On Thursday afternoon, Donna Andrews, the reference services manager at the York County Library’s main branch in Rock Hill, started informing some of the library’s upstairs visitors that the doors would close at noon on Friday and not open back up until Monday.
The reason was the coming of a winter storm that was set to encase Rock Hill and much of the Upper Midlands and Upstate in a layer of ice and snow.
“For the folks that we recognize, who do come in on a regular basis,” Andrews said, “we will be telling them that we will be closing at noon tomorrow and will be closed all day Saturday. Because it can be a hardship for them to find someplace to go if we’re not open.”
To a lot of library patrons, a locked door is little more than an inconvenience. But a lot of these guests, looking out the windows at the municipal complex courtyard or scrolling through phones in soft chairs, the library is where they spend their days. These are the visitors without homes to return to, and they need to make plans for how to spend their days out of the elements, if they want to.
A common option is the city’s free bus service, which unhoused residents sometimes ride for temporary shelter. But the storm could cause disruptions in service.
That leaves the shelters, which the city operates through Pathways Community Center on Cherry Road.
But not everyone wants to spend time in shelters. Cathy Harris, for example, has been living outside for a year, sleeping where she can find a spot of ground and bundling up against the weather.
I ran into Cathy at the library Thursday and asked her what her plans were, given the possibility of sub-freezing temperatures, snow, and ice for the weekend ahead.
“We haven’t thought of it yet,” was her answer. “We just play it by ear.”
Harris also said she’s unconcerned about the weather because she’s been through it before. Her plan, such as it is, is to wrap up in blankets and wait it all out, unconcerned.
“We’ve been in an ice storm before,” she said. “It’s been 19 degrees, so ….”
Our conversation was brief and terse. Harris would endure what she had to and come back to the library when she could. She gave no thought to the real consequences of spending the night on frozen ground, such as hypothermia.
Karla Deese, on the other hand, thinks about that kind of thing quite a lot.
“It’s something that's very much in the forefront of our minds when we're out doing investigations,” Deese said Friday. “It’s the first thing we look for if someone is found outside.”
Deese is the coroner for Lancaster County, where a hypothermia-related death hasn’t been reported in several years. But she’s worried that that might change, as more people who are unhoused, unsheltered, and unconcerned about the dangers of living outdoors in harsh weather find their way onto the streets.
“It's been a few years since I've had a hypothermia case,” Deese said. “However, we have not been in the homeless situation that we are in now.”
Between 2021 and 2024, the number of individuals in Lancaster County experiencing homelessness leapt from 47 to 77, according to point-in-time, or PIT, data from the United Way of Lancaster County. Three in every four of those counted said they had experienced unsheltered homelessness, meaning they either chose to eschew shelter or couldn’t find a bed in one.
These numbers are, for context, considered even by those who conduct the PIT count to be an underrepresentation of the actual number of adults and children experiencing homelessness. In fact, the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty estimated that PIT counts can be between 2.5 to 10.2 times lower than real homeless numbers.
According to the United Way report, half of those who reported being unsheltered in Lancaster last year were either sleeping in their cars or on the ground.
For Deese, the growing issue of exposed, unsheltered people in Lancaster County is the result of a lack of available housing.
“Unfortunately, we live in a society now [in which] housing is not very affordable,” she said. “People have lost job, and the economy is not very friendly to them for various different reasons. So, you do have people who are homeless.”
Affordability is an increasing issue around South Carolina, and that includes Lancaster. According to Zillow, the median price for a house in the county jumped from $200,000 to nearly $270,000 between January of 2021 and November of 2024. If you back things up to January of 2020, the median price for a house in Lancaster today is about $95,000 more expensive.
And that’s just the price of the house. In January of 2021, the mortgage interest rate was 2.79 percent. On Jan. 9 of this year, it was 6.93 percent.
In real numbers, that means the median house bought in January of 2021 in Lancaster, given a 20 percent payment on a 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, would run a homeowner about $855 per month.
The median home bought in November will cost a homeowner about $1,590 per month.
And while it’s harder to break down the effects of escalating rent in Lancaster – its data get lumped into general data for the Charlotte metro – numbers from ApartmentList show that median rents, all swirled together, were about $1,000 more per month in November than they were in January of 2021 in the Charlotte metro statistical area.
For Deese, the pinch of affordable housing is what she most worries will increase the number of people who will find themselves sleeping in cars or sheds or abandoned buildings without utilities.
“There’s obviously no heat,” she said. “There's a little more coverage from the dampness and the dew that then turns into frost, but it's still equal [to the] outside temperature.”
And she worries about this confluence of more people on the streets meeting temperatures below freezing.
“If we see an uptick in [hypothermia deaths], I would not be surprised,” Deese said. “Six years ago, hypothermia would be kind of a one off. And usually, it was related to someone with dementia. someone who was lost, those kinds of things. Now, due to the homeless situation, I very much fear that we’re going to have that happen.”
