Winter shouldn’t be only reason to guarantee shelter

A couple of days before the S&P 500 closed at a two-year high, Gov. Ned Lamont activated the season’s first severe weather protocol.

You could get a nosebleed ricocheting between those two events. In some parts of Connecticut, people walked with a little spring in their steps over their good fortune, while lessblessed people were told that because of the weather — with wind chill temperatures in the teens and lower — they would be provided a place to sleep indoors.

The protocol is meant to protect people who are homeless or about to be, and it means that for a defined period of time — in this case from last Wednesday to noon Monday — anyone in need of shelter would be given a place inside and they would be provided transportation to shelter, if need be.

You could feel uncomfortable that it takes bitter weather to bring everyone inside, though you should know that is always the goal. And things could be worse. At the same time the stock market set a record, half of Philadelphia’s intake centers for people experiencing homelessness were closed. Shelters within the city were actually turning people away at the door while six inches of snow piled up. One of the closed intake centers, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, normally offers services specifically to veterans — but not that snowy day, when perhaps the weather would dictate a little more effort be made.

The stock market is not the economy, but the economic bounce is reaching farther down the food chain. Gas prices have been going down (though not quickly). Grocery prices, as well, are slightly lower, though Connecticut still has some of the nation’s highest housing prices, which creates conditions ripe for homelessness.

But as a cold snap settled its icy fingers on the state, we were reminded that not everyone is enjoying a boon. Connecticut has roughly 3,000 people — 500 of them children — who are homeless, according to the Connecticut Coalition to End Homelessness. I’m on my second stint on that organization’s board. I originally became interested in the state’s homelessness for the shallowest of reasons. A friend of mine, Paul Laffin, worked at a Hartford homeless shelter, and if I wanted to spend time with him, I had to hang out at the shelter. I once cut 50 pounds of carrots in the shelter’s kitchen, hanging out with Paul. While there, I got to know people who shuffled in and out of the system — to the point that one day, while my son and I were walking into Hartford’s downtown library, a man raised up from a mound of blankets and said, “Oh, hello, Susan.” My son looked at me with his mouth open, and asked if I knew every homeless person in Hartford.

I did not.

Later, Paul was stabbed and killed by a man he’d fed at the shelter’s soup kitchen, and by that time, I couldn’t walk away.

For years, the number of people experiencing homelessness in rich Connecticut had been dropping, right up until the pandemic hit. In fact, in the Before Times, the state set records for ending and reducing homelessness. In 2016, thenGov.

For years, the number of people experiencing homelessness in rich Connecticut had been dropping, right up until the pandemic hit.

Dannel P. Malloy announced that Connecticut had become the second state that year to effectively end homelessness among veterans. Homelessness still occurs among veterans, but the state now has a system in place designed to make those incidences of homelessness brief and non-recurring.

Gov. Lamont just announced the formation of an interagency council that is charged with figuring out how to strengthen existing programs that are there to prevent homelessness. Council members will also try to figure out how to address our state’s housing shortage. Our homeless situation is no more inevitable than the state’s scary wealth inequality. Both have remedies, and those remedies become more important every day.

Only in the last few decades have researchers drawn a connection between socio-economic status and health outcomes, including life expectancy. Now, it’s part of the canon that your ZIP code predicts far more about your life expectancy than does your genetic code. research says that as much as 60 percent of your health is determined by where you live.

In other words, poor people live sicker and die younger. We saw that during the height of the pandemic. Vulnerable communities were hit hardest because of course they would be. A state so segregated by income pays astronomical public health costs. If someone living on the streets collapses, we are not yet to the point where we simply step over the body. Someone calls 911, and at great public cost an ambulance and/or a big red fire truck shows up. If the person needs emergency care, the ambulance delivers the person to the most expensive care imaginable, that provided at the emergency department of their local hospital.

We all deserve better. So we celebrate a healthy stock market, but maybe we keep the party muted until everyone is inside.

Susan Campbell is the author of “Frog Hollow: Stories from an American Neighborhood,” “TempestTossed: The Spirit of Isabella Beecher Hooker” and “Dating Jesus: A Story of Fundamentalism, Feminism and the American Girl.” She is Distinguished Lecturer at the University of New Haven, where she teaches journalism.

Mark Weber