The two-week old homeless shelter in Downtown Cleveland perhaps opened at the right time.
Extreme cold is forecasted in Northeast Ohio for the next week with -3-degrees forecasted in Cleveland Friday by the National Weather Service.
The Northeast Ohio Coalition for the Homeless opened the shelter on Jan. 5 with plans to operate from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m., but NEOCH says it has been opening earlier this week to help keep people out of the cold.
“Homelessness is always a crisis for anyone and we should respond like it's a crisis. But I think when it's this cold out, it's a matter of life and death,” NEOCH Executive Director Chris Knestrick said. “I feel like we're in a better position this year than we ever had been to be able to make sure people have access to shelter.”
The shelter on East 19th Street is seasonal, meaning it is designated to operate in the winter with current plans to operate until April. That could change with more funding.
“We want to figure out how to use this resource to end on sheltered homelessness in the community, whether it will be a shelter or navigation center,” Knestrick said. “If we get the money and the funds, people will sleep here and move from here into permanent housing. I can guarantee that.”
Knestrick touted the proximity to the Bishop Cosgrove Center, a drop-in center one block away that provides breakfast and lunch.
The city has two longstanding overnight shelters: the Norma Herr Women’s Shelter on Payne Avenue and Lutheran Metropolitan Ministry’s Men’s Shelter on Lakeside Avenue, which is often called "twenty-one hundred" after its street number.
The City of Cleveland extended its warming center schedule to run through Wednesday. From 11:30 a.m. to 10 p.m., people can escape the extreme cold in the city’s Michael Zone Recreation Center, EJ Kovacic Recreation Center, Zelma George Recreation Center and the Collinwood Recreation Center.
As currently scheduled, those recreation centers were made warming centers 12 days this month. In the first six days of warming center operation, they saw 194 users compared to 90 users in four days last month.
The City of Akron opened its Summit Lake Community Center as a warming center Friday through Tuesday from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m.
