Where Do the Homeless Go When It's Freezing at Night?

Winter always seems more acute in the beginning of the season... along with our sympathies. When the first frigid nights arrive each winter, your mind wanders to the people you see sitting on the side of the road. We inevitably ask ourselves, "Where do the homeless go on a night like this?" The answer may surprise you.

As a Massachusetts native, I consider myself an expert on cold weather. Yet each year, when the first freezing nights arrive, I usually wonder how I will survive the next few months. But my disdain for the cold is nothing. Those who are homeless or low-income must know how to survive each and every night of the cold weather season. It's a matter of life and death when you are without a home.

So where do the homeless go when the temperature drops?

In many communities, particularly urban areas accustomed to cold weather, temporary cold weather shelters will open for the winter. They're usually not the most comfortable places, since they're temporary. Cots or rubber mats are lined up, inches from each other. In Orange County, California, the winter shelter is housed in a cold old armory with concrete floors. These temporary shelters are loud, bright, there is no privacy. But hey - they beat the street.

This year, the lingering effects of our economic woes are straining even the emergency shelter system. In Austin, Texas, so many people showed up looking for shelter on the night of the first freeze, shelter workers had to resort to the back-up of their back-up plan in order to accommodate the need. But not every city has the resources nor the flexibility at their disposal to spontaneously meet this level of demand, especially if it remains this way throughout the winter.

Unfortunately, winter shelters do not exist in every community. And there will always be the few homeless people who choose not to seek out shelter on freezing nights -- sometimes for perfectly legitimate reasons. In these cases, they might camp with other homeless people, using campfires, alcohol, and body heat to stay warm. This is extremely dangeroud, as evidenced by the heartbreaking "homeless cold weather deaths" tallied up each winter.

There you have it - an unremarkable answer to a critical question. The need for cold weather shelters underscores just how intense the homeless crisis really is in our communities. Instead of asking where the homeless will sleep on just the cold nights of the year, we should be consistently fighting throughout the year to end this atrocity.

Image: Freep.com