Burke Patten helps run the Night Ministry, a Chicago non-profit that annually supports 6,000 of the Windy City’s 60,000 unsheltered. As a ferocious and freezing blast of Arctic weather heads into the US he knows it could be lethal for the city’s vulnerable homeless population.
“Unfortunately it’s going to be very dangerous,” said Patten who is Night Ministry’s communications manager. “It’s cold. But it’s going to get a lot worse.”
Advocates for policies that benefit the homeless and shelter operators across America are seeing an influx of homeless people needing food and shelter as the vast Arctic weather pattern sweeps over the Great Plains and Great Lakes regions and raises fears about the safety of unsheltered people.
“It’s very worrisome. We know that people die in these types of conditions,” Patten said. “It’s dangerous. I’m concerned.” The Night Ministry’s outreach team, who visits encampments, has found fewer people in tents and on the street, inspiring hope that the city’s unsheltered are finding places to stay with friends, in hotels, or in shelters, Patten said.
Data from Homeless Deaths Count estimates that more than 7,800 people experiencing homelessness died in the US in 2020. Quantifying the exact number of homeless deaths a year and the causes is difficult due to jurisdictional loopholes.
But there is no doubting the risks. Hypothermia is already an ever-present threat people experiencing homelessness face. It can occur at cooler temperatures, as high as 50F (10C), if people get wet from cold water immersion or weather. Once temperatures dip and snow falls, the tents, sleeping bags and clothing unsheltered people rely on to stay warm get wet and the risk of life-threatening hypothermia skyrockets. The body temperature of an exposed person drops, diminishing their ability to move or even cognitively understand that they are in mortal danger, the CDC reports.
Many US cities open warming centers and emergency winter housing when temperatures drop to 32F or below.
Buffalo uses an emergency weather safety plan, Code Blue, to provide warm food, shelter, transportation and medical care to the city’s homeless. The program’s coordinator, Jean Bennett, said this weekend qualifies as an extreme weather event, one of a few the city sees every winter. The city will send a Code Blue van around to locate unsheltered people, pick them up and bring them inside.
“If they don’t want to leave whatever environment they are in,” Bennett said, “we will call the police. They aren’t making a good decision. This weather can be fatal, and they can pass away quickly. During extreme weather events, we don’t let them make that choice.”
What separates this week’s extreme weather event is the rapid onset of both low temperatures and wind chill.
“This will not be your average cold front as temperatures could drop 20 or more degrees within a few hours,” warned the National Weather Services (NWS) on Wednesday morning. Temperatures across many Great Plains and Great Lakes, a region with residents deeply familiar with deep snow and cold weather, are predicted to drop into negative double-digits. The NWS is calling the northern Plains weather “bitter cold and life-threatening”.
“We all know living in South Dakota what we signed up for. We know that it gets extreme temperatures,” said Elly Heckel, communications and marketing development director for Union Gospel Mission Sioux Falls.
But this week, Heckel said, more people are coming into the shelter and soup kitchen who need to get out of the cold, even showing up for chapel just to be in a warm indoor place. The mission is putting cots in their men’s shelter to accommodate emergency overnight stays and hosting more daytime Christmas activities, giving Sioux Falls’ unsheltered another option to escape the below-zero temperatures.
“We are trying to make sure that people who are on the street are being cared for as much as possible,” Heckel said. The mission’s community health workers are giving them blankets, hats, hand warmers, coats, water bottles, blankets and recycled beds made out of grocery bags “so they don’t have to sleep on the cold, hard ground”, Heckel explained. “We don’t want them to pass out under bridges, in alleyways. We are trying to be mindful when it gets this cold.”
Death by hypothermia and frostbite are not the only concerns.
People who rely on panhandling for revenue will lose that income when people aren’t out during a storm, Patton said, and that affects their ability to get food and other necessities. Heavy snows can make city streets impassable, complicating outreach teams’ ability to get out from shelters and on to the street.
The physical, mental and behavioral health issues that people living with homelessness deal with make the risks of living unsheltered in extreme weather all the worse, said Doug Schenkelberg, executive director of Chicago Coalition for the Homeless. Health conditions, like asthma, are experienced disproportionately by the unhoused, Patton explained, which means people having difficulty breathing is a distinct possibility.