No good deed goes unpunished here

18 May 2001

This week's proof that no good deed goes unpunished can be found on the corner of Boylston and Tremont streets, in the shadows of the nearly completed Ritz Hotel & Towers.

The project's developer, Millennium Partners, has donated close to $1 million to St. Francis House, a homeless shelter and the Ritz's next-door neighbor. Right now, the 600 homeless men and women St. Francis House feeds daily have to wait on the street for breakfast and lunch. Millennium's money is to be used to build a large interior atrium as a waiting area.

How nice, you may think. Wrong. Millennium's charity is instead being assailed as a crass slap at the homeless. The developer and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino stand accused of arranging for a kind of hush money, making them conspirators in a scheme to prettify the area by pushing the desperately poor indoors and out of sight.

In fact, it's anything but that.

There's no question that the Ritz and St. Francis House make for an ironic juxtaposition of wealth and poverty. Of course, ironies abound in cities: Tent City and the South End, Mission Main and the triangle row houses, the Women's Lunch Place and Newbury Street are just a few examples.

But until recently, St. Francis House hadn't had to deal with such ironies. It was in the Combat Zone, that rundown mix of liquor stores and peep shows that has been a sore point for mayors for the last four decades.

Ever since it was established in 1984, St. Francis House has been providing a comprehensive array of services to the homeless. In fact, calling it a homeless shelter is a bit unfair, for while it provides meals and has emergency shelter beds, its real focus is on moving homeless men and women off the streets and into some semblance of a decent life.

Then along came Millennium Partners and its massive, half billion- dollar project. It was the kind of development - with a hotel, condos, movie theaters, health club and retail shops - that promised to transform the area.

And what of St. Francis House? Was it to be forced out, pushed to some darker corner of the city?

Hardly. Instead, Executive Director Ira Greiff was delighted with the new plans for the area. It was he who approached Millennium and asked developers to donate money for an atrium. And when Millennium agreed, he made that the centerpiece of a $6 million capital campaign to expand the facility, add new substance abuse programs and improve its antiquated heating and cooling systems.

Even better, Greiff thinks that the Millennium project will help the people he has made his life's work. Ghettoizing the poor - putting them all in one place together - is the old, failed strategy of public housing. With the new development, "the neighborhood is evolving in a strong and positive way," he says.

Cleaner streets, thriving businesses and a safer environment benefit all people - including the homeless. They create an atmosphere of dignity for a group that every day suffers more humiliations that most of us could imagine. Those humiliations include, of course, the indignity they now suffer at having to wait outside in the rain, cold and snow simply to eat.

Indeed, argues Greiff, building the atrium is a critical part of successfully achieving his mission: by making St. Francis House into a warm and inviting place, he sends a clear message that he and his staff care - a necessary first step to helping the down-and-out.

So what really is the problem with Millennium's donation? It's an odd complaint: By taking throngs of homeless off the streets, they are to a degree being removed from the view of the residents, guests and tourists who, it is hoped, will be part of the new neighborhood.

And that is bad because now the homeless won't be around to make the wealthier newcomers feel guilty.

Never mind that the homeless don't want to be on the street, enduring the elements and dirty looks from passersby. Never mind that when they are outside they attract predators, including drug dealers, who feed on their addictions.

The purpose of the homeless, it turns out, is to be moral object lessons for the rich.

Imagine, if you will, what the world would be like if all businesses behaved like Millennium. Money would flow to financially strapped organizations like St. Francis House. With those funds they would be able to counsel and treat their clients, finding them decent jobs and good housing. Pretty soon, the homeless problem would be solved.

What a nightmare! Who then would be around to prick our consciences?

Luckily, we won't soon be having that problem in Boston. Rather than being praised for its donations, Millennium is being cursed. The lesson to the next company with a charitable bent is quite clear: Don't bother.