McKnight is one of the smallest neighborhoods in the city of Springfield, but also one of its liveliest, with an engaged neighborhood council, active crime watch and community police programs, and a historic district filled with beautiful old Victorian houses.
It also contains more than its fair share of group homes, in the opinion of many residents—18 in total, by the neighborhood council’s count.
So when the council got word that a residential program for male offenders recently out of jail was planned for 175 Bowdoin St., members were not happy. Among their concerns: the proposed site is in a mostly residential area, near a shelter for battered women, and until recently was a poorly managed nursing home that neighbors fought long and hard to get shut down.
The neighborhood concerns were enough to prompt the Hampden County Sheriff’s Department to drop its plans to house ex-offenders at the site. But the South Middlesex Opportunity Council—the eastern Mass. nonprofit that owns the building—still intends to establish some kind of housing program at 175 Bowdoin. While the specifics of that program have yet to be determined, a spokesperson for SMOC vowed that the group will work closely with McKnight residents to make sure the community feels comfortable with the plans.
SMOC, it appears, will have a tough sell.
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Walter Kroll, president of the McKnight Neighborhood Council, said his group first got wind that something was happening at 175 Bowdoin St. when a neighbor noticed workers at the building. She called the city’s Housing Department and was told that the sheriff’s department was planning a “halfway house” at the site, Kroll said.
That initial plan called for 13 male ex-offenders to be housed at the site, according to Rich McCarthy, spokesperson for Hampden County Sheriff Mike Ashe. Those kinds of residential programs are a key part of the department’s strategy to help ex-offenders successfully reintegrate into the community; studies show that former inmates who don’t have a home to go to after release have higher rates of recidivism than those who do have a place to go, McCarthy said. Approximately 30 percent of the population at the Hampden House of Correction have no home to go to once they’re released, he said.
While the program proposed for Bowdoin Street would have been staffed by the Sheriff’s Department, the department would have been working in partnership with the South Middlesex Opportunity Council, which this January bought 175 Bowdoin for $230,000. Based in Framingham, SMOC is a community action agency, one of many founded in the 1960s as part of the federal government’s “war on poverty.” Today SMOC, which has an annual budget of about $70 million, runs housing, job training and behavioral and mental health programs across the state, including housing programs in Palmer and Easthampton.
In response to residents’ concerns, representatives of the Sheriff’s Department presented their initial plans for the house at a neighborhood council meeting last month. That meeting, however, did little to assuage those concerns; after the meeting, the neighborhood council voted unanimously to oppose the project.
Earlier this month, Kroll wrote a public letter to Ashe outlining the group’s objections to the proposed program. A housing program for ex-offenders, Kroll wrote, would be “substantively inappropriate” for Bowdoin, a “densely populated” street of single-family homes with a housing complex nearby, and many children in the immediate area. In addition, the site is near a shelter for women who’ve been abused, who “cannot be put at risk by housing offenders in close proximity,” he wrote. Kroll also questioned whether the 7,323-square-foot building is large enough for 13 residents, plus staff.
Kroll also chided Ashe for poor communication with the neighborhood. “Your decision making in this matter has been grossly negligent both procedurally and substantively,” wrote Kroll, criticizing the sheriff for failing to involve neighbors and elected officials in the planning process and for failing to research the immediate neighborhood, which would have alerted the department to the existence of the women’s shelter.
“There was no transparency, no negotiation,” Kroll told the Advocate. “I guess that’s how a lot of these programs get in.”
Historically, Kroll added, the neighborhood council has had a strong relationship with the sheriff’s department, which supports its neighborhood watch program. That, he said, makes the lack of communication about the Bowdoin Street project especially disappointing.
“Let me make something perfectly clear: the sheriff has had a very positive impact on the neighborhood,” Kroll said. “No one’s looking to pick a fight with the sheriff; no one’s looking to tell him he’s a bad person or he runs bad programs.” But in this case, Kroll said, the sheriff’s department just made the wrong decision.
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Ashe, apparently, agrees. Last week, McCarthy told the Advocate that the sheriff had decided against pursuing a home for ex-offenders on Bowdoin Street.
Typically, McCarthy said, when the sheriff’s department looks to establish a program in the community, it researches the neighborhood. In this case, however, the sheriff’s department had not taken the lead on the proposed project, but rather became involved with SMOC after that organization had bought the building. The sheriff only became aware of the nearby women’s shelter after neighbors brought it to his attention, he said.
“Our decision [to abandon the project] was based on the unseemliness, or the possibility for problems” caused by the proposed program’s proximity to that shelter, McCarthy said.
The sheriff, he added, briefly considered adapting the program to house a smaller number of female ex-offenders, but ultimately decided not to, because there’s not the same demand for beds for female offenders. The department puts a lot of staffing and other resources into these kinds of residential programs, McCarthy said, and it wouldn’t be fiscally practical to invest that much in a program for so few people.
The sheriff’s department, McCarthy said, is used to running into opposition when it proposes community programs. “We’re always a little wary of pulling out of a project because of what we feel is a not-in-my-back-yard thing. But we didn’t feel this was a not-in-my-back-yard thing. Because first, we were literally in the wrong back yard,” he said, referring to the nearby shelter.
The department also understood neighbors’ feeling that McKnight bears more than its share of such programs. “We’re sensitive to that fact that those are people who are really committed to urban living,” McCarthy said.
Which is not to say, McCarthy added, that 175 Bowdoin St. could not be a good site for another kind of social service program. “We hope [SMOC] and the neighbors work it out, because you have two well-intentioned groups of people & in conflict on the issue,” he said. “You don’t have any easy villains in this.”
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With the sheriff’s department out of the project, neighbors are now anxious to see what SMOC intends to do with 175 Bowdoin St.
They’ll have to wait a while for the answer. “Right now, SMOC is in discussions with city officials to develop a plan for the future of the Bowdoin Street building,” said Jane Lane, senior vice president at Johnston Associates, the Boston public relations and consulting firm that represents SMOC. “At this point, there are no definitive plans.”
But whatever plan does emerge, it will be in keeping with SMOC’s core mission, she said: “to get people into permanent housing.
“Sometimes that means putting them into housing with a range of supportive services, whether it’s educational services or behavioral health or mental health or substance abuse counseling. It’s a whole range of human services we connect residents to,” Lane said.
“We haven’t decided what population of people will be [at 175 Bowdoin],” she continued. “But we listened to the neighbors. We heard their concerns,” including concerns about the appropriateness of putting certain programs near a shelter for abused women.
“As we plan for the future use of the building, we will definitely listen to the neighbors, because whatever we do there, we want to be good neighbors. We pride ourselves on doing that wherever we go,” Lane said. SMOC, she added, has high standards for building maintenance and security, and holds its clients to strict rules of conduct.
“Our way of operating is to go into the neighborhood, meet with the neighbors, talk to them about what we’re planning to do there, and let them know that this home will be an asset to the neighborhood, not a detriment,” Lane said.
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That will take some convincing on SMOC’s part. Kroll, the neighborhood council president, said that while he’s glad that the sheriff’s department is no longer involved in the project, the council still has many concerns about adding another group home to the neighborhood.
Their worries are heightened by the fact that SMOC’s programs typically fall under the Dover Amendment, a state law that exempts nonprofit religious and educational organizations from certain local zoning restrictions. That exemption means the project won’t face the kind of government oversight it should, said Kroll, who also questioned whether the program will really have an educational component, or will simply be a homeless shelter. (Lane said SMOC’s programs typically included educational components, such as job training and GED courses.)
The McKnight Neighborhood Council’s concerns are being heard at City Hall. Earlier this month, Ward 4 city councilor Henry Twiggs, who represents McKnight, brought forward a resolution asking the Council’s subcommittee on public safety and civil rights to hold a hearing on the project; it passed by a vote of 12 to zero. In addition, Denise Jordan, chief of staff to Mayor Domenic Sarno, plans to meet with SMOC officials.
Jordan knows McKnight well; her parents live there, and her mother, Donna Jordan, is a board member of the neighborhood council. And, Jordan told the Advocate, she’s familiar with the challenges posed by having so many group homes in that community.
Jordan wants to meet with SMOC to find out what the agency plans to do with the property and to make sure the agency “is in dialogue with the neighborhood,” she said. “You can’t come into the city of Springfield and go into a neighborhood without giving respect to the neighborhood council.”
McKnight, Jordan added, “is a fair neighborhood. They just want to be included” in making important decisions about what happens in the community.
Lane, the SMOC spokesperson, said her agency understands that. “As soon as we come up with a plan, we will present that in a very public way. We’ll get neighborhood input, and we’ll keep the lines of communication open between us, city officials and the neighbors,” she said.
And in the end, Lane added, “I think, ultimately, the neighbors will be pleased.”
