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As winter settles in New Hampshire, unhoused look for warm places to stay

City officials cleared out an encampment in Concord as winter weather hit the state.
Jeongyoon Han
/
NHPR
City officials cleared out an encampment in Concord earlier in December as winter weather hit the state.

As the state braces for intense rain and wind this weekend, housing rights organizers are helping the unhoused get ready for the coldest time of year.

The National Coalition for the Homeless saysthat the winter season is when the unhoused are particularly vulnerable, as 700 people who experience or are at risk of homelessness die from hypothermia each year in the United States.

Many winter shelters have already opened, providing unhoused people a warm place to stay. But housing organizers are also preparing for scenarios where individuals choose not to or cannot take shelter there.

Freeman Toth, Homeless Street Outreach Manager at the Belknap-Merrimack Community Action Program, said only 15 to 20% of the clients he works with plan on staying in a shelter.

Various barriers stand in the way for making shelters a viable option for many of his clients, Toth said.

In some cases, there are simply not enough beds in shelters: Toth said the Concord Coalition to End Homelessness filled up 38 of their 50, including 10 auxiliary cots, beds during last week’s snow storm.

Barring limited capacity, other issues remain.

“It’s a tough environment to exist in, especially if you have previous trauma, or you are living with a mental health condition or disorder,” he said. “There’s a group that are maybe new to experiencing homelessness and they’re not willing to realize that as a resource, or are completely unaware of it.”

Toth says many of his clients have told him that they don’t want to leave their belongings unattended in their tents or wherever they are staying.

"If everything you owned was in your tent, would you go to a shelter because the weather was bad?” he said.

In other instances, individuals who are under the influence or are using substances are not allowed to enter certain shelters. Some shelters also disqualify individuals who are on the sex offender registry or have a criminal background.

Should clients stay outside during the cold, Toth said he and his colleagues help them prepare to stay safe and warm.

“We're interacting with them, educating them about strategies to stay warm and how they can hunker down, just checking with them if they're not going to a winter shelter, what supplies do they have?” he said.

Toth said for those who choose to stay in shelters, he brings them over to ones like Isaiah 61 Café in Laconia — a low-barrier shelter, which means it has fewer prerequisites for individuals who want to stay there.

Dawn Longval, who runs the kitchen and winter shelter with her husband, Dave, said many of the people who come to the winter shelter have struggled to stay warm during the past few weeks.

“Some people don’t even have shoes on,” she said.

Since the onset of the pandemic, Longval said she noticed greater demand for shelter.

“We started to notice how full we were getting with COVID,” she said. “So we expanded.”

With their winter shelter, which opened this past year, the couple provides breakfast and lunch for individuals. But even their shelter can’t stay open 24/7 because of personnel reasons, so the cafe suggests people head to the Salvation Army for a meal on Saturday, and a local church for a Sunday meal.

Longval and her staff also provide support to unhoused individuals who cannot stay in the shelter, supplying them with propane tanks, adapters, tarps and batteries.

Granite Staters looking for more information on shelter and housing can call 211.

Jeongyoon joins us from a stint at NPR in Washington, where she was a producer at Weekend Edition. She has also worked as an English teacher at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, helped produce podcasts for Hong Kong Stories, and worked as a news assistant at WAMC Northeast Public Radio. She's a graduate of Williams College, where she was editor in chief of the college newspaper.
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