It’s been an exceptionally busy week for me so far. I spent the entire afternoon Monday out making the rounds with a case worker from Homestart and a physician’s assistant from Mass. Healthcare for the Homeless. I’m writing a feature on the Housing First initiative, and have been meeting with folks involved on all levels. Warriors and saints.

There are currently ten people in the program, all of whom were homeless for a minimum of five years (three of the ones I met claimed to have been on the streets for twenty, and I can believe it) and were all “high utilizers” of the emergency rooms. The social worker and physician’s assistant told me there was someone who’d visited the emergency room three hundred times in the space of a year. When I spoke to Dr. Jim O’Connell, who runs the program, however, he put the figure at around fifty, but when you consider an emergency room visit runs around three grand, and a bed runs ten, we’re talking a minimum of well over a hundred thousand bucks a year for these guys.

In the eight or so months since they’ve been housed, these emergency room visits have, of course, been cut back drastically.

Which is the whole idea behind the Housing First pilot. Housing, according to O’Connell, is a big part of healthcare. Once you get them in stable housing and in a situation where they’re getting regular physician’s visits and preventative care, they’re not only better off themselves, the idea is they’re saving the taxpayers big-time.

But O’Connell admits, the jury’s out on the supposed savings. It’s still a question whether the cost of multiple weekly visits from case workers and physicians will turn out to be less than emergency room visits in the end.

And as far as the clients ever being truly self-sufficient, most are simply too impaired for that to ever be a real possibility. Before visiting the first clients in North Quincy, the case worker suggested going to the supermarket to pick him up some groceries, which she does for him routinely. As we waited for the physician’s assistant, who was picking up some meds for him at the pharmacy, I talked to the case worker about gardening. It turns out we both have plots in public gardens.

She asked me what I grew, and I said, mostly flowers. The thing about growing vegetables in the public gardens is that it’s labor-intensive and then inevitably just before they’re ready for harvest, either someone comes along and plucks them, or some critter digs them up and eats them. And I haven’t got time for the pain.

I asked her the same, and found her answer telling. She said she grew mostly vegetables, and as to the inevitable heartbreak that comes with that: “oh, we don’t care if we can harvest them, we just like to see them grow.”

Stay tuned for more on this story…

I also met yesterday in Cambridge with the indomitable Shugars (of tboycott.com) and Jeff Rosenblum of livable streets, to discuss possible action on the fare hike issue. Jeff wasn’t so hip to the idea of a boycott. Shugars explained that it was something to get people fired up. Jeff’s objection was that it’s not actually the T that needs to be demonstrated against, it’s the legislature. I thought I had made it pretty clear that any rally that took place in conjunction with a mostly symbolic boycott would be directed at the legislature. Jeff has obviously not been reading my blog. But I have to admit, I have not been reading his, either. I’m determined to start, anyway, and you should, too. Livable Streets has been doing some great things for Boston.

Jeff suggested getting in touch with MassPIRG and the Sierra Club, who he says are planning a demonstration at the State House. I would be all for one big rally, and to leave it to the pros to organize it. So I’ll be in touch with them, and then back to you on that.

Following that little meeting, Shugars and I attended the T fare hike Q&A near Central Square. There were no more than fifty people there (and I would put the number at 35 or so, and it was a rather gloomy crowd at that, except for the guy from Medford who made a rousing proposition: that the T should be absolutely free of charge, period–people went nuts for that).

There were actually two state legislators (Rep. Alice Wolf and Sen. Jarrett Barrios) there for part of the meeting. They both urged the MBTA to come to the legislature for debt relief, to which the T representative, after being silent on the issue through most of the meeting finally responded:

“On the issue of the T going to the legislature…the prevailing feeling at the T is that the legislature gave us forward funding to live with and the T really can’t go and lobby the legislature. If individuals want to go and lobby the legislature, more power to you, and that would be fabulous if everybody went out and lobbied the legislature for us, but the leadership of the T doesn’t feel like it’s their place to lobby the legislature, because they gave us forward funding and said ‘you’re on your own, this is what you’ve got,’ and we have it.”

A public member of the MBTA Riders Oversight Committee (TROC) reiterated, but in stronger terms, that “the T is not allowed to ask for any more money from the legislature.” She went on to say:

“What the…members of the Oversight Committee did is we met separately and as a bunch of individuals we wrote a letter to every member of the senate and the legislature. We delivered those in person a week ago Thursday, asking them to reconsider the idea of forward funding, and that the state really needs to step in and really needs to contribute to public transportation, and not just in the urban areas, but across the state. So we’ve done that, and we hope that other people will do that, too, since the T is not able to do it. It’s up to individual people to do it.”

State senator Jarrett Barrios had a slightly different take on the issue, and told the T representative: “It is never, ever, ever successful for a legislative initiative if the agency you’re seeking to help denies they need the help. It is absolutely critical for us to hear from [that] agency.” I like Barrios, but both his comments and Rep. Wolf’s sounded suspiciously like passing the buck.

In fact, that’s a big part of the problem with the T. But that’s what you’re dealing with. So, as the TROC member basically said, the message riders and the taxpaying public have to send to the T and the legislature is “the buck stops here.”

I’ll get back to you on the issue of a demonstration at the State House, and the fate of the rally at Copley once I’ve contacted some of the other organizations involved.