As presented to the county Board of Commissioners Nov. 15 by Jennifer Teague, Buncombe’s aging and adult services program manager, the Asheville-Buncombe County Homeless Coalition called the first Code Purple of 2022 on Oct. 15 — the first day this year’s program went into effect. After evaluating the results of that first night, the coalition decided to extend entry times for Code Purple shelters.
If next week’s forecast is correct, overnight temperatures in Asheville will dip below freezing several times, potentially exposing those living without shelter to harsh conditions. Fittingly, members of Asheville City Council will hear an update on the city’s Code Purple program during their meeting of Tuesday, Nov. 15.
Code Purple will have nearly 100 beds available for emergency overnight shelter for Asheville’s unhoused population when the temperature is freezing or below. The program will also operate for two additional months in the winter and spring of 2022-23.
For more than half of nights in November, the Asheville-Buncombe Homeless Coalition called Code Purple: an emergency protocol, triggered when temperatures drop below freezing, to increase space in homeless shelters beyond normal capacity. But for all of those nights, people sleeping on Asheville’s streets had no officially designated place to go. The two Code Purple […]
