With only a few dozen cold weather shelter beds available this week, most homeless people in the Daytona Beach area have been enduring temperatures in the 30s and 40s in tents and under the stars.
DAYTONA BEACH — For the past three weeks, Michael Chapman has been living in an empty lot off Clyde Morris Boulevard just south of the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University campus. The muddy lot is owned by the city, and it's the only place homeless people can legally be at night.
A dozen tents are scattered across the property bordered by woods, and one of them belonged to Chapman. That is, until some other homeless people trashed it and everything inside a few days back. Days of rain soaked anything that would have been salvageable.
On Wednesday night, at temperatures headed below freezing and a cold wind blew from the north, Chapman — a 61-year-old veteran of the United States Marine Corps who served at the end of the Vietnam War — found himself spending the evening in a donated pup tent in Daytona Beach's designated "safe zone."
"That wind is coming through the tent window and it's been cold," Chapman said Thursday morning as he sat in a lawn chair in front of a friend's tent. "It's hard. I just had two back surgeries and I have a hernia."
For most people, this week's icy temperatures have meant chilly walks between their car and warm buildings, the hassle of covering cold-sensitive plants in their yards, and waking up to a layer of frost on their windshields.
For Chapman and the hundreds of homeless across Volusia and Flagler counties, the mercury's plunge has meant bone chilling nights of misery trying to stay warm under donated blankets. A new 100-bed homeless shelter is at least a year or more away from opening, and there has only been space for a few dozen people in local emergency cold weather shelters this week. So the vast majority of those with no roof over their head have been in nightly teeth-chattering battles for survival.
By 8:30 a.m. Thursday, the temperature hadn't climbed much above the freezing mark. Chapman rocked back and forth trying to stay warm. He had no hat on his nearly bald head and was wearing jeans, a sweater, a cloth jacket, a scarf and gloves.
He said he's been waiting on his $780 Veteran's Administration check, and once he starts getting that money every month he hopes to get a small apartment and end his three years of homelessness.
"I trusted the wrong girl and got ripped off," he said. "I used the money I had left for clothes and blankets, and it was downhill from there. Everything you see I have is donated."
Also staying in the safe zone is 49-year-old Ronda Knight. Like Chapman and the two dozen other people staying there, she's surviving with donated food, blankets and clothing that kind souls drop off every day. People have brought everything from coffee and donuts to hot corn bread and chili.
Knight has one of the bigger tents on the site, which someone gave her on Christmas Eve. She has also been given several blankets, a sleeping bag and pillows. Her boyfriend normally shares the tent with her, but he's in jail and won't be released for three weeks.
"I'm wearing two pairs of socks, a T-shirt, flannel shirt, gloves and a scarf and I'm still cold sleeping," Knight said as she sat huddled under some blankets inside the tent. "I haven't been sleeping too well. Half of us have colds. At night you hear lots of rattling coughs."
She said city officials told them not to build fires on the site, so that's not an option to stay warm. She said she did get in a shelter one night, but she wasn't crazy about the idea of waiting in line in the cold again to try to get back in.
She added that those who stay in the safe zone have been told to take their tents down as soon as they can see their shadow in the morning and move over to the nearby sidewalks or go somewhere else. But since the cold snap started they've been allowed to keep the tents up.
This story is developing. Check back for updates.