The mayor has appointed new management for her response to the ongoing crisis at Mass and Cass, but residents have lost patience with stalling recovery programs. Some are now looking to find their own solutions.

Mayor Michelle Wu has appointed Tania del Rio, an unsuccessful for Boston City Council, as the new director of the Coordinated Response Team addressing the Mass and Cass crisis. That’s not enough to reassure civic groups and residents who have agitated for years to decentralize services from the area. Some have taken to hiring private security to maintain order, as warm weather attracts ever larger crowds to the intersection’s open-air drug market.

Del Rio has only been on the job for two weeks and says she is still adapting to the position. The mayor’s office has declined to make her available for interviews with the press while she’s, “getting settled in.” Del Rio publicly frames her role as that of an overarching coordinator, making sure the many different departments working in the area don’t step on each other’s toes.

“There are about 12 separate departments involved in Mass and Cass, and my job is to make sure they all are on the same page and working together,” she said at a June 14 meeting of the community Mass and Cass working group. “My goal is for everyone to be communicating constantly, and to make sure that same open communication is happening with neighbors and stakeholders.”

Many of the programs started by the city to address the crisis are at capacity and are reporting only single-digit graduation rates. Several, “transitional”, programs are already past the dates originally set for them to be completed. For some people at the community meeting, those recovery numbers paled in comparison to the hundreds of people flocking to Mass and Cass.

“This is a failing program,” said George Stergios, vice president of the Worcester Square Area Neighborhood Association. “We were promised that this would be transitional housing, but recovery rates are not accelerating. We’re stuck with basically the same people living in the Roundhouse who got in in the first place. Less than 30% are in medically assisted drug treatment, meaning 70% could still be actively using. This program is actually generating businesses for the drug dealers.”

Steve Fox, head of the South End Forum, also put his focus on the backend of the recovery program. Efforts to engage people at the intersection and get them plugged into the city’s support system can only go so far if these programs continue to maintain low graduation rates.

“We’re playing whack-a-mole here. We’re not going to reach a stable solution until we have a comprehensive system that doesn’t just get people off the street, but gets them into recovery and permanent housing,” said Fox. “We need to be treating this like a refugee crisis, and until we have that comprehensive system, we’re going to continue seeing the problems that come with having so many displaced and struggling people.”

Not everyone is waiting for the city to beef up its permanent housing programs. The Newmarket Business Improvement District recently hired its own private security team to keep the peace and disperse disruptive gatherings.