An affiliation devoted to preserving a Roxbury landmark says it’s grappling with homeless lingerers spilling over from Mass and Cass, an issue it describes as “tenacious.”
Over the previous 5 years, the Shirley-Eustis Home Affiliation has labored with a non-public safety firm each day to take away loiterers from its property, which incorporates a historic home museum, group open house and landscaped gardens — “a serene retreat from the commercial bustle of Dudley Street and Massachusetts Avenue,” because the nonprofit describes it.
With a restricted funds, the affiliation has been challenged in addressing issues stemming from homeless drug and alcohol dependancy on its grounds, whereas sustaining the Shirley-Eustis Home, constructed within the 1740s as a summer season property for Massachusetts Colony Gov. William Shirley. The home is listed on the Nationwide Register of Historic Locations.
Suzy Buchanan, govt director of the Shirley-Eustis Home Affiliation, says her group is partnering with one among its neighbors, Youngsters Providers of Roxbury, to “increase the number of daily patrols.”
“But the problem remains tenacious,” Buchanan advised the Herald on Saturday, “a microcosm of a larger economic problem that we know from our own history will never be solved by a single mayor or a task force.”
Homeless persons are seen frequently behind the Shirley-Eustis Home and close to the Carriage Home, a house in-built 1806 by Nathaniel Ingersoll, a ship captain and service provider, that’s used at the moment for numerous packages and personal features.
One signal warns the general public to not trespass onto the premises which might be protected by New England Safety, stating the property has 24-hour safety patrols and video surveillance. One other signal reads, “Shirley Place is closed from dusk to dawn. NO LOITERING. POLICE TAKE NOTICE.”
However that isn’t stopping a years-old downside from escalating, a Roxbury resident whose property abuts the Shirley-Eustis Home advised the Herald on Friday.
The resident, who requested for anonymity, mentioned she’s seeing “too many people” hiding away from the road by hanging out on the mansion’s steps, partaking in drug exercise and sleeping.
She mentioned she is usually compelled to choose up trash that the loiterers spew into her yard, noting how the frequenters have stolen packages delivered to her house previously, and in a single occasion, somebody U-locked their bike to a fence on her property.
In January 2024, the resident moved again to the Roxbury house that she lived in from the age of 5 to 30.
“Who wants to walk out your back door, and this is the first thing that you have to look at?” she mentioned. “My daughter goes out there, she brings the cats outside, and sometimes men or women make comments to her. It doesn’t make her feel comfortable.”
The Shirley-Eustis Home is simply the newest instance of how locations and group hubs in Boston are falling sufferer to the spillover from Mass and Cass, an open-air drug market on the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard.
Metropolis Councilor Ed Flynn is about to introduce a decision at this Wednesday’s council assembly that requires Mass and Cass and neighborhoods impacted by the spillover to be declared as a public security and public well being emergency in addition to a humanitarian disaster.
In his decision, Flynn highlights how “open-air drug dealing, drug use, human trafficking, shoplifting and violent crimes” generally seen at Mass and Cass have now encroached into the
“South End, Nubian Square, Roxbury, Dorchester, South Boston, Downtown Boston and the Back Bay.”
“Any reasonable person who visits this area will say unequivocally that what has taken place there on a daily basis for over a decade now … is completely unacceptable,” Flynn states within the decision.
“As of July 2025, as well-intentioned as some of the City of Boston’s efforts have been,” he provides, “it is wholly appropriate to finally acknowledge that the … current plan at Mass & Cass has been an abject failure by any standard.”
In September 2023, earlier than the Wu administration ordered encampments to be taken down on Atkinson Road that November, Flynn joined three of his colleagues in looking for a state of emergency declaration at Mass and Cass.
Town’s Board of Health, nevertheless, “determined that the confluence of issues concentrated at Mass and Cass (did) not meet the legal standard for a declaration of public health state of emergency.”
Boston Public Health Commissioner Bisola Ojikutu at a South Finish group assembly in June admitted that the town’s plan to sort out the open-air drug market at Mass and Cass has failed.
Elected officers from the realm are calling for the Wu administration to “reevaluate” the town’s plan that started with the removing of tent encampments, whereas South Finish residents have urged Mayor Michelle Wu to request that the Nationwide Guard be introduced in.
Wu dismissed these calls final week whereas acknowledging it’s “not acceptable” for residents to must side-step needles and worry for his or her security at and round Mass and Cass.
“I don’t believe we need or should have a military deployment in our city,” Wu advised reporters final Monday. “I do know that as we are looking to keep tackling the specific challenges with the opioid crisis at the national level and how that’s felt in local communities every single day.”
Flynn says it’s “long past time to put wish lists aside and make a recovery campus a top priority for the City of Boston.”
The Roxbury resident whose property abuts the Shirley-Eustis Home mentioned that believes it will be “nice” for the Nationwide Guard to patrol the areas most impacted.
“This would possibly deter people,” she mentioned, “but I don’t know where these people are going to go. They need to find a place to put them.”
