Pine Street Inn ‘grows with you, what can I say?’

The high school student was shocked. What if her friends found out?

Her father could see what she was thinking, and he didn’t like it. In 1966, when Lyndia was seven, the family had emigrated from Glasgow, a working-class city where everyone was struggling and everyone looked out for each other. Her father, who had lived through the food shortages and other humiliations of World War II, always made it his job to be there for those who did not get a fair chance.

“He took one look at me and I knew what he was thinking,” she said. “I was wrong, and I had to figure this out.”

Downie has figured it out. This month marks her 40th anniversary at Pine Street Inn – the largest provider of shelter and homeless services in New England. Since 2000, she has led the behemoth and made it an anchor and powerhouse of progress for thousands upon thousands of Johnnys.

Yet the line from that Thanksgiving in Connecticut to the sprawling organization on Harrison Avenue was not linear. After graduating from the University of Vermont, Downie moved to Boston with some friends and looked for a job while she worked out where she would go to law school. A friend who was volunteering on Pine Street told her they needed help this winter. She got a job interview, borrowed a dress, rode her bike from Brighton and parked in the lobby for a long time.

“I thought they forgot I was there,” she said. Now she thinks it was some kind of test.

“If you couldn’t sit in the lobby for a long time and talk to the guys, you probably wouldn’t make it,” Downie said. A six-month stint covering the phones and helping frontline staff led to another job at the inn, and another, and another, and here she is.

‘The place grows with you, what can I say?’ she said. “The staff then and now is a great bunch of people. When you get into that company, where you’re amazed at the work they do, at a place where mission has always come first – every time another opportunity came along, I thought, ‘One more year and I’m going back to school.’”

In some ways the work has become more difficult. In Downie’s early years at Pine Street, rental housing was available in Boston for low-wage workers and others who were struggling. Some of them may have had to eat meals at the shelter to boost their finances, but at least there were homes they could go back to. Over the past forty years, the cheap housing that Boston once had – lodging houses, small apartment buildings, places where single people could eke out a living – have all but disappeared. Spots for people with mental illness and other disabilities, or substance abuse, are even harder to find.

“We have made finding housing and building homes complicated and expensive,” Downie said. When her family came to this country, her electrician father made enough money to put a down payment on a $13,000 house, and they made ends meet. Everyone knows what’s up has happened since then: Wages haven’t come close to keeping up with rising costs; cities have become unaffordable and less hospitable to those in need; it is more difficult to build new homes; and some people are so defeated by their circumstances that it takes tremendous effort to keep them housed. Add to that the pandemic and subsequent spike in evictions and it all adds up to headwinds that will require superhuman strength to overcome.

Ask Downie what she dreams of and she doesn’t hesitate: a world where Pine Street doesn’t exist.

“If I could wave a magic wand, there would be enough housing so you never have to come here again,” she said.

To that end, Downie has refocused the organization upstream, shifting some of Pine Street’s resources toward creating a more permanent home for its clients. In addition to serving more than 2,000 people and providing 3,700 meals and other essential services every day, Pine Street is one of the city’s most crucial landlords. With the latest developments at the old YWCA in Back Bay and on Washington Street in Jamaica Plain, Pine Street will have provided more than a thousand units of permanent, supportive housing for people who would otherwise sleep in the shelter.

You don’t get houses here for the city’s poorest residents without serious diplomatic skills, and Downie – fueled by cheerful and righteous certainty – certainly has them in abundance. She also has an authority – drawn from a stellar forty-year career she never wanted to have – that puts her at the center of most discussions about what ails us.

How lucky we are to have her. Some days her job is daunting, but most of the time Downie feels like the lucky one. Just like she finally felt the day Johnny came to dinner. He didn’t say much, but he couldn’t have been nicer, Downie recalled. After the meal, her father brought him home with the leftovers.

“That was actually a nice Thanksgiving,” she said.

Globe columnist Yvonne Abraham can be reached at [email protected].