A mayoral task force on the opioid crisis recommended that the city consider safe injection sites last May. In the summer, officials worked to close encampments around Kensington, closed a decades-old camp in a train gulch along Gurney Street, and bricked up an abandoned church that had become a shelter for young people using heroin among the ruined pews. Though the spaces were dangerous and decrepit, for many they offered the only safe places where they could inject heroin around friends who could administer Narcan if they overdosed.