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What to Consider When Your Hotel is a Warming Center

A sign directing people who are homeless or vulnerable to a warming center set up to provide shelter form the cold weather in winter.

Much of the United States can expect frigid weather amid part of the calendar year, and in recent decades, some cities and counties have turned to the hotel world to help citizens battle the cold.

The term warming center applies to a place that people can go to get warm immediately, and the idea is that a local government will establish them before a series of particularly cold days.

A brief history of warming centers

Warming centers go back decades  — perhaps as far as World War 2.

The city of Detroit started operating its warming centers at some point in the 1980s, per Outlier Media.

Leaders in Bowling Green noticed an uptick in warming centers earlier this month. New Castle County, in Delaware, turned a hotel into a permanent homeless center, having previously been a warming center of sorts in a frigid climate.

Tad McGalliard of the International City/County Management Association deemed it especially important that local governments consider the number of volunteers and other pertinent parties that might be needed at a warming center and the relevant public health directives.

In climates that traditionally have cold weather, these centers help the homeless who don’t have a roof over their head. They also provide a respite from the brutal cold to anyone who might otherwise be exposed to the brutal weather for too long. Left to their own devices, some would die without that help.

The city of Houston made a point to communicate its list of warming centers to the general public via local media sources. Unfortunately, local bureaucracy and other red tape can get in the way of serving the constituency.

Creating your own rules

As hotel leaders, you won’t have to deal with that red tape, but you do have to consider how your time as a warming center runs alongside other happenings in the government world.

In response to what the group perceived as five avoidable deaths due to cold weather in Sacramento, the National Coalition of the Homeless urged that the city and other locales be forthright in their preemptive actions to protect folks before weather issues. Given the circumstances, you may consider your building to be a place that might fit the scope of what local government personnel might need.

A Yale study found that access to short-term hotel housing provided an overall boost in the well-being of the homeless.

Researchers found this impact could help influence city and county responses to homelessness in coming years, especially since having a place to rest helped in so many other areas of their lives.

It’s important to remember that some of the solutions employed here are not designed to be the long-term solutions that citizens will eventually need in the years to come. Yours is a temporary solution.

Train your staff

Localities around the nation struggle with how to respond to the rising cost(s) of housing and other needs, and those increases push some people out into the streets, what you’re doing to protect someone from six, eight, or ten hours pales compared to what the population needs.

As a Band-Aid, your work may point people toward the need for other long-term viable solutions. To some extent, these bigger-picture solutions can become even more clear in the eyes of the public depending on media coverage and other associated details.

Your staff needs to be especially alert to the associated population in the warming center, especially because you’ll be dealing with a population that lives in an especially precarious manner.

They will also need to be ready to communicate concerns inside the building since some will inevitably abuse the privilege of having a room.