'You’ll teach ... the rest of the country': Warren tours Quincy's housing resource center

QUINCY – On Broad Street sits a squat, brick building that used to house a Registry of Motor Vehicles office. Since 1988, it's been known as Father Bill's Place, a homeless shelter providing a "bed and meal" to those in need, as Father Bill's President and CEO John Yazwinski put it.

That building will soon be demolished to make way for Quincy's new public safety headquarters. Across Broad Street, a four-story housing resource center soon will replace the old shelter.

On Wednesday, U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren toured both facilities and talked about how to address homelessness and the housing crisis. State Sen. John Keenan and state Rep. Tacky Chan also took the tour.

The $26 million, 36,000-square-foot Yawkey Housing Resource Center, which includes 30 permanent apartments, is not just bigger than the old shelter across the street. It's qualitatively different. The new model aims not to manage homelessness, but to end it, Yazwinski said.

He said what had been an overnight shelter will expand into full-day services when the center opens in October. That includes access to medical care, behavioral health services, job training, occupational opportunities, access to case managers and more.

As Warren walked through the building's high-ceilinged hallways, dining area, kitchen and dormitories, she praised the new approach, saying it will serve as a model for others.

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"I appreciate that you’re serving, but you’re also teaching," Warren said. "You’ll teach the rest of the commonwealth and the rest of the country where the needs are, what works, what can be improved. We need to learn from what you do."

What will the people staying at Yawkey Housing Resource Center pay

Yazwinski showed Warren one of the 30 permanent housing units designed for people facing chronic homelessness. Residents will pay 30% of their income for a room with a kitchenette, a full bathroom, a stovetop, a microwave oven and a little over 300 square feet of living space, Yazwinski said.

He said keeping people housed is cost effective.

"They're not ricocheting in and out of mental health hospitals, detoxes, ambulances, police interactions. They're not roaming the community. This works for everybody, and it works for the person."

How did data on people who are homeless shape the project's design

Responding to Warren's question about the data driving the new model, Father Bill's Senior Director Liz Rogers said the new resource center is the culmination of a decade's worth of study and analysis.

"We spent several years looking at our own data," Rogers said. "Who's coming in through our front door? What are their characteristics? What is it they need? Everything that we built, all the scale that we're bringing to each part of the continuum of resources, is based off actual data from people coming through our system."

Yazwinski said about 30% of people coming to Father Bill's face a housing crisis but are not yet homeless.

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"All they need is first, last and security," he said. "Right now, in this market, that's ($3,000) or $4,000. If they're working at a front-line job making minimum wage, they could be here four or five months, and they don't need to be. We treat that like a medical emergency. If we can solve it, let's just get that person out (into mainstream housing). Long term, it's cheaper to solve it."

What's next for the project being built in Brockton

Toward the end of the tour, Yazwinski showed Warren a conceptual drawing of a housing resource center that he said will open in Brockton in October 2024. Located at the former site of a National Guard building, the new 31,000-square-foot center will include 32 apartments, similar to the Quincy center.

"Father Bill’s and MainSpring is so sold on this new model of rapid rehousing, diversion and prevention. … We’re changing both shelters to this model," Yazwinski said. "We’re all in."

Father Bill's runs two shelters for adult individuals, one in Quincy and one in Brockton.

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How can the homeless crisis be solved

Addressing the media after the tour, Warren said Father Bill's new project is both humane and wise policy.

"This is about the dignity of people who are in crisis," Warren said. "It's also about managing public dollars effectively by having a health care center right on site that can reduce the number of people who have to go to emergency rooms, and that's going to save money across the board."

Asked what needs to be done at the national level to address the housing crisis, Warren called for more federal investment in local solutions.

"The design of that investment needs to be driven by the locality," she said. "It's not for the federal government to come in and bigfoot about how many apartment buildings a place needs or how many single-family homes. It's about communities coming together and deciding what best serves the people … and the federal government being a good partner. And that means money, and more money to help support the projects that actually work."

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Reach Peter Blandino at pblandino@patriotledger.com.

This article originally appeared on The Patriot Ledger: What Elizabeth Warren saw at Quincy's Yawkey Housing Resource Center