Boston Mayor Marty Walsh, after weeks of tense meetings with the homeless and residents of several neighborhoods, has announced the location of a new shelter to replace beds lost in the evacuation of Boston Harbor’s Long Island in October.
The new shelter will be at 112 Southampton Street, just off Interstate 93, near the South Bay Shopping Center. It will soon be renovated to accommodate 490 emergency shelter beds, and people will be able to sleep there as soon as mid-January.
“The building’s ideal for what we want to do, for being able to house the programs in there, and it’s laid out the way we need to lay out. The Frontage Road site was a building and an add-on was going to be important there,” said Walsh.
The new shelter was a shop building for the Department of Transportation. Walsh says he’s already getting offers from unions to help renovate at cost. Right now most of the 700 homeless who were staying on Long Island are dispersed throughout the city, many on cots in the South End Fitness Center. Walsh says he’s still not sure what the future of Long Island will be, or where detox beds will be located in the near future.
