As a nasty storm bore down on Philly Saturday, advocates said more spaces are needed for unsheltered people

As a significant winter storm sent snow and sleet over Kensington Avenue, people living on the street there huddled around small fires on the sidewalk, sheltered under blankets and inside tents, and crowded inside the few warm indoor spaces available there.

Here at the epicenter of the city’s opioid crisis, hundreds of people are living outside, and advocates who work with them say there are too few spaces nearby for them to seek shelter.

Though the city had declared a Code Blue for the weekend, a special operation for especially cold weather that opens up more shelter beds across the city, people living on the street in Kensington said they had few options in the neighborhood itself.

As it sometimes has done in previous years, the city did not open “warming centers,” which don’t provide places to sleep but allow people without shelter to get out of the cold. Some warming centers are located in rec centers; the city has also used parked buses for temporary warming areas.

Sherylle Linton-Jones, a spokesperson for the Office of Homeless Services, said that the city’s existing shelters have capacity to accommodate people looking to come in from the cold this weekend, and that warming shelters are opened only when the system is full. As many as 300 more shelter beds open on Code Blue days, in addition to the city’s 3,600 year-round shelter beds.

In Kensington, some people taking a break from the cold at Savage Sisters, an outreach organization with a small storefront on the avenue, said they were planning to seek a shelter bed for the night. Others, however, were more wary.

For people in active addiction, the fear of withdrawal — which can cause intense pain, nausea, cramps, and chills, like a particularly bad flu — can be enough to deter someone from seeking a bed in a shelter that prevents clients from coming and going during the night. Many people dependent on drugs are not using them to get high, they say — they use drugs to avoid withdrawal.

“Once you cross that physical line, there’s no fun in it. It’s a vicious circle. It’s torture every day,” said Robert Ditmars, who is addicted to fentanyl and has been living on the street in Kensington for two years.

During a previous stint in a shelter, he woke up in withdrawal in the middle of the night. “You can’t just leave and come back in a place like that — you’ll lose the bed. So I used because I didn’t want to sit there and get sick and throw up,” he said. “I got caught, and I had to leave.”

Other nights, Ditmars said, he would travel from Kensington for a shelter bed, only to find none left when he arrived. Still, amid the bad weather Saturday, he said would seek out a shelter bed on Saturday if he could.

Staff at Savage Sisters say the city should consider opening more warming centers, especially in Kensington, for people deep in addiction who might avoid shelters elsewhere.

“It’s been rough,” said Victoria McDowell, the storefront manager at Savage Sisters, adding that, in recent weeks, staff there have had difficulty finding shelter spaces for clients. (Linton-Jones stressed that the city has enough beds available citywide during the Code Blue.) The storefront can shelter about 19 people at a time, and staff have kept it open 24 hours for the last several days to help more people get inside.

In the storefront, people napped in plastic Adirondack chairs and sipped at hot chocolate from the front desk. Rita Lionti, who has been living on the street with her partner, stepped through the front door, bundled in layers of fleece jackets. She wanted to enter a shelter, but shelter beds for couples are hard to come by.

For her, she said, “This winter’s been brutally, brutally cold. “The city needs to open up more warming centers.”

The city says that anyone who needs shelter during the Code Blue, or sees someone who needs it, should call its Outreach Coordination Center at 215-232-1984.