Public officials and charity volunteers scrambled to bring thousands of homeless people in out of the storm Monday night in New York City, Boston, and smaller, harder-hit inland cities around New England.
Snowfall fell short of professional predictions in New York, where a 1981 “right to shelter” law requires the city to provide all homeless people with a place to sleep indoors, but the storm still dropped more than enough snow to make life more dangerous for the homeless. The city declared a “Code Blue” before Monday’s storm, which meteorologists named “Juno.” The Code Blue relaxes entry requirements at city shelters and increases the number of outreach vans roaming the streets looking for unsheltered people to bring indoors. But many still fended for themselves, according to The Daily Beast’s ride-along report from a Coalition for the Homeless food distribution van route.
New York’s homeless population jumped substantially under Mayor Michael Bloomberg (I), who sought to curtail the city’s “right to shelter” obligation to the destitute and emphasized short-term policies like shelter beds over long-term solutions like permanent supportive housing. Aside from the broader consensus among advocates that permanent housing trumps shelter beds, some homeless people actively avoid sleeping in official shelters because of safety concerns or overcrowding.
Boston was hit harder, with over a foot of snow falling by Tuesday morning. But while Mayor Martin Walsh (D) said at a Monday press conference that the city would work with homelessness advocates, the Boston Globe reports that the city did not dispatch any of its own trained outreach teams. Instead, police officers and other emergency personnel planned to take over from charitable organizations once the roads became unsafe for their vans. Boston, too, is dealing with a serious shift in the shape of its homelessness population, as a bridge closure in the fall cut off access to one of the city’s main shelters and left officials scrambling to make up the lost capacity.
An hour away in Worcester, Juno lived up to its billing. The western Massachusetts city of 182,000 is under 25 inches of snow. Local charities’ census efforts have recorded more than 1,500 homeless individuals in Worcester County and about 1,200 in the city itself in recent years, and a city spokesman said that police would be reaching out to homeless people about their shelter options ahead of the storm on Monday. Worcester isn’t the friendliest place for homeless people. The city is headed to court to defend a new panhandling ban, which plaintiff Robert Thayer says is a violation of homeless people’s first amendment rights. Similar efforts to criminalize homelessness or make it harder to serve the unsheltered population have sprung up in dozens of cities around the country in the past couple of years.
It doesn’t take a big storm for winter to kill homeless people. Hypothermia can set in at temperatures well above freezing, and many cities don’t open their emergency winter shelters until temperatures drop far below that. Thousands of people die each year from exposure — preventable deaths, directly caused by a lack of shelter. And while many never get a funeral, as ThinkProgress has reported, they also do not go unmourned. In December, advocates and activists around the country held symbolic funerals to commemorate the thousands of homeless people who died while sleeping rough in 2014.
