Unhealthy objection

By Eileen McNamara
The Boston Globe
March 19, 2006

FRAMINGHAM -- The uninsured of Massachusetts had better hope it does not take Beacon Hill lawmakers as long to devise a plan for universal medical coverage as it is taking Planning Board members in this western suburb to approve an urgently needed downtown community health center. The protracted process is not good for anyone's health.

It has been two years since the Framingham Community Health Center opened a storefront free clinic in leased space downtown, serving 3,000 patients a year, most of whom would have sought treatment at hospital emergency rooms.

Motivated by the demonstrable need and financed by hard-to-come-by federal grants, the clinic began planning for a larger, permanent health center to be built around the corner on the site of a boarded up auto repair business. Despite support from the Chamber of Commerce, MetroWest Medical Center, the Interfaith Council, and the MetroWest Community Healthcare Foundation, the clinic has hit a brick wall in the form of an obstructionist Planning Board.

So stalled is the project that religious leaders conducted a prayer session for scores of supporters at Town Hall before a recent Planning Board meeting. They were back last Thursday night. Still, there was no vote.

As is often the case when a construction project is proposed to serve the poor, the objections raised are about parking and traffic. Just as often, the real issue is race and class. Clinic proponents have run smack into anti-immigrant hysteria and a vision of a revitalized downtown fixated on luxury condominiums.

At $54,200 the average household income in Framingham is above the state average but, according to the 2000 Census, 8 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. Many of those low-income residents are immigrants, legal and not, without access to even routine medical care.

Fear that the Framingham Community Health Center will be a magnet for the uninsured ignores the fact that they are already here. Fear that the clinic cannot coexist with upscale condominium and commercial developments now underway assumes that only services targeted to the wealthy promote revitalization. Brazilian immigrants, who make up an estimated 10,000 of the town's 67,000 residents, own half of the new small shops and restaurants downtown, according to a study last spring by a group of MIT graduate students.

There is merit to complaints by Stop Tax Exempt Private Property Sprawl, or STEPPS, that neighboring suburbs do little or nothing to serve the poor. But noting that Wellesley fails to shoulder its social responsibility does not address the needs of patients of the clinic, 70 percent of whom live in Framingham itself.

Zoila Torres Feldman, president of Great Brook Valley Health Center in Worcester which operates the Framingham clinic, says her architects have added an underground garage and adopted other design suggestions from the Planning Board. It has been more difficult to combat other objections. Typical is a recent posting on a local discussion site on the Internet, "With a free health clinic cementing together the wet shelter, the Salvation Army soup kitchen, and other programs downtown, how can the Arcade project succeed? How will it and the luxury condos attract upscale homeowners and upscale shops to the area?"

In its material opposing the health center, STEPPS insists "this clinic will service social service clients (such as wet shelter residents), MCI inmates, and illegal immigrants."

On Friday afternoon, the tidy waiting room was filled not with drunks or drug addicts but with mothers bringing newborns for routine checkups and an older man being fitted with crutches for a broken foot. A trilingual staff was quietly going about its work in extraordinarily cramped quarters, serving English, Spanish, and Portuguese-speaking patients. No one was loitering outside.

The Planning Board meets again next Thursday. It might even take a vote.

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