You know to keep from violating the separation of church and state, you could make this a condition for all other Non-profits. Why are you only suggesting churches? ;)
It's a good point, really. Churches immediately came to my mind, though, because they are essentially large houses that allow access from the public, where a lot of non-profit agencies are just office buildings. And we have more churches than we have homeless people, so they could easily accommodate.
An emergency shelter is only open for a short period of time, and it takes several volunteers to make this happen. There are several things to consider, do you have the ability to get food, do you have the liability insurance to cover it, do you have enough bathrooms, and do you have the necessary volunteers to run the shelter. One must also consider access, is it easy to get to? Do they have electricity and running water? And in the case of this latest storm do they have snow removal? And again can you get the volunteers there, just because there is a church on every corner it doesn't mean their members live within walking distance or easy travel distance.
Here are the legal requirements:
Churches should already have all of this in place to cover the requirements of regular sermons, etc. If they have the ability to have 30-200 people sit there for a few hours for a sermon then they have the ability to have 1-5 people stay there overnight.
Meals are also optional; some homeless shelters provide food, but it's not a legal requirement.
And they should already have insurance in case someone in the congregation gets hurt. It might be a different policy for the purpose of a storm shelter, but that's a small price to pay in exchange for their tax exempt status and to potentially save a life.
In our little winter storm 3 people died, 1 when a tree fell on a truck, 1 while on hospice care, and 1 had a heart attack going to a shelter.
Not a single person died from lack of a shelter.
I would be interested to read your source on this, since you don't mention what area that covers. But it's not statistically accurate:
Most deaths occurred in the conditions of cold stress (of different intensity). Deaths caused by hypothermia were thirteen-fold more frequently recorded among the homeless than for the general population. A relative risk of death for a homeless person even in moderate cold stress conditions is higher (RR = 1.84) than in thermoneutral conditions.
https://www.ncbi.nlm...MC5739436/
Schools would make excellent shelters, having gymnasia, cafeteria and multiple pee pee pots. They exist in every community, are well maintained and have up to code everything.
There are two concerns with using a school:
1. some, if not many of the homeless may be on the sexual offender's list and can't legally enter the school.
2. There aren't as many schools as there are churches, and because of that the distances may make them difficult to access. There are an estimated 2,557 schools in the state, so about 1/5th the number of churches:
And the YMCA has the same problem... we have one in Wilkes, but a homeless person in Boomer or Traphill couldn't possibly get there in an emergency without help.
