Kansas City has a new winter shelter plan, but houseless leader says it’s a ‘bandaid’
When a Kansas City man experiencing homelessness froze to death on New Year’s Day in 2021, the city opened an overnight emergency warming shelter.
In the several weeks it was in use, Bartle Hall, on average, gave temporary shelter and warmth to 307 houseless people every night until it closed mid-March.
But this year the city isn’t opening the space again for use. Instead, they’re relying on partnerships between shelters in the metro to ensure as many people can seek warmth as possible.
The city’s Extreme Weather Plan is taking place of Bartle Hall, in part because the downtown convention center – empty last year because of the pandemic – is again being used regularly, including for tournaments, said city spokesman Chris Hernandez.
Instead, in collaboration with shelters and outreach teams, the city opened three daytime warming centers this past Saturday.
The city also created an online database that tracks open beds at seven shelters across the metro. If the shelter beds are full, temporary overflow shelters will be made available.
“We’re trying to focus it really on women and children, as we know that there’s limited shelter space for women, and then women with their families,” said Councilwoman Ryana Parks-Shaw, 5th district, who chairs the city’s houseless task force.
But often those who are camping out rather than staying in shelters do so because they don’t qualify for the shelter, they had bad shelter experiences previously, or they don’t want to make the sacrifices required to go, like abandoning most of their possessions.
That is why starting Wednesday, the city is implementing a system that allows those experiencing houselessness to store their belongings, such as tents and clothes, in a secure location while they’re in overnight shelters keeping warm, Parks-Shaw said. Creative Innovative Entrepreneurs, which helps with outreach, will help those staying at encampments transport and secure their belongings before going to shelters, she said.
For those who do not go to shelters, Parks-Shaw said outreach teams are also going around to encampments to drop off cold weather gear and in some cases, heaters.
While not a part of the city’s extreme weather plan, city council also recently approved an old Days Inn hotel in Kansas City be converted into transitional housing for those experiencing homelessness.
Kansas City’s City Council in late December approved the plan to allocate $400,000 to create a “Housing Navigation Center” through a partnership with Lotus Care House.
Parks-Shaw said that if outreach teams come across individuals at camps who meet the criteria to go to the navigation center, they will have the opportunity to go there as well.
She added that the biggest lesson learned from winter 2021 is that collaboration is key.
“There are many different organizations in this community who have … many years of experience and passion in helping those who are homeless, or experiencing homelessness and the city is really working as a convener to bring those experts together, to help us work together to resolve the issues and to come up with more sustainable solutions,” Parks-Shaw said.
Qadhafi — the outspoken leader of the Kansas City Homeless Union, and whose real name is James Shelby — said he doesn’t believe members of the city’s houseless community are better off this winter than last.
“They keep moving us around like cattle,” Qadhafi said, adding that the city continues to sweep, or forcibly move, tent encampments such as the one at East 10th and Harrison streets, where numerous sweeps have occurred in the past several months.
He added that in the past several days, at least a handful of tents have caught fire as people tried to get warm.
In his opinion, it’s not very difficult to put people in affordable homes rather than hotels and shelters. He wishes less money went to shelters and more went directly to those experiencing houselessness.
Qadhafi, who said he spoke at length with the city manager about the hotel initiative a few weeks back, said he still wants the city to better-involve the homeless union in its decisions.
“That’s why we formed a union, because everybody was doing stuff and saying they was doing stuff on behalf, and there was no homeless people involved.”
He compared the extreme weather initiative to “putting a bandaid over a shotgun wound,” a phrase he’s used many times to describe the city’s efforts over the past year.
Despite efforts by the city, Qadhafi said, there are still people sleeping outside in extreme and potentially deadly weather conditions. He doesn’t believe the city is acting with enough urgency for those folks.
“They should be having emergency meetings every day, all day, until they come up with something that’s viable and that’s working,” he said.
This story was originally published January 5, 2022 at 2:04 PM.
