Editorial: The Cold - Homeless need more than city's charities can provide

You could call it an "Ouch!" moment - and credit it to Sue Byrd, director of Operation Inasmuch in Fayetteville: "Every year, we know the cold is coming, and every year, we seem to still be talking when it arrives."

That's the nature of working with the homeless - for those who are serious about working with the homeless. There's never enough of anything.

Most of those involved in the effort to reduce homelessness, or the effort merely to keep the homeless alive through the winter, know the score. But what do the rest of us know? Who are the homeless? Where are they? How many? Why do their numbers routinely exceed the capacity of shelter set aside for them? And why do their numbers increase despite the work of Byrd's organization and the Salvation Army?

This year the two are innovating. On nights when the temperature nears freezing, white flags will be posted outside the Salvation Army homeless shelter on Alexander Street, the Salvation Army Corps Community Center gym on South Russell and at Operation Inasmuch on Hillsboro. On the worst nights, a few hundred homeless, many of them mothers with children, will escape the cold from 6 p.m. to 6 a.m.

A thousand others will not. And that's just one of the things the public needs to understand if it wants to come to grips with this problem.

Here's another. Most people have a general understanding of hypothermia. It's a dangerous lowering of the core body temperature. But the air temperature doesn't have to reach 32 to induce it. With enough moisture and a strong wind, 40 can be low enough. Furthermore, hypothermia can't tell time. It doesn't know day from night, 6:01 a.m. from midnight.

Most distressing is the steady rise in the number of homeless, including roughly 750 schoolchildren.

This is not merely something that should leave us unsatisfied; it's something we should be unable to tolerate. But passing proclamations won't fix it. Neither will reciting mantras, like "Some of them like it out there."

What's needed to reverse the trend - this is what we want, agreed? - is exactly what the Women's Giving Circle has proposed: coordination to ensure assistance where and when it's needed, and transitional housing that provides not only shelter, but direction for those who want a better home than the street.

There's no way around it. That translates to public investment. The response to that need will speak more loudly about our commitment than all of our words.