A Homeless Shelter

Editor's note: In Monday's City Council meeting, Cambridge's ad hoc committee on the CASPAR shelter announced a proposal that MIT promised to accept: The university would agree to lease three of the four streets it demanded to own, if the city would give MIT the fourth to keep. Next week, the Council will meet to discuss this proposal.

When MIT proposed a deal with the city earlier this month, offering the CASPAR homeless shelter a piece of university land, we were a little suspicious. MIT has fought for more than five months to get the shelter off their property and recent weeks have seen MIT brazenly attempting to spin some good PR out of their selfish proposal. It turns out that we, and the rest of the city, had good reason to worry.

The offer did seem generous: MIT would renovate the shelter, which now consists on university property, at a price of $1.5 million. The shelter now consists of two dilapidated trailers, which fill to capacity almost every night. MIT would give the shelter to the city for 40 years, and the city would lease it to CASPAR for a dollar a year. In return--and this is the catch--MIT would receive four city-owned streets near its campus. Permanently.

These streets have been the main issue for MIT since the beginning. MIT wants to expand its campus. We're not against expansion--if MIT can handle its growth so that it doesn't harm the city at the same time, then fine.

But MIT didn't just want to expand, and they didn't just shirk their responsibility for the city-wide homelessness problem. In their quest for the four streets, MIT permitted what amounted to a moral civil war between the poor and middle-class residents of Central Square and the rest of the city.

MIT originally wanted to move the shelter off its property and into Central Square, a poorer neighborhood which has just started to recover from a two-decade slump. When residents learned that the university wanted to move the "wet" shelter--so called because it does not require residents to seek rehabilitation--from the isolated spot near MIT into their neighborhood, they got upset. And rightly so--wet shelters, when placed in a residential neighborhood, cause problems. Residents of these shelters often spend their days not in rehab but on the streets.

Instantly, the residents of Central Square were accused of being "NIMBY"--that is, of crying "Not in my backyard." Many citzens in richer neighborhoods criticized the Central Square residents as alcoholic-hating villians--an absurb portrayal of a neighborhood which already hosts ten times as many social programs as any other part of the city. Central Square residents simply didn't want a wet shelter built next door to their homes. They suggested that MIT could find a better solution. MIT said nothing. Instead, cloaking its selfishness in the rhetoric of good will, the university decided to let Cambridge residents take the blame for the university's insensitivity.

It didn't work. And when MIT saw that the City Council had heard the residents' complaints, it tried to save face with this new offer.

It's impossible to say whether this new deal is equitable monetarily. MIT would spend $1.5 million to build a new shelter for CASPAR, in exchange for the four streets. No one knows exactly how much the streets are worth; MIT's claim that they can't be worth more than the $1.5 they're willing to spend is a little suspicious. Independent estimates have set the price closer to $2 million.

But even if the streets were worthless, MIT's "generous" offer still has plenty of strings attached. MIT can kick the shelter off its property in 40 years if it wants to--and still own the Cambridge streets for all eternity. Judging from its treatment of the issue over the past few years, the shelter shouldn't count on MIT's civic concern. The City Council recognized that this was ludicrous and offered to lease the streets to MIT instead. MIT has refused, and tomorrow city officials and the university will meet to hammer out a final deal.

The city must demand a permanent commitment to the shelter if MIT is to receive the streets permanently. If MIT won't, then leasing is the only fair deal. MIT works on a giant time scale--they can wait 40 years if they have to. CASPAR, and the people it serves, desperately needs a solution now. The city should not be blackmailed by MIT into selling out the shelter.