On Mean Streets, the Cold Is a Killer : Homeless: Police have seen an increase in exposure and hypothermia deaths. And the demand for emergency shelter has increased by 25%.

A frigid blast of arctic air riding the jet stream far to the south has brought record low temperatures to much of the Midwest and East, leaving America’s rising homeless population, including an unprecedented number of women and small children, in a grim, pre-Christmas fight for survival.

“It’s going to be crazy . . . unfortunately, some people are going to die, I think,” said David Roth, a member of a Chicago homeless task force.

Police have already seen a dramatic increase this week in deaths from exposure and hypothermia. At least four deaths among the homeless in New York over the weekend were blamed on the cold, and other deaths were reported in Detroit and Denver.

Meanwhile, emergency shelters in virtually every city are filled to capacity, leaving thousands of others to search for warmth in abandoned buildings, heat grates, dumpsters or bus terminals.

“I never thought of hell as freezing, but it is more depressing out there right now than you can ever imagine,” said Darlene Feldman, a suburban Detroit woman who has started a volunteer effort to hand out blankets among Detroit’s homeless.

“This cold is scary for people who work with the homeless,” added Bill Faith, a member of the Ohio Coalition of Homelessness in Cleveland. “It’s not just a matter of trying to provide assistance, it’s a matter of trying to make sure people survive.”

The sheer numbers of homeless make this week’s icy blast even more dangerous; a survey released Wednesday by the U.S. Conference of Mayors found that the demand for emergency shelter has risen by as much as 25% in major cities this winter. A lack of affordable housing, along with increased drug abuse, has led to huge increases in requests for shelter in 24 of the 27 cities surveyed by the mayors’ group.

“We turn away people every night because there is not enough room,” said Nelda Clarke, director of program services at the Salvation Army’s Harbor Light Center in Minneapolis. “And one of our greatest fears is that someone turned away will freeze.”

In addition, in this last winter of the 1980s--the decade when America re-learned the harsh Depression-era terminology of homelessness--the makeup of the homeless population is changing. The National Coalition for the Homeless estimated Wednesday that 1 million of the 3 million homeless in the nation are families, a dramatic change from the early 1980s, when most homeless were single men.

“Increasingly, the face of hunger in America is the face of a young child,” said Boston Mayor Raymond L. Flynn, who released the mayors’ report.

And, while private, volunteer efforts are spreading throughout the country, the economic slowdown that seems to be just around the corner could make conditions far more difficult.

“It really is getting much worse, the crisis is speeding up,” said Mitch Snyder, a homeless advocate with the Washington-based Community for Creative Non-Violence. “If we have a bad recession, we could have 5 to 10 million people on the streets.”

Carol Jean Doutcher of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Atlanta agrees; she helps out at a soup kitchen where the lines of the hungry keep growing. “We have a limit of 500 people that we feed,” Doutcher said. “And when we reach that limit we close the door. So it is not a question of feeding more people, it is a question of turning more people away from our door, hungry. That is happening more and more.”

In New York, where homelessness has long been at crisis levels--with as many as 90,000 people living on the streets--new nuisance abatement regulations in commuter train stations are coming under fire for forcing the homeless out into below freezing temperatures.

The city’s new transit rules are designed to get the homeless out of the train and subway stations and into city-run shelters, in response to mounting complaints from suburban commuters about having to wade through a tide of homeless people to get to their trains. Officials at Grand Central Station, for instance, have set aside some areas of its terminal only for passengers with tickets.

New York’s transit police say they have established a new policy not to eject anyone from the subways in sub-freezing weather, but homeless advocates say the homeless are still being forced out of the stations and into New York’s crime-ridden and drug-infested public shelters.

“They are throwing people from the subways out into the street, rounding them up to go to the city shelters where they don’t want to go in the first place,” said John Turcott, of the Partnership for the Homeless in New York. “It’s particularly cruel in this particularly cold winter to do this.”

But in other cities around the nation, volunteers are stepping forward during the holiday season, offering increasingly imaginative ways to spread some Christmas good will.

In Atlanta, for example, a major hotel has decorated a Christmas tree with hundreds of angel ornaments, each with the name of a homeless adult or child; volunteers who then take one ornament are asked to give a Christmas gift to the person listed on their ornament. So far, the hotel has taken in 300 gifts that it will deliver to homeless shelters in the city.

And in Detroit, Darlene Feldman has become known as the “blanket lady,” for single-handedly starting her new organization that passes out blankets on the streets, to reach those homeless who never go to shelters.

She has now won the heartfelt appreciation of the hard-bitten people on Detroit’s streets, and her station wagon has become an especially welcome sight on these bitterly cold days and nights.

“When I come up with a blanket,” she says “they act like they’ve won the lottery.”

Researchers Tracy Shryer in Chicago, Leslie Eringaard in Detroit, Lianne Hart in Houston, Lisa Romaine in New York, Ann Rovin in Denver, Edith Stanley in Atlanta and Anna Virtue in Miami contributed to this story.