Kansas City opens Bartle Hall to homeless: ‘A place to sleep that’s warm, that’s safe’
Kansas City will open Bartle Hall as a warming shelter for people without homes for the rest of this winter, city officials announced on Friday.
Starting that night, one of the large exhibit spaces in the downtown Kansas City Convention Center was to be lined with cots and equipped with services. The announcement comes as the city’s existing warming shelter struggles to meet demand because the COVID-19 pandemic and ensuing economic fallout have cost so many people their homes.
“That’s why our city government, our city administration thought it was vital for us to make sure that we look at Bartle Hall … as a warming center, as a housing center, as a place where folks who need to have a place to sleep that’s warm, that’s safe, that’s taken care of,” Mayor Quinton Lucas said during a news conference there.
Since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic last March, Bartle Hall, usually teeming with conventions and events, has been virtually empty.
The center will be known as the Scott Eicke warming center, named for the man who was found on New Year’s Day after freezing to death. The current warming center at the Garrison Community Center in Columbus Park will close.
City staffers were setting up the new center Friday afternoon. As City Manager Brian Platt spoke, a truck filled with cots, water bottles and other supplies pulled into the expansive room and started unloading. Crews were working fast, he said, to ready the center in a matter of hours.
It will be open from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. nightly through March 31. Platt said the city would start with 150 beds, but given the size of the empty convention center, it can add many more. To prevent the spread of COVID-19, guests will have their temperatures taken and be required to wear masks and wash their hands regularly.
“The challenges that our unhoused populations face is not new, but the COVID-19 pandemic is exacerbating a lot of the challenges that the people of the city are facing,” Platt said.
Since Eicke’s death, the city has been working to find ways to better serve its homeless population. On Thursday, the City Council voted to establish a task force to improve the services the city provides.
Gabby Weeks, coordinator for the center, said it was important that it be named for Eicke.
“Kansas City was Scott Eicke’s home,” Weeks said. “We believe that every Kansas (Citian’s) lives matter.”
She said homeless advocates would hold the city accountable for the services it has promised.
Platt said the city was still coordinating what services would be available. Fiorella’s Jack Stack Barbecue will donate food, officials said.
