Raleigh Worthington was 50 years old when he first stayed at the Salvation Army Homeless Shelter. He remembers because it was age that put him there.

Worthington needed work and had solicited jobs throughout Lawrence with little luck. The situation deteriorated into homelessness when his only job offer — loading oversize garage doors onto storage lockers — turned out to be impossibly heavy for his middle-aged body.

Worthington still struggles to find a permanent job and home, but he now grapples with a new concern.

After the Salvation Army shelter closed last spring, Lawrence’s homeless will have 44 fewer sleeping spaces to share this winter when the temperature falls below freezing, said Loring Henderson, director of the Lawrence Community Shelter.

For the first time in his six years at the shelters, Worthington worries that he and other homeless Lawrence residents might not have a place to stay when winter arrives.

“If they’re outside all night, and they have no protection from the weather, there’s a good chance, if its cold enough, they’re going to freeze to death,” Worthington said.

Short on space

Henderson said the Salvation Army Shelter usually housed 42 guests last year but would expand to 89 guests on freezing nights, boosting the combined limit of the two Lawrence shelters to 120 spaces.

He said the LCS tried to minimize the effect of the closed Salvation Army shelter with a renovation that expanded the LCS’s winter occupancy from 31 to 76 spaces.

But as winter approaches, Henderson said, the occupancy at the LCS last week has already reached 66, only 10 guests from having to turn people away.

Worthington said he remembered frigid nights, as recent as last winter, when both shelters filled to their combined limit of 120 guests. He said he worried it was only a matter of time before those guests would seek refuge in the 76 LCS spaces this winter and instead find themselves outside fighting the cold alone.

“There are going to be nights where they probably won’t be able to hold everyone,” Worthington said.

Erin Pursel, Leawood master’s student at the Edwards Campus, said she too felt concern while volunteering at the LCS for her summer marketing class. She said the guests would often sleep out front when the shelter filled to capacity, and she worried what would happen to those guests when the winter arrived.

“The people that can’t fit into the shelter are sleeping under this canopy outside,” Pursel said. “I really don’t know what they’re going to do.”

Henderson said he expected more guests would soon line up at the shelter at night as the weather turned consistently cold and camping became intolerable.

“If they absolutely can’t get in, we try to give them blankets so they can curl up some place out of the wind and survive,” Henderson said.

Legally, the LCS can’t accept more than its current 76-person limit because of fire regulations, Lawrence Fire Marshal Rich Barr said.

Barr said one of the biggest problems of housing the homeless at the LCS shelter or in a church basement, as in the First Christian Church earlier this year, was that those buildings were not designed to house large amounts of people.

“When you change the use to a residence, then it has to be protected,” Barr said. “It would have to be sprinkled, it would have to have a fire-alarm space, it would have to have adequate exits.”

A solution in sight

Henderson said the LCS was currently raising funds in the hope of constructing a new shelter with a 125-person capacity where Don’s Steakhouse once stood at 2176 E. 23rd St.

“We’ve started to raise the money, but we don’t have enough at all,” Henderson said.

Mayor Robert Chestnut said city commissioners would vote in December on whether to approve the new location. He said the city had met little resistance to moving the LCS, but neighbors of the proposed site are opposing its relocation near their homes.

“There’s a lot of concern in the adjacent neighborhood, making sure it won’t have an adverse impact,” Chestnut said.

Henderson said even if the LCS received approval from the city commission to move to the new location in December, the homeless residents in Lawrence would likely have to endure another winter under the current shelter situation.

“If we were going to have enough for next winter, we’d have to start it now or within the next couple of months,” Henderson said.

For those who will have to survive the wintry weather with a possible scarcity of shelter, even one winter without additional space seems dangerously long, Worthington said.

For Worthington, the horror of what can happen without shelter in wintertime has a face, and he won’t ever forget the day he discovered the cold had claimed the life of someone he knew personally. The victim’s body, he said, was found frozen, lying in the train park between Tennessee and Kentucky streets.

“I don’t think I’d want to enforce such a rule on a cold night,” Worthington said, reflecting on the tough job ahead of the LCS staff this winter. “I got to look at people and say, ‘I’m sorry, you can’t stay here tonight.’ And they’re looking at me like, ‘Where am I going to stay? What am I going to do?’”

— Edited by Abbey Strusz