As climate change-driven extreme weather sends temperatures plunging to dangerous levels across the Midwest, cities are trying to prevent deaths in the homeless population. Sleeping on the streets—or even spending much time awake there—is dangerous, and there are tens of thousands of homeless people throughout the Midwest, with an estimated 80,000 in the Chicago area alone.
In addition to adding hundreds of extra shelter beds and opening warming centers around the city, Chicago kept five city buses running overnight as mobile warming centers for people who weren’t willing to go to shelters. As Tony Neeley told the New York Times, which interviewed him as he panhandled for money to get a hotel room, “I’m cold and I’m afraid,” but “A lot of us don’t go to the shelters because of bedbugs, we don’t go because people steal from you, we don’t go because you can’t even really sleep in the shelter. But my feet are cold, and these clothes are all I’ve got.”
Many homeless people are going to shelters, though, as aid organizations fight to keep up with demand. In Sioux Falls, South Dakota, a worker at a shelter that’s already been over capacity more than once this winter vowed that “We will find a spot for people to come in,” using every bit of available space and anything that could pass for a bed.
Advocates worry, too, about what will happen when the urgency recedes and the extra help is gone: “We’ll have this really bad weather through Thursday and then it will warm up some, and the scaled-up capacity will disappear, and you’ll see people back on the streets, and those people need housing,” said Douglas Schenkelberg of the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless.
For now, though, just keeping people alive is the top priority.