Every winter for the past few years, Bloomington’s city council has enacted an emergency shelter ordinance allowing one of its homeless shelters to expand its capacity during the winter months.
The ordinance technically declares a homelessness emergency and empowers the city manager to enact executive orders stretching the capacity limits of the Salvation Army shelter in Bloomington, in exchange for extra city inspections, staff and safety equipment.
The city put a similar order in place in 2024 and 2025. Both of those orders were active only during the winter months. The October 2025 order expired in March 2026.
City Manager Jeff Jurgens told WGLT after the council’s Oct. 13th meeting that the order will likely come up every winter for the foreseeable future.
“It would take some major changes to their structure to make it compliant,” he said.
Bloomington Salvation Army Community Services Director Adam Lovell said it would take hundreds of beds citywide to prevent the need for an emergency ordinance.
“We would either need the homeless population to go down, which it’s not likely to do, or someone, somewhere would need to build more shelter space,” he said.
For most of the year, the Salvation Army has 50 beds. With this ordinance, they add 24 beds and 15 warming center seats. During the 2025-26 winter season, they helped 165 people in total.
Lovell said they expand capacity by allowing people to sleep on the floor of their cafeteria. While it isn’t ideal, it is the only option for staying warm overnight during the winter.
“There’s no overnight warming centers,” he said. “We just want to be able to step up and fill that need.”
Uptick in first-time homelessness
While there are some clients that are chronically homeless, Lovell said they are seeing more people experiencing homelessness for the first time. The group asks how many times an individual has been homeless in their lifetime and for how long during their intake process.
Lovell said unexpected rising costs or financial crises seem to be contributing.
“Whether they’ve been evicted, they lost their job, they had a medical problem, the list goes on and on,” he said. “We are seeing a slow increase in that.”
“It’s either pushing them over the threshold of becoming unhoused or pushing them very, very near that cliff,” he continued.
Salvation Army’s Safe Harbor shelter is meant to be an eight-week program that places people into housing, but Lovell said some shelter guests are staying for much longer than they anticipated.
“We’re seeing residents that have been here for months. We’ve had a few that have been here over a year,” he said.
Lovell said there is “just no place” to send people, especially if those individuals need mental health care or nursing facilities. If more specialized care facilities popped up overnight, he estimated they could move 80% of their clients into those services and out of the shelter.
There is a similar problem at The Bridge, a noncongregate shelter option offered by Home Sweet Home Ministries. The village of about 50 single-room cabins opened in January 2026, but has mostly been at capacity since then.
Bloomington Mayor Dan Brady said efforts to create more housing overall will hopefully ease those blockages.
“I don’t think that one size fits all, and I don’t believe anybody has the magic wand that is going to eliminate our homeless problem as quick as anybody wants to see it,” he said.
The winter season and the expanded capacity take a lot out of the staff, Lovell said. There are staff working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, including holidays.
“Winter shelter is a very, very stressful time,” he said. “We do it for five months and it takes its toll.”
