Corporate Boston played a key role in opening new Pine Street Inn shelter
The initiative began as then-mayor Marty Walsh was starting his second term as mayor in 2018. He wanted to raise money to help the city's homeless, Downie said, and led the effort to prod some big names to open up their checkbooks. Five committed to $1 million each: MassMutual, Bank of America, Liberty Mutual, Mass General Brigham, and Suffolk Construction. Other donations came from the likes of TD Bank, Eastern Bank, Eversource, Related Beal, and Natixis. (Separately from the Way Home Fund, developer HYM Investment Group kicked in $5 million as a linkage payment to the city, to win approval for its massive
While he knows of examples in other US cities, The Community Builders chief executive Bart Mitchell said this is the first time he's seen a corporate fund-drive of this scope for a project like this in Boston.
TCB developed the $105 million project and assembled the financing, which included money from federal tax credit investors as well as state and city subsidies. Formerly homeless residents in the 140 units will pay one-third of their income as rent; the 62 remaining units in the building (dubbed 'The Lyndia' in honor of Downie's career fighting homelessness as president of Pine Street Inn) are available at subsidized rates to lower-income earners. The 166,000-square-foot
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Aside from being good corporate citizens, Downie said addressing homelessness is in the employers' best interest, as evidenced by the ongoing debate about loitering and congregate drug use taking place downtown — a problem that was exacerbated by the dispersal of encampments at the Mass. and Cass intersection.
So will we see more corporate efforts like this one? Downie sure hopes so. Pine Street Inn and TCB are working on a similar project in Dorchester,
'The opening of the JP building, it really was a huge community effort,' Downie said. 'It is the best of who we are, in my opinion, when we can make all these things happen, and get at a really sticky problem. The fact that the corporations are willing to support this, it gives us a lot of confidence in the model and confidence that maybe we can replicate this.'
This is an installment of our weekly Bold Types column about the movers and shakers on Boston's business scene.
Jon Chesto can be reached at
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