Allan Appel Photo
Munson and Patzlaff at the shelter.
Kelly Munson and Kraig Patzlaff have been a couple for three years, for most of that time homeless.
They can kiss and even cuddle — although no sexual activity is permitted — and quietly listen to their favorite music together in the city’s newest warming center.
They were among about 20 people, including four couples, who were enjoying refuge against the life-threatening, single-digit temperatures Saturday morning at New Lighthouse Ministries Inc at 261 Columbus Ave.
Jazz DeVar, at left in photo, listens to music and talks to a friend.
The church and its facility — a shoe-box-shaped room in the basement of the church — is under contract with the city to be a “warming center” open 24 hours a day until the sub-zero temperature emergency passes and warmer temperatures return at the end of the weekend.
The opening this week of the new warming center in the Hill, which is down the street from the Boys and Girls Club, is part of the city’s implementation of severe weather protocols meant to protect in extreme temperature situations the most vulnerable populations.
That includes keeping homeless shelters open longer and arranging for seasonal warming centers.
The new warming center is specifically for people not looking to seek formal beds during standard hours. Police have been instructed at line-up to approach people wandering the streets at night to encourage them to go to the shelters or centers.
City emergency operations chief Rick Fontana said shelters have been operating at full capacity in recent days. A second warming shelter, with a capacity for 50 people, will open at a church on Grand Avenue on Feb. 1, Fontana said.
Munson and Patzlaff said that due to various conditions like PTSD, they generally prefer to be alone rather than seek communal shelter. Over the last years they’ve slept in the woods or, most recently, at the back of abandoned buildings, under tents and tarps. The recent extreme cold has driven them indoors.
Right before the storm hit, they were put up in a hotel for two nights by a generous private individual in Hamden. They ended up at a firehouse there, where the call was made to the CAA, whose staff drove them to the warming center.
Monitor Bryant Ramirez pours milk for one of the center’s clients.
Starting Monday the New Lighthouse Ministries warming center will continue in operation but be open only from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., said Bryant Ramirez, one of six monitors serving the center.
He and his colleagues have all been recently trained by the Community Action Agency (CAA), which won the city contract both to create the facility as well as to provide on-site case management services for those seeking benefits or housing.
While CAA has provided case management services at the warming centers at different locations through the years, this is the first time the agency found a location and staffed it as well as provided social work there, said Emille Jones, CAA’s director of program and case management services.
The monitors were busy Saturday morning passing out oatmeal, packets of tea, bags of toiletries, and socks to those who asked.
One recipient of warm socks was Mike Florio, a disabled man who usually spends his homeless nights mainly at Union Station. Security officials there ask people to leave by 1 a..m. On Friday it was too bitter, he said, so calls were made and a van came and transported Florio to New Lighthouse.
Saturday morning he went out to walk to the Green but returned because of the cold. His sneakers and socks were icy. At the warming center, Ramirez provided him with sturdy new socks.
Florio with the new warm socks.
Center-users can leave and return at will, Ramirez said, which is different from the rules at more regimented shelters. The center does have some rules: For example only five minutes is allowed per bathroom visit and staff holds onto all prescription medication. Florio, Munson and Patzlaff and all the other residents interviewed described it as a place of both physical and emotional warmth, specifically, where the monitors like Ramirez and his colleague Dominic Punnett care.
Many of the supplies have recently been donated, including 30 bags containing toiletries like tooth brushes, deodorant, combs, and toothpaste, the latter a personal gift of Fire Chief John Alston, Jr., Ramirez said. Nearby food pantries have been sending over yogurt, raisins, and other snacks, and Yale-New Haven Hospital has delivered a supply of blankets, he added.
Housekeeping is voluntary; many visitors pitch in.
On Wednesday, when the center opened for its first day as a “bomb cyclone” blizzard moved toward New Haven, there were just six people who took shelter there. There were 13 to 15 people on Thursday, 23 people on Friday.
As word gets out and as long as the temperatures approached zero, organizers expected at least 30 on Saturday.
The maximum capacity is 50, with people sleeping either on floor space or in chairs. The police, who have standing orders not to let people remain outside in these temperatures, have brought several people in, as have officials at Yale-New Haven Hospital, and folks at CAA, Ramirez said.
He himself goes out, either in his car or on foot, and has found several people in the area and downtown, in bus stops, or other exposed places, and brought them to the center. He said he gets a lot of satisfaction out of the work, providing such basic and immediately needed help to people.
The facility has a security guard;people are checked for weapons or drugs.
“Most of the people are kind. We respect them and they respect us,” Ramirez said. That includes minding people’s belongings as they go out to participate in programs to try to kick habits, apply for apartments, or otherwise improve their lives.
Three couples had left those belongings at the center early Saturday, some neatly arranged between an array of folding chairs —two couples because they had to go to their programs, the third couple to check on the possibility of an apartment.
Theft or loss of property for those people leading the nomadic homeless life is a constant theme. Patzlaff said he and Munson had had so much of their gear stolen over the three years of homelessness that he has stashed various supplies in three different places around town.
Ramirez acknowledged that the four couples at the warming center were there in part because of a gap in homeless care: all shelters are single-sex. New Ministries accepts men and women, but no children.
“Most of the shelters don’t have capacity for couples,” acknowledged CAA’s Jones, “One of the requirements is to be legally married. My experience with [homeless] couples is that the females don’t feel safe being out on the streets, which is why they couple up, and then refuse to go in the single shelters. Couples like that tend to utilize the centers so they can remain together.”
The center has “an open door policy.” People can come in and out as Mike Florio did; there is a group smoke for those who want to go out in the back yard and light up a cigarette .
However, after dark people have to stay in. That’s because Ramirez and the other monitors don’t want people coming back in if they’ve gone out to get high, he explained.
The only two problem incidents they’ve recorded since the center opened on Wednesday have been medical. One person had a seizure; a second had a serious foot infection due to the cold. In both cases, the monitors called the paramedics.
“The radii of the sun are God’s fingers that massage me,” said Jazz DeVar, an appreciative client of the center.
Otherwise, people are behaving and appreciating the warming center, by all accounts.
In the later afternoon on Saturday, there were two people who mentioned it was their birthday, Jones reported. It turned out, by happy coincidence, that Stop & Shop on Whalley Avenue, which had donated lots of baked goods to the center, had also included a birthday cake.
“Someone went out to get candles and we were able to sing happy birthday. So it’s definitely a warm environment. We made good use of it [the birthday cake] and I’m sure we brightened the day for some of those people,” Jones added.
“They actually truly care. By the grace of God we’re here. Thank God I’m not blue-ish from the cold,” Munson said.