Angelo Pizza, the owner of Angelo’s Pie in the Sky Pizzeria in a northern Baltimore neighborhood (yes, Pizza is his real last name), was one of hundreds of East Coast residents thinking about how homeless people would be affected by record amounts of snow dropped by Winter Storm Jonas over the weekend.
Pizza opened his restaurant on Saturday to offer a free meal to anyone who needed it, working with the city to reach people from local shelters, according to The Baltimore Sun.
"The only reason we're open today is to feed the homeless," said Pizza. "We want people to know there's a meal waiting for them."
The city also deployed outreach workers to pick up people on the street ahead of the storm and take them to shelters, and Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake urged people who knew the location of any homeless people to call 311 to get help to them, according to The Sun.
Baltimore was among the cities that issued a “code blue” alert, which allows anyone who sees a homeless person in weather below 32 degrees to call the police to help the person to a shelter. In Philadelphia, staff and volunteers at the Hub of Hope, a program in a subway station below City Hall, braced for an influx of homeless people, who often seek shelter in the subway system in cold weather, according to USA Today.
In Washington, D.C., city workers fanned out from the nation’s capital into surrounding areas in vans loaded with groceries and gift cards, according to The Washington Post. They were making deliveries to families placed by the city in second-rate motel rooms when the city ran out of shelter space earlier this winter, in part due to D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser’s push to shelter more homeless families.
The Post also reported that some recreation centers were opened as temporary shelters for singles, which allowed some men and women in a relationship to come in together rather than being separated into shelters according to gender — something that can cause people to refuse service.
Other temporary shelters opened across the region. The Salvation Army in Wilmington, Delaware, opened the doors of its gym, funded in part by kettle donations earlier this winter, reported WDEL 101.7FM in Wilmington.
But even with extra beds available, some homeless people refuse services, even in emergencies like Winter Storm Jonas. Volunteers in Richmond, Virginia, visited a local tent community to try to persuade residents — some of whom see weathering storms outside as a point of pride — to come indoors before the storm hit, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
John Mendez, head of outreach for the nonprofit agency Bethesda Cares, visited a similar tent community in Bethesda, Maryland, The Washington Post reported.
“The snow is going to be like this high,” Mendez told a man who said he was staying in a tent with his girlfriend, gesturing 2.5 feet off the ground. “The tents will collapse.”
The man promised to go to his brother’s place nearby. “Only then did Mendez reach into his backpack and pull out gloves, hats and socks. He’d held back, hoping the cold would get him more than his one taker for a taxicab,” The Post reported.
Even the homeless in Saginaw, Michigan, far out of the storm’s path, got some extra help because of the blizzard. When Nouvel Catholic High School canceled a field trip to Washington, D.C., to participate in a March for Life event, students didn’t want their 600 bagged lunches to go to waste, according to Michigan news site mlive.com. So they donated them to two local shelters.
"It's too bad their trip was canceled, but we greatly appreciate the lunches — they always come in handy," said Marcia Reeves, a spokeswoman for the rescue missions in Saginaw and Bay City, to mlive.com.
Email: apond@deseretnews.com