Days are just starting to cool, and I'm getting increasingly worried about severe weather shelter planning.

Since the current bout of mass homelessness began, the strategy has always been to pack as many people in a warm room as you can.

Covid-19 makes that impossibly dangerous

Severe cold weather shelters are run on the barest of bones in most communities. They're often hosted in church basements or at food banks, and staffed by volunteers, who are often elderly. People are extremely close together, often with limited toilets/hygiene facilities.

All that is, to say, we CANNOT run them the same way we have in past years.

And whatever safer alternative a community picks - motels, expanded facilities that allow for deconcentration/social distancing, etc. - it's going to be more expensive.

Which is why communities need to be planning RIGHT NOW for how they will provide safe, warm places for people to be indoors this winter. Not to mention it'll take a lot more coordination and support than in years past, which is easier to set up now than a week before a cold front