Outreach to Homeless in Deep Freeze

Tesfa Ogun and Stacie Raymond got into their car just after midnight Monday.

They work for Goddard Riverside, a non-profit, which runs an outreach program for the city. Their job was to check up on the homeless who live on the streets of Manhattan and try to coax them into going to a shelter. Ogun and Raymond were one of 20 teams that the city sent out on the coldest night the city has seen this winter.

“Feels like negative 15 and it’s two degrees,” said Ogun, checking his phone.

At least 3,000 New Yorkers live on the streets. Even on a night when the temperature dipped into single digits, shelter wasn’t an option for many. Ogun and Raymond were canvassing the uptown area and looking for 18 people who are on their priority list because they’re at greatest risk.

“Those are the individuals that might be old, over 60, or use substances like alcohol, which makes it hard to see what the temperatures are outside. Or they might be mentally ill, which is why they might be outside,” Ogun said.

As they approached 87th Street on the Upper East Side, Ogun became worried seeing EMTs. They were there for Christine, 47, who sat under a stack of comforters and blankets and said she wasn’t doing well. But even this kind of cold couldn’t override the reasons that make her stay on the street.

“Try domestic violence, try I don’t like shelters, try I can’t stand the shelters,” she said.

She agreed to go to a hospital, joining around three dozen people the city said were moved off the streets this past weekend.