Planning ahead to protect unsheltered families next winter, city councilors approved mayor Katjana Ballantyne’s request Thursday for $800,000 to make the city’s winter warming center more accessible to people with disabilities and upgrade plumbing, electrical and fire alarm systems.
The city is making improvements to the main entrance to include concrete walkways and accessible ramps and renovating two bathrooms in place of the temporary wheelchair ramps and outdoor portable bathrooms used previously.
The warming center, on the ground floor of the former Cummings School on Prospect Hill, “is a life-saving intervention, and Somerville is proud of opening earlier, staying open later compared to other centers and operating daily” during the winter, a city spokesperson said via email. The city started a warming center open for four nights a week in 2022 at the Armory arts building.
In the past winter, the city hosted 3,692 stays and was “at capacity” most nights: 35 to 37 people and two to three dogs were allowed in the space nightly between early December and mid-April and were given hot meals, cots, blankets, bathrooms and hygiene items, staff said. The past two winters’ warming centers have been operated by Housing Families, a Malden nonprofit.
Its host building, a school at 42 Prescott St., closed in 2008 and has since operated as a swing space for the school department and other city infrastructure projects.
Between 2008 to 2014, the East Somerville Community School community used the building after a fire displaced students, staff and teachers. A Parent Information Center and some administrative offices operated there between 2014 and 2021. Now the school department stores musical instruments and clothes for its clothing exchange inside and allows the city’s infrastructure and asset management department to stage construction equipment outside, including during the high school renovations.
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