Ashland opens new winter homeless shelter with 32 beds

The building at 2200 Ashland Street has served as a homeless shelter off and on since the city bought it in 2023. The new 32-bed winter shelter will run through April 1 and can add up to 20 additional beds during severe weather. Doors open at 5 p.m. Friday, Dec. 5.

Opportunities for Housing, Resources and Assistance, or OHRA, will run the shelter. Executive Director Dan Cano said all the beds have already been assigned.

“We’re bringing in the most vulnerable and the ones that are most chronically in need,” he said. “The goal of this year’s winter shelter is to just keep those that are unhoused and have the most needs housed, to provide some kind of stability.”

Cano said OHRA has prioritized people staying on Ashland’s night lawn, an area behind the police station where homeless folks are allowed to camp.

The shelter includes bunk beds, showers, a kitchen, laundry facilities, meals and storage. It’ll be open nightly from 5 p.m. until 10 a.m., with staff on site.

The city is providing $30,000 to run the shelter, and OHRA is contributing $100,000 in state funds.

Cano said there are some rules for staying there, like good behavior and no drugs or alcohol.

“There’s a lot of people that really are trying to stay out of the cold temperatures,” he said. “We want to make sure that we don’t have any barriers to them coming in, so we’re very pet-friendly.”

OHRA also runs the OHRA Center, the only 24/7, year-round shelter in the city, which is less than half a mile from the Ashland Street site. All 72 of the center’s beds are consistently full, with an ongoing waitlist.

As the winter shelter winds down in the spring, Cano said staff will begin transitioning people into the OHRA Center.

“We’re hoping to get as many folks that end their time here in April to just transition into the OHRA Center,” he said.

Repeated openings and closures

The city first acquired the building in August 2023, when the state was under a homeless emergency order. OHRA then operated it as a 30-bed homeless shelter.

When state funding ended, the state offered Ashland $2.6 million for necessary renovations and operations. But Ashland city councilors said there was no clear long-term plan for the shelter, so they closed it in March 2024.

It reopened in January 2025 for three months, operated by Rogue Retreat, a major homeless services provider. It provided overnight shelter, as well as case management and peer support services.

However, the building was not designed for overnight sleeping and didn’t meet fire codes. As a result, while 28 people could stay there, half had to be awake. The fire code also limited the program to 90 days, and it closed in April.

Since then, the city has completed renovations to meet building code and allow overnight sleeping, including new showers, restrooms and laundry facilities.

Once this new iteration of the shelter closes on April 1, it’s unclear how the building will be used next. Cano said there’s no plan to reopen a similar shelter next winter.

A master plan for the building recommended that it be used as a severe-weather shelter and for daytime appointments, transitional housing and administrative offices.

Jane Vaughan name is a reporter with Jefferson Public Radio.

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