Six people bundled in winter clothing sit around a table, eating sandwiches and sipping hot tea and coffee.
Two men who just met play cards.
Behind them, about a dozen cots are set up in various stages of readiness.
It’s busier than the night before. About a dozen people are eating, chatting and winding down, which a volunteer attributed to the falling temperatures and word-of-mouth.
By 7 p.m. Sunday, more people have trickled into Durango’s new overnight warming shelter, which opened last weekend as nighttime temperatures dipped below 5 degrees. The cold snap offered a reprieve from an unusually warm winter but brought dangerous nighttime conditions for Durango’s unhoused residents.
“Tonight, I’m really happy to be here,” Alan said. “I don’t know what I would have done if this place wasn’t set up.”
Alan, who declined to give his last name, has been unhoused for more than a decade. He has come and gone from Durango for the past 15 years. He keeps coming back because, like so many residents, he can’t stay away.
“There’s just something about this place,” he said. Plus, his doctor is here.
The night before, he stayed at a motel but could afford only one night. He had been waiting since the late afternoon for the doors to open, and shivered as he recalled the wind cutting through his many layers.
“Talk about extreme cold,” he said. “It really shows you what it would be like if you didn’t have a place like this.”
The shelter has been open six nights so far this winter – counting Tuesday night – and organizers say operations have gone smoothly.
Mike Todt, chair of the Emergency Warming Council, said he is grateful every time the center opens.
“It took us literally nine years to figure this out,” he said.
The overnight warming center at Sacred Heart Parish Hall in South Durango was approved by the City Council in October. For people experiencing homelessness and their advocates, the approval marked the culmination of a yearslong effort to establish a place where people could sleep indoors.
The previous warming center did not allow sleeping or pets.
This center is a huge improvement, said Genevieve King and Rosalee, who declined to give her last name. They’re snuggled in cots pushed against the back wall. Rosalee’s dog sits at her feet gnawing on a disintegrating rubber ball that does not seem long for this world.
King, in her 60s, is petite, with long black-and-gray hair pulled into a loose bun. She has been unhoused on and off for roughly three decades and has lived in Durango for more than 20 years.
Sleeping in a warm bed where she feels safe is a relief, King said.
When she has to sleep outside, King sets up a tent behind a bus stop or in another visible area where she feels less vulnerable. She uses a walker to carry her belongings and piles blankets inside the tent for warmth.
Still, she said, in the Colorado winter – below 16 degrees or not – “it’s cold all night.”
The warming center operates from 6 p.m. to 7 a.m. and is staffed by at least three volunteers and one paid coordinator, who rotates halfway through the night. A bus, funded by the city, drops people off in the evening and picks them up in the morning.
Community support has been strong, Todt said. About 88% of nearby residents surveyed supported the project, and 110 people initially signed up to volunteer. That number later dropped to about 60 after some declined to complete the background check required by the church’s diocese.
So far, the shelter has operated without incident – no police calls – reinforcing Todt’s belief that unhoused people are often unfairly profiled.
Todt has been involved in efforts to establish an overnight warming center for nearly a decade and has faced repeated pushback along the way. Much of it, he said, came from neighboring concerns.
“When we tried to do this in different neighborhoods, I mean, the community just had an uprising,” he said.
About three years ago, organizers opened a daytime warming center at a Christian church near 11th Street and East Third Avenue, two days a week. Todt, who lives on East Third Avenue and was part of the Boulevard Neighborhood Association at the time, said the idea was met with resistance.
“The people just erupted, saying ‘Oh my god, they’re going to come in and they’re going to poop in our yard and they’re going to steal our stuff,’” he recalled.
Todt said similar profiling fueled opposition from Durango School District officials, as Sacred Heart Parish Hall is located just a few blocks from an elementary school.
Superintendent Karen Cheser and several parents spoke against the project at an October City Council meeting, citing safety concerns and fears that people experiencing homelessness would leave drug needles or human waste on the playground.
That’s profiling, Todt said. Many of the local unhoused are not drug users, although that is a common misconception.
“It’s good,” he said. “We’re keeping people alive and warm, and they get a meal.”
Nick, a young man staying at the shelter who declined to give his last name, said he and several others had slept in a cave in a remote area the night before to shield themselves from the wind. In the middle of the night, he said, the cave partially collapsed with heavy snow.
“It was a sign from God to come here,” he said.
While he appreciates having somewhere to go when temperatures drop below 16 degrees, Nick said it’s difficult to rely on a shelter that is open only a handful of nights each winter.
“There’s nowhere with a roof where you can sleep,” he said. “You can’t sleep anywhere in town now.”
Nick has lived in Durango for about three years and said it has become increasingly difficult to find shelter from the wind without being told to move along by law enforcement.
Even a simple outdoor structure with just a wall, a roof and charging ports would help, he said.
Volunteers and advocates hope the shelter can become a more permanent or consistent option.
By this time last year, the previous warming center had opened 15 nights as a result of cold temperatures.
Donna Rheault, a board member of the Emergency Warming Council, said organizers hope to raise the temperature threshold next year so the shelter can open more frequently.
“It could be any of us out on the street,” Rheault said. “It’s a hard, hard life to survive in Durango. Sometimes people who are just living on the edge have a medical issue, their car breaks down, they get evicted – and suddenly they’re living on the street.”
jbowman@durangoherald.com
