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Tag: Lowell Transitional Living Center

  • Lowell’s Back Central neighborhood a ‘mini Mass and Cass’

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    LOWELL — During last Tuesday’s City Council meeting, Councilor Corey Belanger called the city’s Back Central neighborhood a “mini Mass and Cass,” referring to the area of Boston plagued by the same homeless, drug and crime crisis that has been growing for several years in Lowell’s poorest neighborhood.

    “On the back of Charles Street … the sidewalk was completely overrun, tents on the sidewalk, open-air drug use going on,” he said. “We need help.”

    Between March and September, the Lowell Police Department recorded a staggering 10,000 police dispatch entries in the densely populated neighborhood, which is roughly bounded by Appleton Street to the north, Chambers Street to the south, Thorndike Street to the west and Lawrence Street to the east.

    The police calls resulted in more than 18,000 officer call-offs, reflecting the significant resources required to manage incidents in this area. During this same period, 606 arrests were made — or on average, 100 per month — with 117 individuals arrested two or more times, and 20 individuals arrested five or more times.

    Councilors Corey Robinson and Erik Gitschier’s motion requested City Manager Tom Golden have a conversation between the council and key stakeholders centered around “challenges with our transient community.”

    Golden said he was trying to “work toward a solution” on what he described as a “revolving door” of people being arrested by the police only to be released back out on the streets by the judges at Lowell District Court.

    “There’s a lot going on here,” he said. “I can report back.”

    But councilors, while praising the city’s policing and social outreach efforts, were exasperated by the lack of coordination between the courts, state-level departments and other social and legislative agencies.

    “We need everybody together to help on this, otherwise we’re just going to spin our tires,” Gitschier said. “Send them down to the courthouse, they’re going to come right out of the courthouse and these numbers are just going to continue to escalate and escalate and no one really gets help. And that’s the sad part — people are not getting help.”

    Although not exclusively a homeless problem, based on figures released by the LPD and the Office of Homeless Initiatives, which is under the purview of the Department of Health and Human Services, the rise in arrests of homeless people tracked with the rise in homelessness.

    The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development defines individuals as homeless if they lack a “fixed, regular and adequate nighttime address.” Last winter’s federally mandated point-in-time count, conducted during the early morning hours of Jan. 30, reported 250 homeless people in Lowell.

    Two hundred were sheltered through Community Teamwork Inc.’s hotel program in Chelmsford, and in both regular and emergency beds provided through the Lowell Transitional Living Center on Middlesex Street in Downtown Lowell. There were 50 unsheltered people living outdoors.

    Those unsheltered people were mostly living in squalid encampments scattered throughout the city, including South Common Park, a 22.5-acre public green space in the city’s Back Central neighborhood.

    The City Council passed an ordinance in November 2024 making it unlawful to camp on public property in the city of Lowell. The civil ordinance is enforceable through the LPD, and the city sanctioned so-called “sweeps” of numerous homeless encampments, including South Common.

    In early October, one person was killed and another person hospitalized after a garbage truck backed over them on Spring Street. Witnesses said the two homeless individuals had been sleeping on the narrow, alley-like street after they had been repeatedly told to leave other parts of the city, most recently South Common.

    But even homeless people with an emergency bed at night become unsheltered during the day when the LTLC, the largest adult emergency shelter north of Boston, asks its clients to leave the premises.

    According to the LPD, complaints about trespassing increased from 519 complaints in 2021 to 1,369 complaints in 2024, a more than 150% increase.

    The shelter clients generally congregate in the Jackson Street, Appleton Street, Middlesex Street, Summer Street, and Gorham Street corridors.

    “These areas have experienced a high concentration of transient individuals, which has led to recurring public safety and quality-of-life issues,” Assistant City Manger Shawn Machado said in the motion response dated Oct. 21.

    Councilor Vesna Nuon suggested that the task force approach the city took to address gang violence in the city almost 20 years ago may be a guide to Lowell’s current crisis.

    “When we had a gang issue in the city, the juvenile court judge and others participated in this,” Nuon said. “The [District Attorney] the [Middlesex] Sheriff’s Office, [Department of Children and Families] and all those entries, joined in. The court plays an important role in this.”

    Machado’s motion response noted that the city’s Community Opioid Outreach Program had been active in the neighborhood, offering outreach and services to individuals in need.

    “Despite their daily efforts, there remains a significant number of individuals who decline the services offered,” Machado’s motion response said. “This underscores the complexity of the issue and the need for a more comprehensive, multi-agency approach to address the underlying causes of chronic homelessness, substance use, and mental health challenges.”

    Machado said Golden will extend invitations to a representative from Sheriff Peter Koutoujian’s office, leadership from the LPD, district court judges serving the Lowell area, an a representative from the Middlesex District Attorney’s Office.

    “The goal of this discussion is to explore collaborative strategies that address the root causes of recidivism, improve outcomes for individuals experiencing homelessness or substance use disorders, and enhance public safety for all residents and businesses,” Machado said.

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    Melanie Gilbert

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  • Lowell’s adult homeless shelter at peak capacity

    Lowell’s adult homeless shelter at peak capacity

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    LOWELL — There are more homeless people than available beds in Lowell, leading to people in need of emergency shelter being turned away, said Isaiah Stephens, managing director of the Lowell Transitional Living Center on Middlesex Street.

    “People are coming into the shelter faster than we can house them,” Stephens told a group of service providers and advocates attending a remote meeting of Solidarity Lowell on Jan. 28.

    Solidarity Lowell is a volunteer group of community members of Greater Lowell working toward social justice in areas such as housing and homelessness.

    In January, the city conducted its annual, federally mandated point-in-time count of the number of people experiencing homelessness, and found there are 189 sheltered and 97 unsheltered individuals in Lowell.

    At the City Council’s Feb. 6 meeting, councilors suggested that some people were unsheltered by choice and not due to a lack of shelter or motel beds.

    “We have open beds that people aren’t taking,” Councilor Erik Gitschier said.

    The bed-to-person ratio was just one of the many surprising data points to come out of the roundtable. Attendees heard about police agencies from as far away as Salisbury bringing unhoused people to Lowell’s shelter, that more men than women need shelter and an almost doubling in attendance at the Eliot Day Center, which provides both spiritual and practical support to its unhoused neighbors in the city.

    “This time last year, our average daily attendance was around 70 people,” the Rev. Heather Prince Doss said. “Now it’s around 125 people a day.”

    The number of unhoused people who call Lowell home jumped by a staggering 23% last year based on figures released by city Director of Homeless Initiatives Maura Fitzpatrick

    The outreach mission on Summer Street, across from South Common Park, opens its doors at 8 a.m. The program offers a safe place for people who are homeless to escape the weather and the streets, to grab breakfast and lunch, or as a stop in their day for a cup of coffee, companionship or solitude. St. Paul’s Soup Kitchen takes over at 2:30 p.m. until the evening, with dinner at 5 p.m. The Day Center is not open on the weekends.

    “The reality is that there isn’t enough space,” Doss said. “The shelter and the hotels tend to be at capacity every night.”

    LTLC is a client-centered emergency shelter that has provided shelter and care to adults for 35 years. It was founded as the Middlesex Shelter in 1986 in response to the number of homeless individuals living on the streets of Lowell, and is now the largest homeless shelter and support organization north of Boston with 90 beds and an extra 70 emergency beds in winter.

    Stephens said the shelter offers case-management and harm-reduction services, addiction counseling, HIV testing, health care and resident meals for the homeless population.

    “When I first started at LTLC about six years ago, we were a sober/dry shelter,” he said. “But for the past four years we’ve been operating as a wet shelter because sobriety shouldn’t be a barrier to housing someone.”

    That open-door mission is being strained by the crushing need for affordable and low-income housing in the city that Stephens said is causing people to “fall into homelessness.”

    “It really is a public health crisis,” he said.

    Even under the winter protocol program, which funds additional shelter and hotel beds from November through March, Stephens said the LTLC staff nightly turn away men looking to get off the streets and into a warm bed.

    “We cap out for the men every night,” Stephens said. “We haven’t hit max capacity with the women, yet.”

    The lack of available or affordable housing is a regionwide issue, but it is being felt most acutely in Lowell.

    Although many communities have unhoused people, not all communities provide services for that demographic. Instead, each town has an agreement with the South Middlesex Opportunity Council, the operator of the LTLC.

    “Police drop off people every night at the shelter from other communities,” Stephens said.

    At the same time, larger communities like Lawrence and Haverhill are also under-resourced to meet the demand and send their homeless to the LTLC.

    Lawrence’s Daybreak Shelter has about 20 beds for a city of almost 89,000. In Haverhill, with a population of 67,000, Mitch’s Place has enough beds for 30 people — even during winter protocol.

    “It’s frustrating because we don’t have enough beds for people in our own city, and now we’re helping other communities as well,” Stephens said.

    Daniel O’Connor is the chair of Lowell’s Hunger and Homeless Commission, and also a board president with House of Hope, a nonprofit that helps homeless families. He noted that sheltering capacity in Lowell’s surrounding towns is low.

    “We have over 200 beds compared to 26 beds in these other cities,” he said. “I don’t understand why the sheltering is so low in these cities.”

    Massachusetts has two distinct homeless systems: one for families and one for adults.

    “The emergency assistance family shelter system is at capacity for 7,500 families,” O’Connor said. “There are 600 families on the waiting list for shelter beds.”

    As both the adult and family homeless crisis rages on, Stephens said the need even exceeds the available manpower to staff the facility.

    “We do not have enough staff,” he said. “Staffing is a big, big problem in human service work. Our field is criminally underpaid and the job is very, very hard. People aren’t knocking down the door to work in the shelter.”

    He asked the public’s help in donations such as handwarmers, gloves, hats and socks.

    “Anything that will keep people warm,” Stephens said.

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    Melanie Gilbert

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