'I Don't Want to Live Like This'

Behind the kudzu vines and thickets, they saw homeless men hover around a campfire.

Canton Mayor Gene Hobgood had received a tip that people lived in a wooded area behind the old McFarland's grocery store just off Marietta Road. A few Fridays back, he decided to check it out for himself.

"Honestly, just driving by, you couldn't see this," said Hobgood, who was accompanied by council member Bill Bryan and members of the . "But when you stopped, Mr. Bryan pointed out you could see someone back there."

They may have seen men such as Juan Pedro, who said he has lived there for six months.

Surrounded by trash, tents, sleeping bags and days-old food, Pedro said he looks for work every day. Across the street from the encampment, day laborers waited on the side of Marietta Road and Dr. John T. Pettit Street for someone to drive by with a job offer.

"There's nothing now," he said Wednesday morning. "I've always worked. Construction. Landscaping. Painting houses, too. I can do just about anything."

Seeing the kind of conditions in which Pedro lives, along with the recent ice storm and record cold, convinced Hobgood that it's time for the city to establish an emergency shelter.

"I would not want to think that I had to stay outside all night long," Hobgood said during the Dec. 16 meeting, the last one of the year. But "there are those out there existing through the night in temperatures in the 20s or teens or near single digits and wind chill factors in the who knows what."

Early this year two homeless men froze to death in a wooded area behind a shopping center in Canton, Hobgood said. A few years ago, a man froze under the Etowah River bridge.

"We need to consider the humanitarian aspects of this and do whatever we can," Hobgood said. "It should be automatic that when this happens, this happens. The police force, if they see someone out there that needs shelter and it's 12 degrees and the wind's blowing 30 miles an hour, they need to be going somewhere inside. They don't need to be standing out there all night."

"If we had a gym with cots or something that we could offer on these extra cold nights," Bryan said, "I think we need to try and do that."

City Manager Scott Wood said that before the city moves too hastily, he would like to sit down with the mayor, one other council member and the city's public safety heads to review the emergency management plan in place, then make a recommendation to the council.

The plan "speaks to this and assigns certain responsibilities already to various county agencies," he said. "Everybody in the city of Canton is concurrently a Cherokee County resident, and I would just encourage you to look at the plans and be sure that those are given adequate emphasis and participation by the city."

Council members didn't object to Wood's suggestion, but Hobgood asked that the city put the meeting on the calendar sooner rather than later.

"We need to go ahead and do that," he said.

officials are looking at an old gym as a possibility, council member Pat Tanner said. Council member John Beresford suggested the YMCA.

The shelter wouldn't be anything fancy, and the city wouldn't incur any costs, Hobgood said.

"We're not talking about providing a lot of comfort, just warmth and shelter for a short period of time," he said. "The only thing we would do is have a member of our police force or some officer stay in there with them during the entire night so that nobody destroyed any property or did anything that they shouldn't be doing."

Council member Jack Goodwin backed the plan.

"I would like to see us act on this now and try to put a plan into action," he said. "It's not something that's going to come up a year from now. It's something that's going to come up now. These people don't have a place to live in. It's a lot worse than you think it is."

Pedro, 30, said he would appreciate any help the city could offer on those unbearably cold nights. He said on one such night, he stayed in a self-service laundry until it closed.

"I don't want to live like this forever," Pedro said. "Nobody wants to be like this. I have to for now. To survive."