If you line up outside the front door for two hours before the building opens at 3:15 p.m., you are probably going to have a bed.
If you spend every penny of your welfare check in the first week of the month, on hotels, pocket books, cosmetics, drugs and alcohol, the Pine Street Inn will make no inquiry into your finances and you can live at the shelter for as many years as you want.
If you're working, and you ask for one of the 10 beds that are reserved for women who work, out of 120 emergency beds, you have to show the Pine Street Inn your paystubs, give the Pine Street Inn your bank statements, give the Pine Street Inn an official copy of your schedule, tell your employer that you're homeless and ask your employer to write a letter to the shelter to verify that you're working. It doesn't matter to the shelter's administration that to tell your employer that you're homeless is to jeopardize your employment because of the stigma of homelessness. After you have done those things, then you can be on the waiting list for a saved bed, and you can sleep in the street after working all day, for all the shelter cares, as long as you don't sleep on the street near the shelter because that makes the shelter look bad to the neighbors.
There is no training program for the staff.
There are no educational requirements for the staff.
There are few to no rewards for staff who are empathetic and intelligent; most of them leave after a few months or a few years. The lack of training by contrast with the demands of the job is so frustrating that the shelter is constantly hiring.
There is continual disorganization among the staff and from one shift to another, resulting in mistakes that impact the clients every day. Rather than to solve the disorganization, the shelter's administration consistently chooses to punish the guests by eliminating services and creating more restrictions.
There are no literacy screenings to identify people who can't read or write, no basic education referrals and no support for people who try to advance their education.
There are no support services to help people budget money.
There are no support services for people who are trying to recover from substance abuse issues or maintain sobriety.
There are no support services for people who are survivors of domestic violence or sexual abuse.
There are no support services for the mentally ill.
There are no support services for people who have left jail.
There are no support services for mothers who have lost their housing and who are trying not to lose custody of their children.
If you are physically disabled, even dying, and Social Security rejects your claim, there are no support services to advocate for you.
The entire women's shelter at the Pine Street Inn doesn't have one wheelchair-accessible door; not the doors to the building, not the doors to the restrooms, not the doors to the offices, nowhere.
People who need access to electricity for breathing machines at night are not guaranteed beds.
The Shattuck Shelter, which is owned by the Pine Street Inn, has one case manager, who is also responsible for some of the clients at the Pine Street Inn.
The supervisors of case management and the director of the women's shelter hate me, probably because I criticize the shelter's inefficiency and chronic incompetence. One of the case management supervisors has instructed everyone whom she supervises to deny every request from me for advocacy. My last request to my case manager was that she write an email to Metro Housing Boston, saying that I'm suicidal all the time and that I had sought admission to a crisis stabilization unit. The unit where I have had the least trauma didn't have availability, so the psychiatrist at the emergency room offered to have me placed in a mental hospital. I declined that offer so that I could be active in my search for housing and employment, but I was so overwhelmed that I ended up spending a few weeks trying to stabilize my mental health without being in a facility. My case manager wrote me back saying that it wasn't her job to write an email like that; Metro Housing Boston subsequently only gave me a month's extension for my housing voucher, which will expire on November 25, 2018, if I don't have a place to live by then or haven't done enough for my housing search, according to Metro Housing Boston, to be granted another extension. Before asking for the last extension, I asked Metro Housing Boston how many housing applications Metro Housing Boston wanted me to have done; Metro Housing Boston refused to answer, and told me that filling out housing applications wasn't enough proof of a "meaningful housing search." I have emails from Metro Housing Boston that refuse to specify a number of housing applications that would prove that I'm doing enough to try to obtain a place to live. For a while, before my last nervous breakdown, I was sending Metro Housing Boston housing search logs almost every day; I did that until Metro Housing Boston told me to stop sending them.
This is from the Pine Street Inn's website:
Everyone who lives at the shelter knows that this is a bad place to live. It's the shelter's administration that treats homeless people as if all we want to do is live here, while the administration makes it almost impossible for anyone to leave.
