Residents of the McKnight neighborhood will have the chance tonight to ask an eastern Mass. non-profit about a group home it wants to bring to the community.
The South Middlesex Opportunity Council wants to open a home for people with substance-abuse problems at 175 Bowdoin St.—a plan about which neighbors have grave concerns. Residents opposed to the project say the neighborhood already hosts more than its fair share of group homes and similar programs, and point out the site’s close proximity to a home for women who’ve been abused.
Those concerns prompted the Hampden County Sheriff’s Department, which had initially planned to partner with SMOC on a home for male ex-offenders, to drop out of the project late last year. “We’re always a little wary of pulling out of a project because of what we feel is a not-in-my-backyard thing,” Rich McCarthy, a spokesperson for the sheriff, told the Advocate at the time. “But we didn’t feel this was a not-in-my-backyard thing. Because first, we were literally in the wrong back yard.”
SMOC—which bought 175 Bowdoin in 2011 for $230,000—intends to proceed without the Sheriff’s Department and says it welcomes neighbors’ input. “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,” Jane Lane, a SMOC spokesperson, told the Advocate in December. “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.”
At this evening’s meeting, SMOC officials can count on getting plenty of feedback from the neighborhood. Among the issues on neighbors’ minds: the case of Ryan Welch, a one-time resident of a SMOC-run home in Easthampton, who was arrested last month and charged with the brutal murder of his girlfriend, Jessica Pripstein, at her apartment. A press release from the McKnight Neighborhood Council, which has organized tonight’s meeting, quotes an article by Springfield Republican reporter Diane Lederman noting that Welch lived in the Easthampton program for several years and that police found numerous drugs at his apartment after his arrest.
The meeting takes place on Tuesday, March 13, at 6:30 p.m. at the Rebecca Johnson School, 55 Catharine St.
