Cold temperatures can be life threatening, especially to the homeless population.
The polar vortex that’s brought below-freezing temperatures to many major cities in the US has already led to a number of deaths.
There are roughly 553,000 homeless people in the US on any given night, and approximately 11% of the adult homeless population are veterans.
There are a number of ways you can help at-risk populations during cold weather events.
The polar vortex that’s brought blistering temperatures to many parts of the US, especially states in the Midwest, has already claimed at least 11 lives.
This weather event is life-threatening, especially to folks without proper shelter.
There are a little less than 553,000 homeless people in the US, according to a December 2018 report from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and roughly 224 million people nationwide have been hit with below-freezing temperatures this week.
Veterans account for a disproportionate number of adult homeless people in the US. According to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans, roughly 11 percent of the adult homeless population are veterans.
As much of the nation struggles to keep warm during the polar vortex, here’s how you can help populations that are most at risk.
Call 311 to connect with homeless outreach teams
Many major US cities, including including New York, Chicago, Boston, and Washington, DC, have hotlines under the number 311 you can call if you see someone on the street who might need help. The number can help connect you with homeless outreach teams.
Dialing 211 can also help link people with community services. This service is available to roughly 270 million people, or about 90% of the US population, according to the Federal Communications Commission.
Donate clothing and other supplies to emergency shelters
Many homeless people turn up to shelters without proper clothing during a time where a proper coat can make all the difference. If you’re able to, donating warm clothing to local shelters and organizations can be a major help amid extreme weather events and low temperatures.
Click here for help finding donation centers in your area. Many of these organizations are willing to pick up donations from your residence, which you can often schedule online.
Putting together care packages and keeping them in your vehicle to hand out can also be extremely helpful. Warm items like gloves, socks, hats, scarves, and blankets are especially useful, as well as shelf-safe food, Nancy Powers with the Salvation Army’s Chicago Freedom Center told CNN.
There are specific resources for veterans you can direct people to
Veterans who are homeless or at risk of homelessness can call theNational Call Center for Homeless Veterans, which is available 24/7 and is run by the Department of Veterans Affairs.
The National Coalition for Homeless Veterans can also help you locate local services for veterans. Click here to find an organization in your area.
Donate money to a charity
If you’re able to donate money to a charity for the homeless, a little can go a long way.
Below are over a dozen organizations that were given four out of four stars by Charity Navigator, an independent nonprofit that rates charities based on their financial management and accountability.
These are anxious times for Stephanie Klasky-Gamer and the people her organization, LA Family Housing, helps lift out of poverty and homelessness.
Throughout the 35-day government shutdown, the chief executive worried that some 400 families — or about 1,600 people — wouldn’t be able to stay in their federally subsidized houses and apartments, and that LA Family Housing wouldn’t recoup the $250,000 it had spent to prevent mass evictions from the federal government.
And now that the government has reopened, she is worried that another shutdown will put those same tenants at risk again and that landlords will be less willing to work with the poor and homeless people her organization serves.
The partial government shutdown ended in time to prevent a feared housing catastrophe. On Friday, President Trump and Congress agreed to fund government agencies through Feb. 15 — or for three weeks — as negotiations continue over how to secure the nation’s southern border.
If they are unable to come to a deal, Trump has threatened another shutdown, again potentially jeopardizing millions of dollars in contracts through the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
More than 130,000 households in Los Angeles County receive some form of federal rental assistance and were at risk of not being able to pay their rent if the shutdown had lasted through the end of February.
But the mere threat of thousands of poor people returning to homelessness in L.A. — and the possibility of that threat happening again — has rattled government officials and affordable housing advocates.
In a letter to members of the California congressional delegation, Douglas Guthrie, president of the Los Angeles Housing Authority, explained that landlords who accept vouchers depend on the government to come through with funding and that losing their trust could be a problem going forward.
“We have 14,000 landlords participating in the program, most of which are small family-run businesses,” Guthrie wrote. “Because of the extremely tight rental market in Los Angeles and the escalating rents there are already fewer landlords willing to participate in this program.”
HUD spokesman Brian Sullivan declined to say how the government reopening for three weeks will affect the funding of rental subsidy programs going forward.
“We’re so busy we can’t look that far downstream,” he said.
The question now is whether landlords will still trust the federal government to pay its bills on time — especially with the threat of another shutdown looming.
The stigma of leasing to tenants who may have been homeless was a tough sell already. But the chaos in Washington appears to have made it worse. For so long, tenants receiving federal subsides offered a level of dependability and certainty for landlords because, at the end of the day, Uncle Sam was footing the bill.
“It really sows this distrust and skepticism of whether these landlords can rely on the government like they have in the past because of this dysfunction,” said Elayne Weiss, senior policy analyst at the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
Keisha Hosea, housing liaison for Union Station Homeless Services, recruits landlords to accept federally subsidized vouchers across a wide swath of L.A. County, from Pasadena to Claremont. In the last couple of weeks, she said, some have expressed concerns about whether their tenants would be able to make rent.
“There’s a fear from landlords doing programs like this that the funding will stop and they have all these people in housing who they can’t get to pay,” she said.
Before the shutdown ended, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority wrote to the Trump administration that it was “concerned that the shutdown could drive more families into homelessness, which will greatly increase public sector costs while subjecting already vulnerable people to trauma.”
The county’s homeless population was 52,765 in 2018, a 4% decline from the year before. City and county officials believe these lapses in funding will fuel a problem that they’re only beginning to get their arms around.
Joel John Roberts, CEO of People Assisting the Homeless, feels this fear acutely. His multi-service organization is one of the largest providers of affordable housing in California. It also does extensive outreach to help bring homeless people off the streets. Many of those clients were at risk of losing their apartments during the government shutdown.
Roberts said he was committed to not evicting anyone, but at the same time, he didn’t want to be disingenuous about how much help he could offer if the federal government had stayed shuttered.
“We have been selling this program by saying, ‘It’s government funded. You don’t have to worry about the government not paying rent,’” Roberts said. “They’re asking, ‘How do I know the government will pay?’ That’s a big problem.”
This is a huge question in the hot Southern California real estate market.
At LA Family Housing, Klasky-Gamer said her organization owns and operates 24 buildings and acts as a landlord for about 150 families that use about $167,000 a month in federal subsidies to pay their rent. Klasky-Gamer said she never thought she would have to evict people during the shutdown, but if it had lasted until March, she wasn’t sure.
Separately, the government shutdown also affected the organization’s broader mission of getting people off the streets and into affordable housing, leaving LA Family Housing without federal funding to subsidize the rents of an additional 250 families.
Normally, $250,000 a month was delivered from an annual HUD contract, which LA Family Housing has had for years but which expired at the end of 2018. Because of the government shutdown, the contract wasn’t renewed for 2019, so Klasky-Gamer’s organization paid its clients’ January rent out of its own limited coffers, hoping to be paid back.
“We don’t have the wherewithal to withstand $250,000 a month and not be reimbursed,” she said.
Now that the government is back open, Klasky-Gamer learned Tuesday that HUD has renewed LA Family Housing’s contract and made it retroactive to Jan. 1, 2019 — meaning the organization won’t be out of hundreds of thousands of dollars after all.
“I’ll be relieved once we have the funds,” she said.
The money comes from Measure H, the quarter-cent sales tax approved by county voters. Here’s how it will be spent.
Homeless advocates say Pasadena will be able to help more people experiencing homeless after a recent infusion of $1.33 million in Los Angeles County sales tax dollars.
The City Council on Monday divvied up Pasadena’s share of Measure H funds for the 2018 and 2019 fiscal years to area service providers. Measure H, approved by county voters in 2017, raised the sales tax by a quarter-cent for 10 years with an expected $355 million in annual revenue targeted for homeless services.
Last year 52,765 homeless people were counted in L.A. County. Pasadena counted 677 homeless individuals living on its streets and in shelters the night of the annual census last year.
$146,231 to Friends In Deed for homeless prevention efforts.
$300,326 to Union Station Homeless Services and $150,000 to Hathaway-Sycamores Child and Family Services for rapid rehousing for single adults.
$136,224 to Union Station for strengthening the coordinated entry system.
$223,467 to Union Station and $131,677 to Friends In Deed for emergency shelter programs.
$238,480 for a new city staff position that will focus on helping people receiving rental assistance hang on to their housing.
“Measure H has had a huge impact,” Ryan Izell, chief program officer at Union Station, said in an interview Tuesday. “Over the past two years, we’ve been ramping up services. We’ve seen an ability to serve more people with a greater variety of services and interventions.”
Among the programs Union Station plans to fund with the city grants is a three-faceted rapid rehousing program that will build on one it currently runs. It offers short-term rental assistance for homeless people so they can move into market-rate rentals, wraparound case management services and employment services. It follows a “housing first” philosophy, Izell said.
“We want to help move people off the streets as quickly as possible,” he said.
The coordinated entry system will bring together service providers working with Pasadena’s homeless to collaborate and ensure efforts are not being duplicated for specific people, Izell said.
Additionally, the grant for that program will allow Union Station to hire an outreach staffer and a part-time liaison who will connect with landlords and the Housing Department to streamline issuance of vouchers, he said.
Its emergency shelter grant will pay for motel vouchers that will allow people in need to be quickly housed. Izell said this will compliment Union Station’s traditional shelters by allowing the organization to house people who may not be open to staying in shelters.
These grant-funded programs represent just some of the tools Pasadena is deploying to address homelessness. The City Council last month voted to move forward with plans to build 65 to 70 units of permanent supportive housing for homeless senior in Northwest Pasadena.
Last year it also approved a controversial ordinance that would allow conversion of motels into permanent supportive housing.
Pasadena’s Union Station Homeless Services will send a case worker to West Covina two-to-three days a week.
With about 30 West Covina residents demanding action to address homelessness at Tuesday’s City Council meeting, the city announced a new partnership with Pasadena’s Union Station Homeless Services.
Union Station, the lead homeless services provider in the San Gabriel Valley, will provide a case worker two-to-three days a week who will partner with the West Covina Police Department’s two-officer Homeless Outreach and Park Enforcement team to connect the city’s homeless with services and provide assistance finding housing, Assistant City Manager Nikole Bresciani said.
The effort, expected to begin in January, will run as a six-month pilot program paid for with grant funding secured by Union Station, Bresciani said.
West Covina’s homeless population has increased significantly in the past three years, according to data gathered during the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s annual homeless count. The numbers rose from 48 people in 2016 to 158 in 2017 to 277 in 2018, although Bresciani has said the 2017 number ought to have been higher because several areas of the city went uncounted.
Before the city made its announcement, several residents spoke about the need for increased law enforcement because of crimes they believe to be committed by homeless individuals.
Brigitte Cusimano spoke on behalf of her 78-year-old mother, Paulette, about a break-in at her parents’ West Covina home the afternoon of Dec. 10. A man they believe to be homeless kicked on the front door and demanded money and water, punching through the glass in the door in the process. Cusimano said her parents waited 10 minutes for police to respond. “There’s obviously some internal problem (in the Police Department),” Cusimano said. “When two elderly, unarmed people are told by a dispatcher that she has no units to send, there’s something wrong.”
City Manager Chris Freeland apologized for the slow response but pointed out that responding officers arrested the man as he was walking away, and the Los Angeles District Attorney’s Office has charged him with felony burglary, attempted robbery, vandalism and resisting arrest.
While residents conflated homelessness with criminal activity, Freeland said the two are separate. He also pointed out that the city’s police officers will not violate homeless people’s civil rights. “That’s not a homeless issue if crime is occurring, it’s something the police need to respond to,” Freeland said. “The homeless issue itself needs to be addressed, and the city is trying to find solutions, but there’s no silver bullet.”
Sue Augino, who organized the group of residents who spoke Tuesday, said one thing is clear — West Covina does not have enough police officers on the streets at any given time. “The officers who are are out there can only be in so many places at once,” Augino said. “We need more officers on the streets. Bad things are happening, and they’re happening fast.”
For nearly five decades, South Pasadena officials have joined forces with neighboring Pasadena to ensure those in need have a bountiful Thanksgiving meal.
And that was the case this past Thanksgiving as So Pas officials joined forces with state and local representatives to serve scores of homeless and low-income families a Thanksgiving feast with all the trimmings in Pasadena’s Central Park.
Whether it was State Senator Anthony Portantino or Pasadena Mayor Terry Torneck alongside So Pas City Manager Stephanie DeWolfe, Interim Police Chief Brian Solinsky or City Councilman Bob Joe, the food was served up hot and delicious.
The annual thanksgiving feast, known as the Union Station Services’ Thanksgiving Dinner in the Park, has been an integral part of Pasadena for 47 years.
“For 47 years, Union Station Homeless Services’ Thanksgiving Dinner in the Park has been an important part of Pasadena’s community of caring and for many, a special part of the holiday itself,” So Pas Police Sgt. Shannon Robledo, who also participated in serving up the feast, said in an email to The Review. “We love doing it and the people love us doing it.”
Interim Police Chief Solinsky concurred, saying the experience was “tremendous.”
“This was a tremendous experience, one that I am very grateful to have taken part in,” Solinsky said. “It was a wonderful opportunity to serve those less fortunate and give back to the community in a small, but meaningful way. I met some fantastic people from all walks of life. Some were community members, and others, although less fortunate themselves, were willing to lend a helping hand wherever needed. Law enforcement in South Pasadena is about community and partnerships with every citizen. Serving on Thanksgiving is just one way we can strengthen these bonds.”
The park is overrun with volunteers ready to be of service to those with no place to go during the holidays. It also gives officials a chance to refer anyone interested to services that can break the cycle of homelessness.
“I’ve been doing this my entire career,” Robledo has said during many conversations. “The whole reason for us being here is to help those who need it.” Officials estimate that more than 500 Thanksgiving meals were served up this past Thanksgiving.
“A small army of volunteers traditionally serves up hope and hot Thanksgiving dinners in Central Park to thousands of homeless men, women, children, seniors, very low-income families, and those with no place to go during the holidays,” Robledo said.
So Pas City Manager Stephanie DeWolfe agreed with her colleagues, adding it not only benefits the homeless, but the region as well.
“It was a great opportunity to come together as one regional community – non-profits, businesses, government agencies and individual volunteers – to work on a specific project with a specific outcome, feeding the homeless and hungry on Thanksgiving,” DeWolfe explained. “It gives me great hope that all of us can apply that spirit of collaboration at other times throughout the year as we address regional challenges such as homelessness and housing.”
Even the threat of rain Thursday – now increased to a 40 percent by the National Weather Service – can’t dampen the enthusiasm of hundreds of volunteers working hard to prepare one of Pasadena’s beloved annual traditions, offering a free Thanksgiving Day meal to those in need at “Dinner in the Park.”
Volunteer chefs are embarking on a two-day roasting, basting, and baking blitz as they work with Union Station Homeless Services to prepare their annual feast for a couple thousand of their neighbors in need.
The organization has worked to make sure no one goes without a traditional turkey dinner and good company to share it with on Thanksgiving for more than four decades. Through community donations and partnerships, volunteers will serve up well over 100 turkeys and 300 pies between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. at Central Park, Union Station Director of Special Programs Stephanie Harris said.
“We’re expecting around 2,000 to 2,500 meals to be served,” she said. And for dessert “We’re planning to serve around 300 pies,” she added. With the homeless population increasing in recent years, more food donations for the Dinner In The Park event would still be a big help, Harris said.
Prior to Thanksgiving, store-bought pies and other food donations can be dropped off at the facility at 412 S. Raymond Ave. “We’ll be happy to receive food donations on the day of the event,” Harris added. “We’ll have a food drop-off station setup on Fair Oaks (Ave.)” Homemade items cannot be accepted due to public health regulations. A list of needed items is available on Union Station’s website.
Union Station CEO Anne Miskey said the city has embraced the endeavor and helped make it a success for so many years. “We have such huge community support at this event, both in terms of volunteers coming out the day of, as well as people supporting by providing food and items,” she said. But it’s a big job. “Obviously, we can always use more support,” Miskey said.
The National Weather Service predicts a strong chance of rain Wednesday night, continuing through to Thursday morning. But forecast expect the skies to begin clearing by late morning on Thanksgiving Day. Either way, dinner will be served.
“Everything is going to be under a tent, so it shouldn’t be a problem, rain or shine,” Miskey said.
Pasadena Mayor Terry Tornek and State Senator Anthony Portantino, D-Glendale, are among those expected to attend, Harris said. A wide array of people from throughout the Pasadena community come together each year to make the massive meal possible, Harris explained. Pasadena Convention Center Executive Chef Brandon Barousse and his staff will lead the all-important turkey preparation, she said. The Morongo Band of Indians and SuperValu donated the bulk of the birds, Harris said. Other significant donors include United Agencies in Pasadena, Vallarta Supermarkets, Super King Markets, and many private donors.
