'Life-threatening' cold has shelters and outreach workers scrambling to get homeless inside

Men and women were huddling in the small chapel of the Salvation Army Harbor Light Center homeless shelter in downtown Minneapolis to stay warm. Nearby at the Higher Ground shelter, more than a dozen sleeping pads on the floor would expand capacity for the night.

In south Minneapolis, outreach workers with the American Indian Community Development Corp. (AICDC) were handing out cold-weather survival kits to people encamped in tents. And in St. Paul, staff with the Ramsey County Sheriff's Office were driving from one bus shelter to the next, distributing warm clothes.

Emergency measures were being rolled out across the state as county agencies and nonprofits scrambled to find ways to protect people who are sleeping in the cold. Starting Wednesday, shelters have been pushed beyond their normal capacity by people seeking refuge from the subzero temperatures. To avoid turning anyone away, shelters were squeezing in cots and mats in hallways and other spaces; and they were extending their hours so that people could stay through the day.

"The situation is really, really dire," said Margaret King, senior director of housing at Catholic Charities, which operates two large shelters in Minneapolis and St. Paul. "People need to be inside or they're gonna die. They're going to freeze to death."

The blast of bone-chilling cold comes as shelters and agencies that serve the homeless are already strained by economic pressures. The number of people seeking emergency shelter in the Twin Cities has soared over the past six months, which authorities attribute to rising rents and the expiration of the moratorium on evictions. As of Dec. 16, 242 families with children were living in emergency shelters in Hennepin County — nearly quadruple the number from a year ago, according to the county's latest tally.

"We have a large and growing population that is living on the margins," said Trish Thacker, executive director of the Salvation Army Harbor Light Center. "And then this really severe weather just means that the folks who already were under-resourced are then suddenly in a life-or-death, crisis situation."

Street outreach teams said they are encountering some individuals suffering from early stages of hypothermia and frostbite.

This week, a street outreach team with the AICDC has been handing out blankets, gloves, hats and hand warmers to people living in area encampments, and driving many to shelters. Around midnight on Wednesday, they encountered a young Native couple under a bridge near the Little Earth housing project with only a thin blanket to shield themselves. Outreach workers helped the couple warm up in a van before ferrying them to a newly opened shelter in the basement of the Anishinabe Wakiagun apartment complex in south Minneapolis.

"We were fortunate to be at the right place at the right time," said Vinny Dionne, AICDC's lead street outreach worker, who was among those who rescued the couple. "With that cold, they were barely keeping it together and could easily have died under that bridge."

A team with Hennepin County has been traveling to homeless camps in a van, providing a warm space for people and help in finding permanent housing. They helped one woman with painfully swollen hands get to HCMC, and they provided phones to others so they could call friends and loved ones for help. Because of the extreme wind chills, the team, known as Streets to Housing, has tried to minimize their conversations with people outside while visiting the camps.

"We don't want people to come out of what may be a warm, blanketed environment just to talk to us," said Erin Wixsten, principal planning analyst with Hennepin County's Office to End Homelessness. "People are tired and stressed out and frankly burned out by systems that have failed them. So why should they trust us?"

Sleeping outside can be deadly even in warm temperatures. In 2022, there were 153 Minnesotans who died while homeless, according to Simpson Housing Services , a Minneapolis-based nonprofit that does an annual count of homeless fatalities based largely on death records. Homicides, drug overdoses and cancer are among the leading causes of death among those who are unsheltered, the nonprofit has found.

On Thursday, as temperatures plunged well below zero, Eric Adams, 48, expressed elation that he had a warm spot inside the Catholic Charities' Higher Ground shelter in Minneapolis, which has 125 emergency beds.

"On a happiness scale from 1 to 100, I'm at '100' right now," said Adams, who runs a small business that provides roadside assistance but has been homeless off-and-on for the past year. "I've slept on park benches and in bus stops, and I can tell you that it's an experience that I don't want to relive." He added, "I'd probably freeze to death if I was out there now."

Hennepin County officials said they have been working with nonprofit shelter providers to find creative ways to expand capacity and keep their facilities open longer. On Wednesday night, Rescue Now Services, Inc. opened a 50-bed shelter at a church in northeast Minneapolis.

Authorities said they are trying to secure warm spaces for everyone seeking shelter and to avoid a tragic scenario in which someone gets frostbite or dies because they couldn't find space in a shelter. On Tuesday, staff at Simpson Housing, which operates the county's system for matching homeless adults with shelters, had to turn away 60 people because area shelters were full.

"The extreme Arctic cold puts a lot of pressure on staff, and it pains them every time that they have to turn people away," said Steve Horsfield, executive director of Simpson Housing.

In Duluth, the city's seasonal warming center will stay open extra hours Friday when wind chills are expected to be most dangerous, but the facility doesn't have staffing to operate continuously except for Christmas Day, said Joel Kilgour, the center's coordinator.

The city's spate of freezing days has meant the overflow shelter is near capacity nightly, with 75 to 100 people.

"There's a lot of attention on the extreme cold, but it's almost as deadly when it's 30 degrees and wet," Kilgour said, and with the city's dearth of more permanent shelter, outreach workers are in emergency mode from November to April. "We really need the community to dig in on structural changes."

Staff writer Jana Hollingsworth contributed to this report.