The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that local governments can enforce bans on sleeping in public, bringing nationwide attention to the homelessness issue. The court’s ruling doesn’t oblige Chicago to enforce any particular policy, but it gives the city a freer hand in fighting homelessness and addressing causes such as housing affordability, addiction and mental health.
In preparation for the Democratic National Convention, Mayor Brandon Johnson has suddenly taken a more aggressive approach toward homelessness, which is not in line with the administration’s feel-good rhetoric. Large tent cities in areas such as the South Loop have been cleared. This has come with unintended consequences, such as displacing current residents of homeless shelters to make room for new ones, and doesn’t even consider the predicted influx of up to 25,000 migrants by the time of the DNC.
While Johnson’s sudden concern is welcome, shifting people around won’t change anything beyond the convention. It’s promising that the city is now pretending to get serious about the issue, but it shouldn’t take an influx of powerful visitors to incentivize a cleanup, especially when such short-sighted maneuvers create new problems. To effectively reduce homelessness in a sustainable way, city lawmakers should shrink the city’s influence in the housing market to make room for affordable rentals and adequate shelter space to grow up.
Chicago’s chief homelessness officer, Sendy Soto, said the Supreme Court ruling wouldn’t change the city’s focus on affordable housing units. While more affordable housing is a commendable goal, the Johnson administration has done an exceptionally poor job at trying to achieve it. Chicago’s burdensome building regulations make it difficult to build more homes to keep housing prices in check, even as research suggests housing prices have a strong impact on homelessness rates. Though Johnson has, to his credit, expressed serious interest in cutting red tape, this is belied by his proposal of draconian real estate taxes and costly, convoluted plans for using city funds to develop affordable housing. Artificially increasing demand will only raise prices for everyone — including privately funded shelters or mental health facilities that could assist with the homelessness problem.
This is further complicated by Johnson’s free housing for migrants. The city’s taxpayer-funded housing for migrants increases city-funded demand for rentals while restricting supply for individuals willing to pay fair market rates, raising housing prices for everyone.
Doubling down on its mistake, Chicago’s “One System Initiative” proposes to combine migrant housing and homeless shelters into one system. This risks applying the same solution to radically different issues, while potentially exposing migrants and others to the mental health issues that are unfortunately prevalent among the homeless population.
However, the issue of housing affordability isn’t the only factor behind chronic homelessness. Even if Chicago magically created enough cheap housing with no deleterious economic effects, there’s no guarantee that housing alone would lead to more amenable conditions for the previously homeless. In fact, the track record of a supportive housing program in San Francisco suggests mental health and addiction issues could get worse. In 2020 and 2021, program participants in city-funded single-room occupancy hotels made up 14% of all confirmed overdose deaths in San Francisco despite the program housing less than 1% of the population. Horror stories of residents assaulting other occupants and staff abound, while conditions in the hotels — infestations, mold and poor disability accommodations — sometimes compromised residents’ health more than living on the streets did.
The Johnson administration’s work thus far does not inspire confidence in its ability to tackle these more complicated problems, while Chicago’s restrictive housing landscape makes it difficult for private organizations that know what they’re doing to intervene.
When accountable to the people, the Johnson administration’s course of action has been fecklessness hidden behind compassionate rhetoric. When accountable to out-of-state Democratic Party elites, the administration scrambles to move people around while ignoring underlying causes. Chicago needs neither of those extremes, but instead a less regulated landscape in which the market can make affordable housing a reality and the underlying causes of homelessness can be addressed by those who know the issue best.
Mike Viola is a state beat fellow at Young Voices. His work has appeared in the Tribune and National Review, among other publications.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.