During the ice storm in late January, a street newspaper vendor died while living outside. This is not an unpredictable tragedy unfortunately. It is a visible outcome of a condition that is deadly in every season: homelessness.
Contributor vendor Sharon Conyers was just 46 years old. She started selling the paper in August 2023 and sold 876 newspapers to her loyal customers. She really cared about her job, so much so that she would recruit anyone to become a vendor, even college students that she would meet on and off the job. She often spoke with loving concern to staff at The Contributor, her language laced with religious and mystical terms and energy. She inspired us and will be missed dearly.
Unfortunately, her death should not catch anyone off guard. People experiencing homelessness die prematurely at far higher rates than housed people because of exposure, untreated illness, mental health crises, substance use, and the cumulative toll of living without safety or stability. Extreme weather accelerates these risks. It does not create them.
We know this because we see it. We bury people whose names quietly disappear from the streets. We watch health decline while people wait months and years for housing. We reassure one another that help is coming, even when we know it may not come in time.
Homelessness is often discussed as a housing issue, a social issue, or a funding issue. It is all of those things. But it is also a public health crisis. In a public health emergency, we would not accept delays as normal. We would not treat deaths as unavoidable. We would ask how quickly people were brought to safety, who was left exposed, and what barriers slowed intervention.
Frontline workers care deeply. Outreach teams work long hours. City staff operate under immense pressure. None of that changes the reality that the system itself is not organized to respond with the urgency that a lethal condition requires. It is an emergency when housed individuals lose power, and, of course, shelters must open to accommodate them, but it is also an emergency for unhoused people on a more consistent basis to be in the same elements.
People do not die because they failed. They die because systems move more slowly than trauma, illness, and exposure.
The measure of a city’s homelessness response is not how many reports it produces or how many plans it writes. It is whether people survive long enough to benefit from them.
Preventing premature death is the lowest bar we should accept. Right now, too many people are falling beneath it.