DAILY NEWS CLIP: January 13, 2025

Newborns in CT homeless shelters, frostbite cases grow. Advocates compare situation to ‘hunger games’


Hartford Courant – Sunday, January 12, 2025
By Kaitlin McCallum

The hardest part, Connecticut advocates say, is turning people away in the cold because we’ve “got no place for you to go.”

This can be the reality, even as arctic air blew recently into Connecticut with its frigid temperatures, and Gov. Ned Lamont activated the state’s severe cold weather protocol “to ensure that the most vulnerable populations receive protection from the severe cold, which could be life threatening if exposed to the elements for extended periods of time.”

The protocol set into motion an all-hands-on-deck response system, coordinating the efforts of police, hospitals, homeless outreach workers and shelters through the state’s 211 call center. It also released some additional resources to care for people and get them off the street.

Yet the reality across the state is a system where providers say there are not enough beds, not enough services and people sleeping in cars, outside and with newborn infants in shelters. One lawmaker said of the situation that it’s time to “find a moral compass for this state,”

At the activation of the cold weather protocol, 5,486 people were recorded by name as homeless in Connecticut, including more than 500 children. Of those, more than 800 people were living outside, according to Sarah Fox, chief operating officer of the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness.

“We know that’s an undercount,” Fox said in an interview with the Courant. “We estimate about 25% of people experiencing unsheltered homeless can’t come inside out of the cold.”

Connecticut’s homeless resources are concentrated in cities and larger towns across the state.

In Greater Hartford, there are year-round shelters in New Britain, Bristol, Hartford and Vernon.

Some serve individuals, others families, and some just women and children. They are all full.

Many towns also have overnight cold weather shelters that are open from December to March just during overnight hours. Individuals looking to stay overnight usually have to line up ahead of time because beds are first come, first served, though many are reserved for people whom the shelter has verified are living outside. When beds run out, the rest of those in line are turned away.

During the severe cold weather protocol, some towns have also opened emergency overflow shelters, in libraries and churches and other buildings not suited for habitation. Sometimes there are cots set up in rows, allowing for warmth but not privacy, an issue that keeps some unhoused people in their tents. Sometimes there are not enough cots, so people are offered chairs to sit in overnight, still better than the icy concrete.

“It varies. In some communities they are able to bring everyone inside albeit what we’re talking about is just a chair, these are not comfortable situations. But in other communities you have people being turned away during severe weather protocol,” Fox said. “We are actively working on the turnaways, how many are being turned away from resources. But we know that is happening across the state because of lack of capacity.”

Children and the elderly

The state has seen a 13% increase in homelessness over the past year, including an increase in children and seniors.

A handful of babies are living in the year-round family shelter at Cornerstone Foundation in Vernon. Executive Director Sharon Redfern listed them off in an interview this week: a 1-week old, a 2-week-old in the shelter, with a month-old baby and an 8-month pregnant mom on the way. Police and community members often bring people they see living outside to Cornerstone. One of the mothers was living outside before her baby was born, Redfern said.

The number of children experiencing homelessness in Connecticut rose by more than 75% since 2021, according to the state’s most recent Point-In-Time Count data. In January 2024, the annual statewide count found children younger than 18 made up 20% of the state’s homeless population.

The count found families with children experiencing homelessness increased from 310 households in 2023 to 362 households in 2024. “These 362 family households are made up of 1,108 people of which 677 were children. In 2023 these households were made up of 965 people of which 583 were children. Across both metrics, this is an increase of about 16%,” the report said.

In New Britain, staff at Friendship Service Center, which operates a year-round shelter and a myriad of other services, is seeing more older folks, CEO Caitlin Rose said.

“We’ve seen nationally a surge of homeless seniors. We’re seeing an older population and we definitely locally see that day in and day out,” Rose said. “We’re serving more people over 60 than ever before. That comes with … severe medical issues, incontinence, memory issues that we’re not at all equipped to deal with.”

Frostbite, hypothermia and emergency rooms

Christine Thebarge is executive director of St. Vincent DePaul Mission of Bristol, which operates a year-round shelter for individuals and, like Friendship Service Center, serves as a refuge, providing food, showers and laundry services, computer access, as well as case managers who work to help people get their needs met.

“The hardest part every day is someone coming in absolutely bewildered, young, old or whatever, and having them say ‘I don’t know where I’m going to go tonight’ … and if there’s no shelter beds, no warming beds and there is no place to go, where do you send somebody?” Thebarge said. “For my staff, the hardest day, is when they have to say I’ve got no place for you to go.”

Rose said the same. “If we have extra people, then we try to do a night-by-night: Can we call a friend, negotiate a short-term stay, are there resources in another community – call Waterbury, call Meriden, call Hartford, do they have any capacity? Some people will go it alone and go back out into their tents.

“We’re consistently faced with the hunger games. Staff are really in a tough spot when the needs exceed our possible offerings. We pretty consistently have to turn people away,” she said. Hunger games refers to a story of a dystopian society.

Thebarge said she’s concerned about the increasingly vulnerable people – younger children, older adults, the medically fragile, enduring the cold.

“I worry about people dying this winter,” she said.

Fox does, too.

“We have heard of people dying this year, we heard of people dying last year because they were unable to come inside to warmth,” she said. “I haven’t gotten to the exact names but I’ve had reports of people dying outside in communities across the state and several this year alone.”

Dr. Cynthia Price, senior emergency medicine attending at Hartford Hospital’s Emergency Department, said while the cold has an immediate impact, showing up as frostbite and hypothermia, homelessness is deadly regardless of the weather.

“The reality of homelessness is that it impacts every area of your life,” as people struggle to get adequate food, water, a shower, access to a bathroom and shelter. Respiratory illnesses, currently rampant in Connecticut, “are more dangerous in the undomiciled population and if one person in the shelter is coughing, everyone in the shelter is coughing,” she said.

Health and mental health issues are compounded by lack of access to regular care and basic necessities.

“All of those are why people die early who don’t have a place to go in the wintertime. Their lifespan can be 20-25 years less than people who don’t have a home,” Price said.

The Emergency Department does what it can to help triage the needs of homeless people while balancing those who are sick.

“Last night a guy came in and said ‘Somebody took my bag’ and he was wrapped in a blanket. His chief complaint was homeless and needs clothing so we are going to get him shoes and clothes and a cup of coffee,” she said. “We like that people are frank but we have very many who will say they have a headache or abdominal pain” to be able to stay somewhere warm.

The hospital will let people warm up and then work to get them to warming centers amid freezing temperatures, she said.

“We start to see frostbite from exposed areas from people unable to change their socks, change their shoes, they’re getting frostbite in their toes and fingers. We start to see it on the face and nose and all those other things that come with exposed skin and when people are laying around. And once you kind of freeze the blood that’s going through the outside of the skin, it comes back and makes you colder. Then we start to see the first signs of hypothermia,” Price said, discussing the impact of being out in 25 degrees.

While by noon Friday the severe cold weather protocol with its additional resources and protections had expired as temperatures rose to the high 30s, by nightfall, it had dropped to 26. The handful of degrees is little comfort to those still outdoors, Rose said.

“There are all these resources kicked into gear for cold weather and then they disappear. We have a year-round shelter issue, we have a year-round capacity issue,” Rose said. “Do you think at 12:30 it’s going to feel drastically different? Of course not,” she said. “For me and my colleagues, it’s really difficult to explain there’s really silly bureaucratic things. I’m really sorry … I know it doesn’t feel a lot warmer and I still don’t have a safe, stable place for you.”

The shelter capacity issue is driven both by the increase in homelessness due to skyrocketing rents and the inability of people to move out of the shelter system into permanent housing due to the skyrocketing rents and other costs of living in the state.

Legislators who work on homelessness issues are seeking both a solution to the state’s lack of affordable housing and stable funding for homelessness response work.

At a recent press conference at the state Capitol , advocates said they need $33.5 million for homelessness prevention, crisis response and to fund the Coordinated Access Network’s regional service hubs.

“Look, we have $33 million,” Sen. Matt Lesser said, referring to the state’s revenue surplus and the coming political battle over the state’s fiscal guardrails, which limit legislators ability to spend it. “We’ve got a lot more than that in the state’s resources, but we are up against the fiscal constraints, and we have to decide whether or not those are going to remain in place.”

Advocates and legislators repeated the same refrain: All we lack is the political will.

But Rep. Geraldo Reyes said Connecticut needs something else.

“In parking lots, there are the families in there – three, four living out of the car,” Reyes, of Waterbury said at the press conference. “That’s a sin in one of the richest states in the union.

“I, too, will send a message out to Gov. Lamont: Please, please, we need to find a moral compass for this state,” Reyes said.

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