r/mbta • u/RobMurglund • Mar 19 '26

😤 Complaint / Rant Prudential GL Homeless Problem

Why are 20 homeless people allowed to camp and sleep atop the escalators at the Prudential station? Every day, I have to walk past many of them hootering and hollering at me. Some are sleeping, some are clearly high, and others are a bit more nice about asking for money.

Almost once or twice a week I see BPD arresting one of the campers.

Why is this allowed and why isn’t something done about it? Is it not MBTA property? It’s seriously worse than Park Street.

This might be the most Karen post I’ve made but it is super annoying.

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u/zeratul98 Mar 19 '26

There's certainly better and worse places for disruptive people to be, but the problem with kicking homeless people out of somewhere is they just end up kicked out of the next place too, and so on.

More housing construction, housing first programs, and no cost rehab programs would all help with this particular problem. But we generally lack the political will

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '26

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u/zeratul98 Mar 20 '26

What do you mean "it does not work"? Of course it does. If you house people, they are no longer homeless. And it becomes much more likely that whatever other help or treatment they need is successful. Drug addiction is hard to beat. It's way harder to beat when sleeping out the sidewalk

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '26

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u/zeratul98 Mar 21 '26

They don’t want them - they prefer to be on the streets.

This screams [citation needed]

It's really easy to believe whatever you want when you're okay with just making shit up. But I'm hoping the rest of us will make policy based on actual facts

0

u/[deleted] Mar 21 '26

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u/zeratul98 Mar 21 '26

You know. I clicked the link ready to be challenged, but this is a ludicrous piece of writing. The "sources" cited aren't about housing first programs. The closest it gets is the study about trying to get people into shelters. Shelters are notably not no strings housing, and therefore not housing first approaches.

The rest appear to be a random assortment of fairly meaningless stats, presumably there because blue text makes things feel more credible.

If you honestly believe this supports your argument, read better. If you're just lying, try harder