Tracy said the center is a short-term, overnight facility, mainly serving homeless individuals and is not a permanent winter shelter. It’s not the same as a winter shelter, which we sometimes refer to. They’re used colloquially, kind of similar, but a winter shelter would be a shelter that’s open every night in the winter,” Tracy said. The homeless believe emergency winter shelter is a system set up to appease your conscience so that you can say, we offered a shelter and nobody came. He said staff intend to use that plan to seek other funding opportunities and noted the need for both a winter shelter and an emergency shelter when in dire need.