healey is there by invitation of officials from the Framingham–based South Middlesex Opportunity Council, which took over the shelter’s operations last year.
After a briefing by SMOC officials on their plans to reduce crowding at the shelter by moving clients to scattered locations around the region, Healey is led around the four-story shelter, where she looks at sleeping quarters, the medical area, and the women’s facilities. Though PIP puts up more than 100 persons a night, there is hardly a homeless person to be seen, apart from a small recovery group meeting.
“This is my workday,” says Healey, when asked about the timing of her visit. “This is the time I could spend talking to the directors.” Healey adds that she is there mainly to learn about what SMOC is doing to reduce the number of people on the street. “That [population] causes a great drain on the health care system. We need to be able to create stable environments.”
There is nothing stable about the environment she had walked into, however. Some three dozen nearby residents are standing outside holding signs decrying what one of them calls the influx of “derelicts” that the shelter brings into Main South, a low-income neighborhood where open drug use and prostitution are ongoing nuisances.
“Things have just gotten worse since SMOC took over,” says William Breault, a neighborhood activist and president of the Main South Alliance for Public Safety, who has long fought for closing the PIP. “There are three sex offenders who are registered with the PIP Shelter’s address.” He hands Healey a thick packet of his grievances.
State Rep. John Fresolo, a Worcester Democrat who is going along on the tour, corners Healey and asks her to return to meet with the shelter’s neighbors. (Healey agrees, and City Councilor Barbara Haller, who represents the district in City Hall, reports that Healey’s office has promised a meeting in October. “What Healey got was a very narrow, one-sided perspective [about] a shelter that wasn’t even operating when she was there,” says Haller.)
The PIP Shelter is a longstanding sore point in the state’s second-largest city. The shelter was founded as the Public Inebriate Program, a place for drunks to come in out of the cold and sleep it off. In a public relations move, the name was changed to the People in Peril Shelter in 1999, but the program’s policy has remained the same: Any homeless person can receive overnight accommodations, even those who are actively intoxicated or high.
This makes PIP something of a rarity, as other shelters in the region require their guests to be sober. Only a handful of other shelters across the state accept intoxicated clients. Boston’s Pine Street Inn is a “wet” shelter, and SMOC also operates such a program in Framingham. Wet shelters exist in Gloucester and Lawrence as well, according to the Massachusetts Coalition for the Homeless.
This tolerance of the Achilles’ heel of many homeless adults has made the PIP a constant source of controversy. It has long been seen as a magnet for drunks and addicts, much to the chagrin of activists working to rid Main South of drugs and crime. Indeed, shelter director Carlos Cunningham explains the scarcity of homeless people during Healey’s visit as evidence of the shelter’s responsiveness to neighborhood concerns.
“We recognize the safety and security concerns about seeing people loitering out here during the day and preying on our clients,” says Cunningham. “So we have a policy that only those committed to furthering their recovery can be here during the day. After 4 p.m. is when anyone is able to come in.”
In fact, the very plans to disburse PIP clients to other sites that SMOC officials are touting to Healey have already gotten the agency into more hot water. A few weeks earlier, SMOC had raised a commotion in Worcester’s affluent West Side when it purchased a house to be used for a women’s shelter. Soon after, Democratic state Sen. Harriette Chandler saw to it that $200,000 was cut from SMOC’s state funding.
Did Healey know she was walking into the middle of one city’s war over how to treat the homeless? “I read the papers,” she says. “I know what’s going on.”
Noah Schaffer is news editor for Worcester Magazine.