photo by: Rochelle Valverde

Phil Englehart, far left, Brian Daldorph, and Sharon Miller, both seated at the far side of the tables, help to check in guests on Feb. 2, 2022, at the emergency winter shelter at the Community Building, 115 West 11th St.

The visitors to the Community Building put down their yoga mats around the perimeter of the gym, and on top of that they put their blankets and pillows. Many have bags or backpacks filled with the possessions they are able to carry with them.

They have filtered in over the past couple of hours, checking in at two folding tables set up near the recreation center’s back door. No basketballs bounce, and the workout machines are still. The visitors are here to sleep. They have come because it is their best option to get out of the cold for the night.

The City of Lawrence has been using the Community Building this winter to provide a temporary emergency shelter program for people experiencing homelessness. This particular night — Wednesday, Feb. 2 — the overnight temperature will drop to single digits, and 43 people will come to stay. The following night, as the temperature drops even lower, 48 people will stay.

Some people immediately lie down and keep to themselves, while others talk, listen to music, or get something to eat. A metal shelf with a microwave and some pantry items has been rolled in, and some of the visitors heat up popcorn or single-serve cups of noodles. A woman walks in with a platter of foil-wrapped hotdogs that she passes out to those who want them. One man sits quietly, eating a bag of popcorn with a plastic spoon.

Brandon Wall has set up his sleeping area alongside the bleachers. His folded blanket lies over his yoga mat and he’s taken off his shoes and is wearing a pair of fresh white socks. As he talks, he pulls on the facial hair on his chin. Though he concedes the gym floor feels like sleeping on concrete, he seems grateful for the option.

“I like how homey it feels here,” he said, adding that they give out snacks, which he has set out along one side of his yoga mat. “It’s kind of like a big slumber party.”

The next day, because of the bitter cold, the city is allowing the guests to stay later than the usual 7 a.m. departure time, and when the program closes they can simply re-enter the recreation center, just like any other member of the public. On days when that is not an option, Wall said, he has another way to stay warm: He catches the city bus and just stays aboard as it loops its route.

On Sundays, though, he loses that option too.

“On Sundays it’s a struggle because the buses don’t run,” Wall said.

If the shelter weren’t open, he said he’d probably be staying with a friend. He said he knows there is a shelter on the edge of town — the Lawrence Community Shelter — but he’s been told it was full. When asked what he thought was most needed by people in his situation, he said it would be cool if there were a shelter in the same area as the Community Building that could be open all the time, not just on cold nights.

photo by: Rochelle Valverde

Brandon Wall stands by his sleeping area at the emergency winter shelter at the Community Building, 115 West 11th St.

•••

Directly next to Wall, a woman who looks to be in her 50s speaks up, too. She wears half-rim glasses and her hair is pulled back in a ponytail. The woman, who didn’t want to be named in this story, said that she considers herself in a better situation than most, because she has a car. She said her trick to keeping warm overnight is getting a bunch of “hot hands” — disposable hand warmers that heat up for several hours — and using duct tape to attach them all over her body. She said she puts some near her armpits, others around her abdomen, and then rolls herself up in several blankets in the back seat of her car.

“I’ve accumulated lots of blankets,” she said. “When you are in a sea of blankets in the back seat of a car in fetal position, you almost feel like you can’t breathe, you got so many blankets. But it is so depressing.”

To stay warm during the day, she said she goes to the Lawrence Public Library or to Panera Bread, where she said they offer unlimited drip coffee for $8.99 per month. Though she has paid like anyone else, she said she still feels bad.

“Because no matter where you go, you’re loitering,” she said. “It makes you feel like you’re always doing something wrong, no matter where you go.”

When asked what she felt would help people like herself, she said Lawrence needs a day shelter where people can go all day — she said earlier in the day she put hot hands in her shoes to keep her feet warm because she spent most of the day outside — and that she’d also like to see some of the COVID-19 relief money go to help homeless people get housing.

•••

This winter, the city temporarily suspended certain building and fire codes so it could run the emergency shelter program at the Community Building. Guests are generally allowed to stay in the building from 8 p.m. to 7 a.m. when the overnight temperature is forecast to be below 35 degrees. The temporary code changes allow up to 75 people to sleep at the Community Building, and the city has the ability to use another recreation center for overflow if needed.

The city and volunteers have taken on the responsibility of emergency winter shelter services since the Lawrence Community Shelter reduced its capacity in 2019. LCS is permitted to serve 125 people most of the time and 140 people during the winter, and originally reduced its capacity to 65 people in August 2019 amid budget issues and changes to its staffing model. It further reduced the number of people housed at its building in eastern Lawrence to a maximum of 40 during the coronavirus pandemic so that it could space out guests in its dormitories and have room to quarantine guests as necessary. It also previously housed some in hotels.

Last winter, the city funded an emergency shelter that housed people in hotels to keep them separated due to the coronavirus, and the winter before that a volunteer group helped run overnight shelters in local churches. This winter is the first time the city has used recreation centers as emergency winter shelters.

A combination of city staff and volunteers help run the shelter, and early on the city said it was in danger of not being able to open the shelter some nights because not enough volunteers were signing up. Recreation Center Programmer Stephen Mason, who has been helping run the shelter program, said the city has gotten additional interest since then to help staff some shifts, but that the city ultimately hired six staff members to help cover the hard-to-fill overnight shifts. Mason said they generally see about 30 to 40 people, and it goes up from there when the weather is especially cold.

Mason also helped with another city-run project, a sanctioned campsite at Woody Park in North Lawrence, that the city also managed last winter. He said a lot of the people who stay at the Community Building are otherwise staying with friends or family, getting help from other service providers, or sleeping outside.

“We’ve got a lot of people that are still camping, and they just come to us when it’s really bad or they’ve had a hard day,” Mason said.

The program has also had its challenges — it’s adjusted to some of them as things have gone along. Mason noted that sleeping on a wooden gym floor is not ideal, and he said they are looking into ways to potentially offer storage for people’s belongings. He said initially they were not going to serve food, and the single-serve meals and individually portioned drop-offs from volunteers were an addition, as was a homeless outreach worker with Bert Nash Community Mental Health Center who recently started stopping in once per week. But he said ultimately, the guests need case managers and other services, and there are limits to what the city and its partners can provide at the recreation center.

“We’re just not prepared to meet all the needs,” Mason said.

He said things also tend to run more smoothly when some of the more experienced volunteers are working, because he said it’s not something people can easily jump into. He said the volunteers are provided training, including de-escalation training, but it can be an adjustment.

“For a lot of people, this is a group you’re used to walking past on the sidewalk,” Mason said.

This night, all three of the check-in volunteers are regulars. Two of Wednesday night’s volunteers, Sharon Miller and Brian Daldorph, actually started volunteering last winter, when the emergency shelter was being run in hotels.

Daldorph is working alongside Phil Englehart, and they both said volunteering has shifted their perspective and allowed them to get to know a part of the community that many times can seem anonymous.

“People see them around, but they don’t really know who they are,” Daldorph said. “And I think that one of the great things about doing this is you get to talk to people and you hear their stories. And this is our community — this is not other people — I’ve really appreciated that.”

Englehart said he agreed, and that now when he sees some of them around town, he can say hi and ask how they are doing. He said the experience has also increased his interest in affordable housing issues and efforts to transition people into permanent arrangements.

Miller said that she also volunteers with the Kansas Statewide Homeless Coalition, and that in her volunteering she’s gotten reacquainted with some of the people she got to know at the hotel program last winter. She said while it was good to see them again, it was also sad to see that their circumstances hadn’t changed: they are still experiencing homelessness and the best shelter available to many of them is still a temporary overnight shelter only open on the coldest nights.

“(It’s) sad that they’re still out there,” Miller said.

•••

Another woman has set up in a corner of the gym, in what appears to be her usual spot. Like she is hosting a guest, she clears off a metal folding chair of her things and offers the seat, then offers one of her bottled waters. She has a small dog, and its leash is looped around a clasp at the corner of her yoga mat.

The woman, who also did not want to be named, said she got the dog when she still had her own house. The dog limits where she can stay, but she said she’s the most important thing to her. She said they wouldn’t be there at the Community Building — she uses “we” to refer to herself and her dog — if both of them weren’t allowed to stay.

“She saves me, every day,” she said. “Her character is so funny and she lightens everybody’s mood. They don’t understand.”

She said it was when her daughter died unexpectedly two years ago that she left the place she’d been living and stayed with family for a while, but since then she hasn’t had a stable place to stay. If she weren’t at the Community Building shelter, she said she’d be sleeping in her car. But she said she was almost out of gas, and didn’t have nearly enough to keep the car running and warm. She said sometimes, when she’s not feeling well, she’ll spend some money just to get a motel room for one night, so she can sleep in a bed.

“You know that feeling, ‘I want to go home,'” she said. “When you have that feeling and you don’t have a home to go to, it’s so despairing. But this is awesome, because they’ve been really nice to me and they let me bring my dog.”

During the day, she said she’ll stay in her car or go to the library, and the latter was actually where she first saw a flyer about the shelter at the Community Building. She said she was so hopeful she’d find it open the first time she went, that she ended up being one of the first people in the door that day. She said there are a lot more people without somewhere to go than people think, and she thinks there should be somewhere like the Community Building shelter that is open 24/7, every day of the year, so people always have somewhere to be.

•••

For her part, the woman in the half-rim glasses said she’s had some apartments in the past, but if she gets stressed out she’ll leave. More recently, she said she has tried without success to find a place to live, but with the low amount of income from her disability payments, lack of landlord references and the big gaps in her rental history, she doesn’t even make it past the application process. She said she runs into the same problem for subsidized apartments.

“There needs to be some forgiveness, so you don’t have to be a perfect person to get housing,” she said.

She said she’s open to trying to find somewhere that will give her a job, but she also worries that she might lose her eligibility for Medicaid. At this point, she said she’s been homeless for so long, off and on, that she’s embarrassed to say how long it’s been. She said at times she’s slept in a car, in a storage locker and on the street.

“It really affects your opinion of yourself because people disrespect you,” she said. “It makes you feel like somehow it’s your fault.”

Referring to herself and all the others staying in the gym that night, she said everyone’s experience is probably different, and she emphasized again there are people in a whole lot worse situations than her. But she said she thinks they probably all have one thing in common that some people don’t consider.

“I think that what we all have in common is we don’t have family — either we don’t have it or we don’t have family who wants us to come,” she said. “… So you don’t really have a support system.”