Kim Janey administration gets a fifth of homeless living at Mass & Cass off the streets

Acting Mayor Kim Janey has vowed to continue chipping away at the Mass and Cass crisis in her final days with one-fifth of the more than 300 people living in tents at the infamous intersection off of the streets.

“In the one week since we’ve implemented our protocol, we’ve helped close to 70 people find housing and treatment,” Janey said on Monday during an interview on GBH’s “Boston Public Radio.”

She added: “The vast majority of those 70 people — or 66 people, to be exact — have found their way into either permanent housing or shelters or treatment, residential treatment.”

Janey is pursuing a high-profile tent removal program that includes wrap-around services for the hundreds living in the area that is sometimes referred to as “Methadone Mile” — a plan hatched in mid-October during the waning days of her administration.

Janey sought to keep her job, but didn’t earn enough votes in September’s crowded preliminary election to move forward. At-large City Councilor Michelle Wu won the citywide race last Tuesday, becoming the first woman and first person of color elected to lead Boston.

The ongoing crisis at Mass and Cass was one of several issues that dominated the election cycle and it’s one Janey — who was the first woman and first Black person to serve as mayor after former Mayor Martin Walsh resigned become President Biden’s labor secretary — has resolved to help solve.

Outreach teams with the Boston Public Health Commission counted 323 people living in squalor in the rat- and drug-infested area on Oct. 24. By Halloween one week later, that number dwindled to 262, according to the mayor’s office.

Of the 66 people Janey’s team has helped, 13 people were placed in permanent or transitional housing, 21 went to shelters and 32 people were placed in residential treatment, city officials said. More than two dozen tents have been removed from the area.

Janey, a Roxbury native who has herself struggled with homelessness, said her administration has “taken a lot of steps” to push people to view the the crisis at the intersection of Massachusetts Avenue and Melnea Cass Boulevard through a public health lens.

“We’re making sure that we weren’t allowing folks to continue to talk about tents and encampments, when the real issue is people,” Janey said Monday on GBH.

Unlike previous attempts by the Walsh administration to clean up the area that relied on a heavy police presence, no arrests were made as part of the Janey administration’s tent removal.

“This work is urgent, but should not be confused with ‘sweeps’ conducted in year’s past. No person is required to remove or store their tent before shelter, housing, or treatment is available,” Janey said in a statement.

During an interview on WBUR on Monday, Brendan Little of the state’s Opioid Recovery and Remediation Fund Advisory Council, called Walsh’s sweep strategy “deeply traumatic” for both front-line staff and homeless living in the area.

Little encouraged the city to invest in “harm reduction services to help people in active use and … then on the back end, once people are in recovery, to give them the economic supports so that they can maintain recovery.”