Durell Parker arrived at Providence City Hall last Tuesday evening, dubious. With 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 every year. 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.”
A community response
As the polar vortex swept over New England last week, nearly all of the more than 1,400 shelter beds in the state were filled, according to the Coalition to End Homelessness. To offer additional places to get in from the cold, Providence worked with nonprofits to open three 24/7 emergency warming centers.
Warming centers do not have beds and prohibit people spending the night from lying down. Instead, they’re offered chairs. According to advocates, outreach workers and reporting in the Providence Journal, some people were turned away even from the additional warming centers.
In a statement, Michaela Antunes, director of communications for economic development in Providence, said no one was turned away from a warming center and that “the City collaborated with providers and initiated our respective protocols to ensure availability of warming centers for residents in need and awareness of resources.”
As of last Thursday, 933 people were on the waitlist for a shelter bed in Rhode Island, according to data from the Coalition to End Homelessness. In 2024, on average, people waited 12 days for a referral to a bed.
“They could have opened more warming centers,” Eric Hirsch, a Providence College professor and advocate for the homeless community, said of state leaders. “They could have opened more shelter beds.”
Providence City Councilors Miguel Sanchez and Justin Roias decided to try and meet that need on their own by opening a temporary warming center without going through the usual channels. After trying to find a community space where they could stand up an impromptu shelter, the councilors realized there was a space they had unfettered access to: the city council’s own chambers.
Sanchez and Roias drew on mutual aid and community networks to recruit dozens of volunteers in a matter of days. Donations of food, blankets, coats, hot chocolate, and more poured in. About 30 people ended up spending the night in the council chambers.
Sanchez took the community response as evidence that leadership at the local, state, and federal level is “not acting urgently enough when it comes to alternatives. We know winter comes every year, and for the state and city to not open up more emergency shelters is really just a huge disappointment.”
Providence Mayor Brett Smiley said that while he respected the advocacy of the city council, he thought using City Hall as a shelter was a mistake, insisting other emergency warming centers in the city could have met the need.
“Turning City Hall into an emergency shelter was foolish and not a serious proposal,” he said. “Part of the point was to get attention, and they accomplished that.”
Brandon, who is homeless and did not want to share his last name, couldn’t quite believe the scene as he rode the elevator to the third floor.
“I mean, City Hall is City Hall,” he said. “You wouldn’t really think that they’d have a bunch of homeless people staying somewhere.”
Brandon said he spent the previous night bundled up in a tent. Once, he’d spent a night at Harrington Hall, a congregate shelter near the ACI. He never went back, saying he’d rather sleep outside than on a bunk bed in a room with dozens of other men. Being in City Hall felt more comfortable, but he was still dubious.
“The town hall thing kind of got me,” he said. “I don’t really feel like we should be here, if that makes sense.”
The push for an emergency declaration
The makeshift shelter at City Hall only lasted one night, before relocating to the DaVinci Center, a community health center in the city’s North End. By Friday, as temperatures warmed into the low 30s, that too had closed down.
Still, Sanchez and Roias hope the drastic action they took will help provoke longer term change in the homelessness response system. At the city council meeting last Thursday, Roias introduced a resolution demanding the governor declare a public health emergency. Such a declaration, advocates say, could help expedite the opening of the long-delayed pallet shelters at ECHO Village by allowing the state to bypass certain regulatory requirements.
“Homelessness is a public health emergency,” Roias said as he introduced the resolution in the council chambers, where a few nights prior dozens of people had found shelter from the cold. “Living on the streets isn’t just difficult—it’s deadly. And yet, we treat this crisis as if it’s acceptable — as if it’s normal. It’s not. It never will be.”
Last night, Senate leaders joined the call for an emergency declaration, and scheduled a hearing for next week to evaluate the state’s homelessness response plan. That call followed a letter that dozens of state legislators signed last week, also pressuring Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee to declare a public health emergency. Their statement noted that 54 homeless Rhode Islanders died last year, and that others “have lost their lives because of diseases or illnesses they got as a result of their being homeless.” In December, a longtime advocate for the homeless, Ruth “Diamond” Madsen, passed away.
At a press conference on Friday, Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee expressed concern about using an emergency declaration to waive certain regulations, especially ones related to fire safety. He also emphasized that addressing homelessness is a collaborative effort.
“We have to do this together—community-based and faith-based organizations, state agencies and municipalities, the shelter providers and the homeless advocates,” McKee said.
Durell Parker has grown impatient with all the back and forth, as year after year passes, waiting for his name to come up on too many housing waitlists to count. More pressing concerns occupy his day to day, like the holes in his tent that need patching, or replacing the generator that someone stole.
“This is my livelihood,” Parker said. “They’re just delegating, talking about whether they should do something or not do something. Something should have been done.”
