Quick Take
Santa Cruz County failed its unhoused residents during weeks of severe winter storms by not activating its extreme weather shelters, despite having staff, supplies and facilities ready, writes Sara Coon, an overnight site manager for the extreme weather shelter hosted by People First of Santa Cruz County. She believes narrow policies ignored the deadly risk of prolonged exposure to cold, rain and flooding, leaving people without dry clothing or warmth and contributing to preventable deaths. This was not a lack of resources, she writes, but a failure of leadership that demands immediate reform.
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Imagine waking up outside in the dark after another night of rain. Your clothes are still wet from yesterday. Your blanket is soaked. Your shoes never dried. Everything you own smells like mildew.
There is no heater, no dryer, no spare change of clothes — and no place to go to get warm or dry. The rain has stopped for the moment, but the cold hasn’t. Neither has the wind.
Now imagine doing that not for one night, but for weeks.
For nearly three consecutive weeks this winter, starting Dec. 22, Santa Cruz County suffered repeated storms, nonstop rain, coastal flooding, high winds and even snow in parts of the county. We all remember the cold nights. But during that time, not once did the county open its extreme weather shelters.
We have also had more recent February storms and unusually cold weather.
Yet, the county authorized its extreme weather shelters to open only twice, both on short notice. Notably, those two activations did not coincide with active rain or snow events.
Santa Cruz County did not open or authorize any warming centers — even when snowfall occurred, a rare and hazardous event in this region.
At the time, Santa Cruz was the only California county I know of that did not have a warming shelter open for its unhoused residents, despite widespread cold-weather activations elsewhere in the state.
This distinction matters.
The extreme weather shelters are not simply a place to sleep indoors. To my knowledge, they are the only shelters in Santa Cruz County that reliably provide unhoused residents with dry donated clothing, dry blankets, warm meals, hot drinks and other basic survival supplies during severe weather. When the shelters are not activated, people do not just lose a bed — they lose their only realistic opportunity to get dry.
The Santa Cruz County Office of Response, Recovery and Resilience manages the shelters, which are paid for by the county, the City of Watsonville and the City of Santa Cruz. Thresholds for shelter openings include when temperatures are forecast to drop below 38 degrees for two or more consecutive nights, when there are inland flood warnings or when the county issues evacuation orders due to excessive rain.
The thresholds, developed in 2023, are inadequate.
Prolonged exposure to cold, wet and windy conditions is life-threatening — even when temperatures remain above freezing, according to guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the National Weather Service.
Hypothermia does not require snow. It requires exposure, moisture and time.
Yet during the bulk of our three-week period of extreme weather, Santa Cruz County did not activate its emergency shelter system. No county-supported access to dry clothing, bedding or laundry was provided. Unhoused residents were left in soaked conditions for days without reprieve.
This was not a question of capacity.
I work as an overnight site manager for the extreme weather shelter hosted by the nonprofit People First of Santa Cruz County, which helps unhoused people access free services across the county. We were prepared to open and staffed on standby.
We had supplies staged. Facilities were available. Funding existed. The only thing required to activate the shelter was county authorization — authorization that never came.
We never heard why. The county didn’t cite a staffing shortage, a facility limitation or a safety concern. We never heard an explanation why activation thresholds were not met, nor were alternative protections put in place.
I know of at least three unhoused community members who died during this period. These deaths occurred under predictable, well-documented conditions and were preventable.
Santa Cruz County does not currently recognize coastal flood warnings as a qualifying trigger for extreme weather shelter activation, although we are a coastal county where many unhoused residents live along the San Lorenzo River levee and in flood-prone, exposed areas.
When storms bring sustained rain and flooding, people lose what little protection they have — tents, tarps, blankets, dry clothing. Once belongings are soaked, they stay soaked.
The Centers for Disease Control has documented that people can die from hypothermia even in temperatures around 60 degrees when they remain wet for prolonged periods — particularly individuals who are older, medically vulnerable, malnourished or living with substance-use disorders.
Santa Cruz County offers no consistent, free access to clothing replacement, bedding or laundry for unhoused residents. The result is predictable: People sleep in wet clothes, under wet blankets, night after night.
Emergency response systems exist to prevent precisely this kind of harm.
When danger is known in advance, resources are available, and authority exists — but action is delayed or withheld — the result is not an oversight.
It is a failure of governance.
There are clear, reasonable use cases where the county should act automatically. Prolonged rain combined with cold temperatures should trigger shelter activation before people lose the ability to stay dry. Coastal flood warnings in a coastal county should count as extreme weather.
Snowfall — rare in this region — should immediately open warming shelters. Activation criteria should account for cumulative exposure over multiple days, not just a single overnight temperature threshold. And when full shelter activation is delayed, we should deploy interim measures — warming centers, clothing distribution, laundry access and expanded outreach.
In response to these gaps, I’ve launched two public petitions demanding that the county lower activation thresholds so the extreme weather shelters can open when we have three or more nights of weather below 42 degrees and modernize its extreme weather response. Together, they have received more than 550 signatures from housed and unhoused residents.
One petition was specifically designed to be accessible to unhoused community members who cannot easily navigate traditional online platforms. The message has been clear: People want the shelters opened before conditions become fatal, not after lives are lost.
Santa Cruz often prides itself on compassion, innovation, and evidence-based policy. Those values matter most when conditions are hardest and lives are most at risk. The public deserves transparency, accountability and a clear explanation when life-safety systems fail — especially when the cost is measured in human lives.
Sara Coon has 20 years of lived experience of homelessness on the streets of Santa Cruz. She has been housed for seven years and is now a Medi-Cal-certified peer support specialist specializing in unhoused and crisis care. Coon works as an overnight site manager for the county’s extreme weather shelter hosted by People First of Santa Cruz County and she conducts outreach into encampments to notify unhoused residents when shelter is open. She also does independent outreach in Santa Cruz, providing clothing, blankets, basic medical supplies and support to the unhoused and currently housed. She has advocated for unhoused residents at the city, county, state and federal levels and has served on multiple lived-experience advisory boards in the past 16 years.
This op-ed does not reflect the views of her employer.