Editor’s note: This is the third segment in a multi-part series covering homelessness in the North Quabbin region.
As the North Quabbin region deals with the issue of homelessness, advocates say it’s important to identify those who find themselves homeless to determine how best to meet their needs and the needs of the community.
During the August meeting of Athol’s Downtown Vitality Committee, town Building Inspector and Zoning Enforcement Agent Bob Legare estimated that about one-third of homeless people in the Athol area are actually working.
“Bob’s assessment, in my opinion, would be absolutely correct,” North Quabbin Community Coalition Executive Director Heather Bialecki-Canning said in an interview. “The percentage of those who choose to be homeless — I have a colleague out of Franklin County who refers to it as ‘living rough’ — who choose to live rough, in my experience, is often linked to active substance abuse. Not all. There are people that make those choices to live off-grid, to live in that way.
“However, locally, a lot of times it’s come down to people kind of exhausting opportunities or burning bridges, and then feeling like there are no sheltering options for folks who are not sober. So, that becomes a real barrier to people — good, bad or ugly as it is. So, often, you’ve seen encampments where at the same time as homelessness and mental health issues, you’re also seeing some really robust substance abuse issues,” Bialecki-Canning said.
That variety of issues, she said, create additional hurdles for people seeking short-term shelter or sustainable housing, and there are those who make a conscious decision to “live rough.”
“We’ve definitely heard of loved ones who have offered places to stay for folks, and it’s refused because of caveats like ‘you need to give us some of your income or need to show that you’re making sobriety’ or those kinds of things,” Bialecki-Canning said.
And employment creates no guarantee that people can pay for housing.
“There are folks who are working,” she said, “who cannot afford rent. Rents are exorbitant right now. It is a landlord’s market as far as what they can ask for rent and as far as what they can ask for hurdles for folks to jump through to live in their places. So, some of it is unattainable housing or unsustainable housing.
“Many of the folks that we see coming through the doors of the North Quabbin Recovery Center, which we oversee, or here, they’re really folks who have exhausted other resources. It’s an individual, typically. We have not seen families. They’re really just looking for, ‘How do I get by day-to-day?’ Fortunately, we have a system, but it’s really a Band-Aid kind of system at this point,” Bialecki-Canning said.
The North Quabbin Recovery Center works closely with the Interfaith Council of Franklin County. Through that organization’s fundraising efforts over the past year, which allowed for an increase in shelter capacity in Greenfield, it was able to help people in extreme temperature situations to be in hotels for the night. Bialecki-Canning said the group paid for a total of 136 nights for people to get out of the cold last year.
“The Athol-Orange Baptist Church really supported that effort, bringing bags to folks with basic needs stuff, toothbrushes, that kind of stuff, as well as showing them where food pantries were and other resources,” she said. “The Salvation Army and Athol-Orange Baptist Church really led the way in partnership with the Interfaith Council.”
Asked about the attitude toward the homeless residents of North Quabbin, Bialecki-Canning said, “Outwardly, we are a conservative area, but we are people willing to help their own. One of things you see is that our homeless population, locally, is not about people pitching a tent in an alley; it’s about people couch-surfing. It’s about people staying with folks that they’re connected with somehow. We do see a community really willing to open their doors to those they are connected to, sometimes putting their own tenancies in jeopardy.
“We know through things like the Food-a-Thon that happens, things like that — even those who are truly the have-nots in our region give,” she continued.
Bialecki-Canning estimates that the homeless population in the North Quabbin region is a mix of those who grew up in the area and others who have wandered here as part of a transient lifestyle.
“It’s a little bit of both,” she said. “The hard thing is, we’ve seen the videos of some of the transient folks who are panhandling or doing other things on the street, but I would beg our community to know that they do not represent the homeless population. Those are the few.
“It really is about safe, stable, sustainable housing and the need for it on all fronts,” she said. “We need new stuff built, we need to increase things like public safety and our schools, as well as making sure people know that when rough times hit — and we are all certainly experiencing rough times right now — that resources are there. And they’re all meant to shore up someone, not to create sustainability as an income.”
Greg Vine can be reached at gvineadn@gmail.com.