Winter has ended. What’s next for those living on Lansing’s streets?

The past winter was one of the coldest in years, and while everyone feels the chill, it doesn’t punish everyone equally. People were sleeping on the streets, in backseats and in tents even on the coldest days.

Kelsea Hector, 34, executive director of Punks with Lunch, said that although shelters ran at maximum capacity, some chose neither the shelters nor the bus, but their tents. Hector, a former mayoral candidate, said that during the coldest storm, around 20 to 25 people stayed outside.

Mobile teams checked on at least that many people and provided some supplies to make sure they didn’t freeze to death, Hector said.

“We did try to convince them to go into the Women’s Center or Letts or wherever. They chose not to,” she said. “But that’s the reality of what we’re dealing with.”

Persuading people who are living outside to come indoors has become an urgent battle in many American cities where winter carries the risk of death. There are plenty of reasons for those who choose to stay cold.

Strict shelter rules that don’t fit everyone are one reason. Having to leave what goods they carry — such as bicycles, tents and even pets — is a challenge because shelters often don’t allow them to bring it in or don’t have enough space, so people have to risk leaving their belongings on the streets, vulnerable to being stolen.

“It could be the way the system has treated them in the past, and they’re not comfortable enough going into shelters or the bus,” Hector said. “It has something to do with how people are treated sometimes. They have an unfortunate experience, and they don’t want to go back.”

 

Code Blue

Lansing activated its “Code Blue” protocol around 70 times between late 2025 and March of this year.

During a code blue, warming shelters extend their operating hours and capacity so they can accommodate as many people as possible, and bus routes extend their schedules and offer free rides to shelters. Route 1 extends its service to 24 hours a day, serving as a mobile warming center where people can spend the night traveling between downtown Lansing and Okemos.

The number of Code Blue days exceeded the city’s budget of $40,000 by 58%. An initiative established as an emergency plan to protect affected people whenever temperatures drop to extreme colds or severe snowstorms strike, Code Blue days accounted for about 20% of the calendar year, and more than half of the days between Nov. 11 and March 19, the first and last Code Blue days.

Shelters like New Hope, one of the largest in Lansing, and part of the homeless services provided by Holy Cross Services, opened its doors to anyone in need during the Code Blue days. When their beds were at capacity, said Shelbi Frayer, director of Holy Cross, they provided extra cots, extra staff, more bed supplies, additional meals and often overtime for security.

“While this response is critical, it significantly increases operational costs,” Frayer said. “Like many nonprofits operating on lean budgets, we do not have the financial flexibility to absorb these unexpected expenses each month.”

Gaps persisting

For Hector, this shows the gaps that exist even when Code Blue is active and that programs like Code Blue are necessary until everyone has housing.

“Until we shift our priorities to truly prioritize housing first — and treat housing as a human right — we will continue to need spaces like that to ensure people are cared for,” she said.

Those who can will usually sleep in their cars, but they face risks.

Where can someone park for longer than eight hours without being kicked out, ticketed, harassed by the police or even towed? Rest areas are an option, but the Michigan Department of Transportation is seeking to ban camping and limits stays to only 48 hours. 

Khadja Erickson, 32, director of the Tenant Resource Center, says there used to be more places to go, but options are being eliminated. 

If someone’s car is towed, it can lead to losing everything they have left.

“Every day it grows more expensive to retrieve your car, and thus your items, and presumably everything that you had,” she said.

Homeless encampments serve as prime examples of last-ditch situations when there is nowhere left to go, when people cannot find shelters or are forbidden to set a tent in public parks or parking lots, and finding a home again feels like an eternal process.

Encampments are typically situated in the woods, an easy walk from urban areas and close to what few public services are available but still far enough away to remain out of sight.

Some last only a short while, until a neighbor or a city worker reports them to the city or the police, who will often clear out the encampment.

On the other hand, some encampments can endure for years. They can evolve into small communities housing dozens of people in sometimes complex, semi-constructed structures under a certain degree of urban organization, Erickson said.

“The biggest threat to any encampment is their nosy neighbors who feel uncomfortable at the fact that there is open poverty in their sight,” Erickson said. “They start to develop their own mini city, in my opinion. They start turning the space into their own with unique decorations.”

When an encampment is cleared, it’s a traumatic experience for those who live through it, she said. Erickson criticized the presence of police officers during these processes because there may be an “antagonist” relationship they have had with homeless residents.

The city of Lansing, following ordinances 656.05 and 656.06, fines those who stay in city park areas after dusk when they are closed. Littering is also prohibited and is penalized with 90 days in jail and/or a $500 fine. If a person decides to stay in a city park with all their belongings after it is closed, police are allowed to remove the individual and their possessions.

“We said we needed a place for people to be housed right now, as a stopgap, so they’re not being harassed by police,”
Erickson said. “It’s like they just get kicked out of the system. They are literally outside of it.”

 

Fallen Angels

One of those encampments was called Fallen Angels. It was a small community of tents, beds, stoves and a few pets that sheltered more than 50 people for nearly four years across two private properties next to Dietrich Park in north Lansing.

The city filed a lawsuit against the owners for allowing the encampment to occur. After several legal battles about relocation, and with significant media scrutiny, the encampment was evicted in the middle of December, and 57 encampment residents were sent to the Causeway Bay Hotel for six weeks as a temporary measure, backed by a court order.

The case pushed Mayor Andy Schor into the media spotlight as the city publicly wrestled with solutions to growing homelessness while he wrapped up the race for his third term as mayor.

Funds from the city and county, along with donations from various organizations, helped extend the residents’ stays from six to nine weeks, but they are now largely gone from the hotel.

A few have since managed to escape homelessness, but the vast majority were eventually evicted from the hotel with less stuff than they had when they lived in the encampment. Some have gone back to shelters, other back to the streets in the middle of winter due to non-compliance. Fewer than a dozen of the original 57 remained at the hotel in mid-March.

“They took a whole community of people and put them under one roof,” Erickson said. “But saying you can’t visit each other’s rooms, you can’t have outside visitors in your room, you can’t do this, you can’t do that, and all of this would result in your removal, it’s crazy.”

Erickson and Hector think Lansing should have made better plans to handle the encampment residents. They each said the problems ran from the proposal stage through the actual transition. Both organizations helped to provide encampment residents with rental storage rooms to organize and store their stuff.

“What the city of Lansing specifically does is take everybody’s stuff,” Erickson said. “It all goes in a pile in a big dumpster truck in a different location. Then they (the people) have five business days to come and get it. All your stuff that’s all mixed up with everybody else’s stuff. How are they supposed to get it from that location to wherever they are now? Come on.”

Complaints ranged from inconvenient shuttle schedules to the hotel and court sessions without some residents present to strict monitoring and rigid rules within the facility — non-compliance with which would result in eviction — as well as a hotel stay deemed too short relative to the job-finding and housing procedures, and a lack of preparedness among the hotel staff to deal with individuals in sensitive emotional states or those dealing with substance use issues.

“I don’t think that there was enough planning put into what could have been a really beautiful study of how Housing First works and operates when you have all the right agencies in the same place,” Hector said.

On March 5, 11 residents were evicted from the hotel.

A Lansing spokesperson told WILX News 10 they were sent to shelters, but both Erickson and Hector said they’re back on the streets. The city said some residents had not complied with self-improvement rules and housing progress. Around 16 people were notified about the eviction about a day ahead of time.

 

Temporary solution

For Hector, the temporary solution — the transition — and the demands the city placed upon the camp residents during the weeks in the hotel did not align with reality.

Both she and Erickson said the entire transition process — and the abrupt shift away from an environment the residents had created and grown accustomed to over the course of more than a year — was a traumatic experience.

The ideal way to hold residents accountable is to engage with them through a “trauma-informed lens and understanding” to facilitate their optimal functioning, Hector said.

 “We have someone who’s been in abject poverty,” she said, “who is in active substance use, who has a lot of intersectional things going on, and you gave them hope. And then you took it away from them. I don’t think that was necessary.”

Winter has ended, and according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Michigan’s unemployment rate is lower than it has been, but homelessness advocates believe rent prices will remain high.

Expect more tents

Advocates expect that more tents, and even clusters of tents, will begin to appear around the Lansing area, and that more encampments will likely spring up within the city.

“It is getting nicer, so landlords are going to feel less bad about whipping up their eviction machine. We’re getting into eviction season,” Erickson said.

Frayer said that last winter, New Hope saw an increase in individuals over age 55 seeking shelter. “They now make up roughly 30% of the people we serve,” she said.

Last September, state representatives introduced a package of laws, House Bill 4995, that would limit landlords’ decisions over tenants, including landlords’ ability to deny housing to tenants based on poor credit history, and would allow for the concealment of eviction records, among other measures. The bill is still under review.

Erickson noted that once a tenant has been evicted, it remains on their record, which makes it virtually impossible for them to be accepted as a renter again — even if they have the means to pay rent. And even if that’s not a problem, the process of getting new documents, a job application, a house list, a new house and going through the transition will usually take months, even in the easiest cases.

Scott Bean, a city spokesperson, said the hotel stays were intended to be temporary and the city is preparing for cooling shelters in the summer. “The hottest parts of the day occur during regular business when facilities are open and air conditioned,” he said.

Erickson and Hector said many of the problems stemming from homelessness can be resolved by prioritizing housing, rather than relying on temporary solutions, encampment evictions, camping bans, or the ModPods/Nova Housing Initiative (a project by the city of Lansing intended to provide transitional housing for the homeless population).

On March 16, the city of East Lansing voted against a proposal to ban sleeping, camping or setting up temporary living spaces in public areas. This proposal had originated as a measure to combat rising crime rates in the downtown district. Erickson said she welcomed the rejected vote as “one less layer of harm,” but she and Hector were critical about the measure even being considered. It’s already prohibited to camp or sleep in private areas, and the council approved a ban on loitering in parking structures.

For Hector, these aren’t real solutions.

People need to be prioritized over capital, she said, and solutions need to be well executed.

 “It doesn’t help them. It doesn’t make the problem go away. All you’re doing is indicating to them that you want them to disappear,” she said.