Cold and homeless
The idea that people died in Houston because of frigid temperatures is repugnant.
One of the dead bodies was found a short walk away from Minute Maid Park. Another corpse was discovered near the Sears store on Main Street.
Nobody was surprised that two men died on the streets of Houston that night. Both the mayor and the police chief warned that it might happen. The deaths appeared to have been entirely preventable. All the victims needed to do, it seems, was find shelter from the cold.
Every time a hard freeze hits Houston, we witness the same sequence of events that unfolded before the hazardously frigid night of Jan. 2. Government leaders, police officials and social workers publicly urge the homeless to seek shelter. Reporters interview people living on the streets. And on the day after the coldest night of the year, all too often, police find the corpses of people who died in the freezing weather. Enough already. This is unacceptable. Our mayor, our county officials and law enforcement cannot shrug these deaths off as an unavoidable consequence of homelessness. As freezing weather blows in — and it is here again this weekend — our metropolitan area needs to get people off the streets and into safe harbor. These are troubled, fragile individuals, and the difficult job of caring for them in extreme crisis falls on government.
Advocates for the homeless flatly say Houston has more than enough places where people can seek shelter on cold nights. The Houston Coalition for the Homeless compiled data saying that on the freezing night of Jan. 2, most of the city’s shelters had plenty of empty beds. The problem is that all too many people choose to stay on the streets despite dangerous weather.
Some of them stay outdoors because shelters won’t let them bring their pets. Others don’t want to abandon piles of belongings. In many cases, they either can’t or won’t comply with the requirements imposed by faith-based shelters; alcoholics and drug users have a hard time sobering up because they’re addicts.
And anyone who has even casual interactions with homeless people knows one of the most intractable elements of the problem is mental illness. Downtown pedestrians have seen the same psychologically disturbed men and women wandering the streets for years. Even on the coldest of nights, many of those troubled citizens of our city don’t seek shelter.
“We believe that they lack the mental capacity,” Marilyn Brown, CEO of the Coalition for the Homeless, told the Chronicle’s editorial board. “Sometimes they can’t even tell us their names.”
In an earlier era, police officers quietly confided that they looked for excuses to arrest homeless people and haul them to jail on especially cold nights. Today, as troubling as this might seem to civil liberties watchdogs, advocates for the homeless are convinced we need a variation on that idea: Empower police to take homeless people arrested for minor offenses like criminal trespass not to jail but to what’s described as a “triage hub.” Instead of cycling them through the criminal justice system as dangerous weather approaches, temporarily house them in a facility providing them not only with shelter but also with social services addressing the underlying causes of their homelessness.
A coalition of homeless advocates and criminal justice officials is working to establish this “triage hub” in downtown Houston. It will require cooperation and funding from city and county elected officials. The proposal will be presented within the next few months. City Council members and county commissioners need to make it happen.
Meanwhile, social workers who deal with homeless people every day say state adult protective services officials must get involved in caring for mentally ill people living on the streets. Texas law requires that anyone who believes an adult with disabilities is being abused or neglected report it to state authorities. Memo to the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services: We know that adults with mental disabilities are being neglected on the streets of Houston. Consider yourself notified.
Homelessness will always be a problem in our city, if only because some people inexplicably insist upon living on the streets. But we should never accept the idea that some people will inevitably die on our streets whenever the weather turns cold. Social workers and law enforcement authorities must exercise greater latitude to temporarily move homeless people out of harm’s way during weather emergencies.
And anyone who has even casual interactions with homeless people knows one of the most intractable elements of the problem is mental illness. Downtown pedestrians have seen the same psychologically disturbed men and women wandering the streets for years.