Coming in from the cold
Three nights ago, a 33-year-old man named Leon McGann tried to find a safe place to sleep on the streets.
It was not easy.
On that night, and the arctic morning that followed, temperatures dipped into the teens. A steady wind blew out of the east.
McGann, a gaunt part-time construction worker, took shelter on the lee side of an eye clinic. A security guard roused him at 1 a.m. and told him to move along. He stumbled a few blocks to a church and curled up on the front steps, where he waited for the morning sun.
McGann, who has been homeless since losing a construction job last year, regularly avoids the city’s shelters, where others “harp and harp and harp.”
But this week’s low temperatures – which reached single digits Friday night – propelled McGann and some of the city’s hardiest homeless into shelters. Warming centers around the city have opened once again, offering emergency shelter to the homeless.
“It’s way too cold to sleep outside,” McGann said Friday, as he warmed up at the House of Charity, a downtown shelter. “I’m too smart to stay out and get frostbite.”
At the House of Charity, the emergency housing grew from 19 people on Wednesday night to 41 on Thursday night. That’s in addition to the 108 beds normally open to the homeless.
This week they arrived by all manner and at all hours. At 4 a.m. Friday, city police brought a man dressed only in pants and a T-shirt.
On Friday afternoon, the shelter readied for another busy night.
“I figure we’ll have at least that many tonight because the cold starts to get into people’s bones,” said Ed McCarron, the shelter’s director. “It’s a 60-degree difference between inside and outside.”
Even so, some people refuse to come in from the cold. Staff members provide warm clothing to those who insist on staying outside. Experts on the homeless say some of those people suffer from mental illness and feel deep discomfort staying indoors. Others simply don’t like to listen to snoring.
Robert Crockett, 38, said he often stayed outside in the cold, but an injury – a car struck him as he walked along Interstate 5 after drinking a fifth of Canadian whiskey – forced him indoors.
“I’ve slept out in this many, many times,” Crockett said.
Crockett often searches behind appliance stores to find large cardboard boxes. The cardboard provides a key layer of insulation from the frozen ground, he said. He recommended taking shelter under freeway overpasses but warned that sleepers need to be wary of their neighbors, who can be more of a threat than the cold.