As Winter Drags On, Providence’s Unhoused People Want to See Long-Term Solutions

Durell Parker arrived at Providence City Hall dubious last Tuesday evening. With the wind chill, the temperature outside felt like the single digits. He’d spent the previous night, and most nights before that for the past several years, outside, in a tent. When an outreach worker told him the city council was using its chambers as an impromptu shelter that evening, he decided to check it out.

“This whole turnout right here, honestly, is a good thing,” he said after taking in the scene in the council chambers, where pizza boxes sat stacked on folding tables alongside fresh fruit, bottled water, hot chocolate, and an array of winter coats. He ran his hands through the outerwear, impressed by a leather coat.

“These are some nice coats too,” he said, before deciding not to take one. “Somebody else who’s more deserving will probably get these.”

The makeshift shelter at City Hall seemed to impress him, and he appreciated the community mobilization that meant he had a warm place to lie down for the night. Still, Parker wasn’t hopeful about another short-term response to an ongoing crisis that deepens yearly. Last year, homelessness increased by 35% in Rhode Island, according to the Rhode Island Coalition to End Homelessness.

“It seems as though every situation that comes up that has anything to do with the homeless is either being blocked, being denied, not even being taken into consideration as something tangible,” Parker said. “It sucks because we’re out there freezing.”

Parker and others are waiting to see what impact last week’s direct action has on longer-term solutions to homelessness — namely accessible, affordable housing.

“We need help,” Thomas Mason, 59, said in the council chambers last Tuesday. “I’d probably be frozen to death had I been out on the street tonight. That’s a reality that we face every night. We could die.”

This story was reported by The Public’s Radio. You can read the entire story here.