“We were really busy leading up to the storm,” Thompson United for the Homeless Director said. “Some days we can get all of them in, some days we can’t.”
Area shelters have similar ways of dealing with homeless who have to be turned away.
The New Life Center can house about 100 men and serves 180 or more meals each day.
“As the Fargo-Moorhead community has grown, so has the homeless population,” Danielson Executive Director of New Life Center said.
“More people are living on the fringe and in marginal living circumstances,” he said, “and as economic situations go bad, we usually end up seeing those people in the shelter population.”
“No one is going to let anyone freeze to death outside,” said former Fargo City Commissioner Linda Coates, who fought to help open the Gladys Ray Shelter. She is also a Churches United board member.
Coates pointed to two instances last winter when individuals died of exposure because they didn’t reach out to the homeless shelters for help.
The temperature was about 14 degrees below zero in Fargo on the morning of Jan. 13 when a newspaper carrier discovered Vernon Weigand’s body on the sidewalk in front of the bishop’s residence at St. Mary’s Cathedral on Broadway.