The Shattuck Shelter, which abuts Franklin Park at its 120-bed Morton Street location, is saying its “too early” to comment on how the proposed 2024 Boston Olympics might affect it.
Previous Olympics have seen the host cities attempt to cleanse the streets of homeless people, while Olympics-triggered housing displacement has sometimes increased the homeless population.
“I would say it’s way too early for us to make any comment on this. I think we need to wait and see how this plays out,” said Pine Street Inn spokesperson Barbara V. Trevisan in an email to the Gazette. Pine Street Inn is the nonprofit that operates the Shattuck Shelter.
At the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, the last summer Games held in the U.S., police conducted mass arrests of homeless people, and organizations shipped others out on one-way bus rides, as DigBoston reported last year. For the 2012 Games, London attempted to stop any homeless people from sleeping outdoors with programs that packed shelters and relocated some people more than 150 miles away, according to the British newspaper The Guardian.
The Franklin Park Coalition, a park friends nonprofit, will ask both Boston 2024 and the opposition group No Boston Olympics to attend a meeting to discuss impacts on the park before deciding on a pro or con stance of its own.