Billings shelter ready to help homeless during cold weather Deep freeze a danger for homeless in Billings and last updated 2021-02-12 15:06:49-05 Sub-zero temperatures have caused challenges for the homeless, and Billings shelters are ready to help. About 50 will stay Thursday night at Off The Streets at Second Avenue North and North 33rd Street. Van loads of about six people come over from the Crisis Center, where they are screened. "There's a lot of people that have stayed out, as long as they could. You know they're not wanting to be around other people necessarily and so they're the, they're the difficult ones to reach to get them to come into a shelter like this," said Craig Barthel, site director for Off The Streets. "But the cold weather has actually forced them, they're getting cold at night now where maybe when it was 20 above they weren't quite so cold, you know now at zero or negative degrees. They're realizing that they can't take that kind of kind of cold, and so they're coming into the shelter so we've seen our numbers climb significantly, just with the increase in the cold weather."