Feedback from Cold Weather Shelter guests

5/19/25 Cold weather shelter forum 

Missing first few minutes of forum…

• Bathrooms/showers
  • Didn’t have access to a shower
  • Bathrooms are disgusting – people make a mess and it stays like that for 5-6 hours, clean that up
  • Showers are cold, some guys don’t like that cold water, they want warm water and they should have it
  • 30 minutes to an hour before shower time, staff should turn the showers on to let the water warm up, let the pipes warm up when it’s time to shower from 7-9am
  • The cold weather shelter I was at, we only had a porta potty, we didn’t have showers
  • Some people have medical needs and they can’t take cold showers so they don’t have the opportunity, it’s something that’s important
  • People tore down the bathrooms in these places, and it’s totally uncalled for, and it causes people to see the homeless they way they do, they didn’t want to open up bathrooms up because they had problems
    • Staff needs to be doing their job, I could tell you how many times I see them on the phone, then a fight breaks out, they should mitigate what they’re doing, go to the bathroom and clean up the bathroom, do your job
    • Some of those messes are not that person’s fault, people have disabilities, staff is sitting around doing nothing, they should be up, their job is to clean up after the situation, and people who make a mess in the bathroom should not be thrown out, there’s a better way of resolving it, not everyone is trashing the bathrooms to be an asshole, it hurts everyone in the shelter when they aren’t cleaning the bathrooms, you are punishing the entire shelter for actions of one person which is not fair, staff should just clean up the bathroom and leave it open and I bet if they talked to the person they’d find they didn’t mean to make the mess, that’s still on staff and they shouldn’t punish everyone else for one person’s thing
    • My staff, they’re on their phones most of the night, we’re a night shelter (Holy Rosary), a couple of girls who walk around but most of the time we have the guys and they don’t usually go into the women’s bathrooms and we do have problem, 3-4 doors that won’t shut completely, 3 doors that locked, most of the time more than half those stalls have no toilet paper, it’s usually me who has to go ask the staff to refill it, they should be able to do their fucking jobs
    • You have people doing jobs, going to the hospital, and then you have mobile bathrooms outside, you should have staff checking every 10 minutes, half the time hours go by and people can suffer, they do drugs by themselves, someone needs to kick the door down, the cycle continues
    • Staff is there to make sure you have a very enjoyable experience, you’re there because you need to be there to stay warm, you both have a responsibility, everyone’s all adults, you have to work together to get along and make sure your experience in the shelter is a good memory and you want to be treated rightly by the staff, at the same time staff wants to be treated right by y’all, at the end of the day we’re all grown
      • It’s a responsibility on both parts, they took the air conditioning out of the mobile bathroom and did something different with it, you cannot do stuff like that, somewhere you need to draw the line, then they were putting fecal matter on the walls of the bathroom, but they’re mentally in
    • If you know bathrooms are going to get destroyed, it goes to staff not being paid enough, no one wants to clean the shitty overflowing toilet but if you paid them $50 per hour then they’d be happy to do it, I’ll do it
    • I used to be a manager at king soopers but if you have a job that’s what you are paid for and that’s what you need to be doing, if my staff didn’t do their job I would have to go in and do it for that, people have mental issues, sorry but that’s not okay
    • We did not have access to a bathroom at the Doubletree cold weather shelter. 
• How did you find out about the cold weather shelter?
  • Here at St. Francis Center and Channel 9 News or the news
  • From the staff at Holy Rosary, I wanted to go there and see what the cold weather shelter was like and see how bad it was, I was already expecting it to be bad, and I got that situation, bed bugs
  • Word of mouth
  • He lost his job and was sleeping in a car and grabbed the free bus over here and met someone staying at the Mission
  • I was staying outside and one of those nights it was raining and snowing and I had to stay out in the cold, I hadn’t heard about the cold weather shelters at the time
  • Make sure you go to St. Francis or DRM and ask
  • Hard time knowing if the cold weather shelter was open, I don’t have a phone, asked people if they knew but it was hard
• How would you prefer to find out?
  • I don’t have a phone, so just a bulletin on the doors of the places we go to, on all the outside doors so even if we can’t go in, and keep it updated since things change based on weather patterns
    • Colorado has bipolar weather, can be hot one day and then cold and rainy the next, I’m having trouble with it
  • Some sort of community center, flyers, that would be pretty tought because it depends where you’re getting people bused into the city, for me I walk into the city so how I found out is by talking to people on the streets
  • When people are walking up in the morning, have an announcement that says what’s going to happen tonight, have it ready for us that morning or even the night before, we don’t have internet access so we can’t sit and watch the weather channel
  • Put them on our beds
  • The city doesn’t do a good job informing us – the best way to do is word of mouth, nobody’s looking at computers/phones
  • If cold weather shelters opened between the first and last snow, that’d mitigate the problem, then word of mouth would spread
    • They don’t open them until a certain temperature anyways, they shouldn’t have approved that through City Council, it used to be 32 degrees but now it’s a lower temperature, come on get out of here with all that, should do the temperature 32 not lower
• Transportation/issues accessing the shelter
  • The city was bussing people, a shuttle which they pay for to take people there, I don’t think transportation was a problem
    • I agree (x3)
    • 4 times a day they have the busses that take you, so transportation was fabulous
    • All accessed it from St. Francis
  • Not an issue, I chose not to take it, I walked
  • Heard about free buses from 48th Street to here at St. Francis but don’t know when
  • For the cold weather shuttle bus it was the same hours as the free bus
    • Shuts down around 6-6:30
    • 7-9pm, then they come back at 1-2am to transfer from one shelter to another
    • It stops at 2:30
    • Depends where you’re catching it
  • They want you at a warming center then they’ll take you to the emergency cold weather shelter
  • Confusion about the bus could be mitigated if they were open all winter
• Were you able to get in when you tried to?
  • A lot of people who are disabled are not able to make it in time because by the time they get to the buses it stops running, unfortunately because of enforcement I’m seeing a lot of people out rolling around, pushing themselves around, trying to stay warm, saying they couldn’t get to the shelter in time because they’re disabled
  • They’ll let you in if they have space but a lot of people were causing problems because of drugs, I didn’t have experiences where they don’t have space, just talking about people who cause problems
    • As a staff person you should not base the actions of one person onto everybody
  • There was someone on Alameda and Zuni but they were full but they had a van they took everyone to the DoubleTree but when they got there staff had an attitude and said “we don’t have any space” and the guy who drove the van said he couldn’t take them anywhere but they could stay in the van but then someone stole the speaker and so the driver got mad and kicked them out and then the shelter let them in
  • One time this winter an abandoned building opened up to me and became my cold weather shelter, now I don’t know if I’m the one breaking into all these shelters
• How was it in normal shelters in the winter because of the cold weather shelters?

• Other comments
  • I’ve seen most of these people out, there’s a whole mental transition when you go from here to there, because a lot of these people are drug addicts and they go right to the doors and do stupid stuff, they go straight to the drugs
  • Overdoses at the emergency shelters
    • A lot of that happened in the bathrooms
  • One night because he was at work he missed his window and it was cold and he ended up staying outside
    • The same thing happened to me, I came late because I was at work and it ended up raining and I did not sleep
  • The curfew is a killer – you get locked out and you’re dead the next day, can’t sleep at night because you have to force yourself to stay up, the drug use leads to that to stay warm
    • There shouldn’t be no curfew, if the staff have time to sleep that night they have time to let people in
    • There was a time we did need a curfew but a lot of these people are adults and trying to get back to a time when they’re making a revenue, coming back late from my job I lost my bed and then I didn’t have a job because I lost my bed for a week
    • Why is it a 24 hour place to stay but they have a curfew, I don’t understand that point, I’m wondering that because I’m learning from everything
    • My main experience with curfew is that it was at 5 o’clock and staying outside and ended up freezing my balls up, if I was working at the time I probably would’ve lost a job as well, I can see that happening
    • It’s almost like they want you to stay unhoused, on the streets, poor
    • They’re open 24 hours but to keep your bed you have to be there at 5pm because of bed check
      • But the facility is not closed off
    • When they first started in 2021 or whenever that was, you had to be there by a certain time
    • If there’s a job, they have to leave at 4pm to get there by curfew, they get deducted for that because you lose 2 hours and they don’t get called back from those jobs because you’re too much of a bother and have to leave at 4pm
  • Something I like is that they would bag our stuff and put our name on it if we checked out, I wish other shelters would do that
  • I went to a lot of them, but they’re not good, I have nothing good to say about it because they had a lot of ODs
  • What I liked about Johnny 360 missions was that they had a worker’s list because they’d know you’re working and they wouldn’t have to oblige by the rules, if they could apply that to the shelters that’d be great
  • When I first got here, it was cold, I wasn’t in a shelter, I slept around Union Station and had 1 blanket only, I covered myself and shivered most of the night, I stayed in Union Station to stay warm, I didn’t know if I was going to die or not, it was cold enough to make me shiver, I didn’t know at the time if the cold weather shelters were open, I was so lost, it was so confusing for me, sometimes I thought I was going to die
  • This is where our part comes in, where staff needs to trust us and we can volunteer because I know it can be hard to be open 24/7 to fulfill all our needs, I’ve worked and cooked and provided mental health support, that’s hard, but if there were more volunteer help to come in and do stuff then stuff like this could change because I know people need a break too, need to get more volunteers
  • When cold weather shelters opened back in November, it was alright, staff were low, then it progressed and you had 125-150 people every night, it was bad. The mental thing was real bad. Staff were asses but you have to roll with them but a lot of them are street thugs too, you have to respect yourself so they respect you, as it went on they got more staff as it got more hectic, they don’t care about what’s happening, don’t nobody want to go outside, it’s an open door trap house, it’s bad
  • I was in there the whole winter and it was bad, they wanted to make more money but there wasn’t enough room, everyone would get trampled, the employees were active addicts smoking outside with us, coming back from their shift, that shit was bad, I felt like an animal in there all winter, they were just hiring their family in, everyone was related among the employees, they blamed innocent people for no reason, most of the time they weren’t doing anything, the drugs situation you know how it is but it’s too a point to where it was inside, people smoking in bed, people OD’d. To deal with homeless people you need to know how to deal with mental health as well, they are just in there for a paycheck, they don’t care what happens with homeless people mental health
  • When you wake up at night and you see staff on their phones, you have a job to do, stop sleeping on the job at night time, you’re not doing your job
    • They should have a way to punch in every hour
    • A guy last night was in the office blasting music and you could hear it a couple rows away, staff are not doing their job at Holly they are lazy as fuck
  • They need proper training, I’ve seen sick shit 
  • When I did get in trouble I got in trouble because one of the staff members touched me and they kicked me out for a week, they didn’t train her and tell her not to touch me (at Holy Rosary), I got thrown out and it was cold, they need to train stuff before they let them into the yard with the people because the staff can get in trouble and we ourselves get in trouble because they don’t train them first not to touch people or do stuff they’re not supposed to, that’s why I got kicked out for a week