11/06/2025
We talk a lot about “solutions” to homelessness, but somehow the conversation skips right over one of the most basic, life-saving needs: a safe place to heal.
Medical respite is what happens after the ER visit, after surgery, after the hospital stabilizes someone and then says, “We need the bed — good luck out there.”
When you discharge someone recovering from amputation, heart failure, diabetic wounds, pneumonia, or cancer treatment back to a tent or the sidewalk, you’re not “resolving homelessness.”
You’re setting up a slow-motion medical disaster.
Respite interrupts that cycle.
Since 2019, Ascending to Health has provided more than 20,650 respite bed-days to people who otherwise would have been left to recover in the cold, on the street, or in unsafe encampments.
Average stay: 24 days.
Average outcome: stability, healed wounds, reduced rehospitalization, and reconnected care.
Hospitals pay $2,500–$4,000/day to keep someone in a bed.
Respite costs around $295/day — and that includes:
Daily medical care / wound care
Case management & care navigation
Medication coordination
Food, clothing, transportation
A real bed
Safety
Dignity
Respite prevents expensive readmissions.
It prevents ER revolving-door care.
It keeps people alive, period.
But here’s the part that feels like screaming into the void:
There are over 1,700 people experiencing homelessness in our city right now and capacity for maybe half of them.
And we have to fight every month to keep respite funded and open.
If we say we care about public health, community safety, or human life — then funding respite is not optional.
We should not have to justify keeping human beings alive.
We should not have to beg for the bare minimum.
Respite is not a luxury.
It is the difference between healing and a body bag.
If you want to help — truly help — fund respite.
Share this. Speak up. Ask your elected officials where the money is going.
Because a society is defined by how it treats the people with the least power.
I’ll be damned if we let ours be defined by abandonment.
— Codi
Ascending to Health Respite Care
Compassion isn’t complicated. Bureaucracy is.
