As municipalities across Illinois and the country continue to tighten restrictions on where the homeless can sleep, local advocates and service providers asked Chicago officials Wednesday to reconsider the planned closure of one of the city’s largest homeless encampments and not bar people from sleeping in the park in the future.
Approximately 30 people are still living in tents scattered across Humboldt Park on the West Side. On Friday, the city plans to clear the encampment, offering its residents “access to support services” as well as the option to move into housing or shelters, a move that has alarmed homeless advocates for its “expedited timeline” and “lack of sufficient “housing pathways,” according to a joint letter sent to the city late last month.
Advocates on Wednesday asked that the city not force residents who didn’t yet have a place to go — or who were waiting to move into already-secured permanent housing — out of the park.
“The city is displacing people as extreme weather is approaching; (it’s) actually already here,” said Patricia Nix-Hodes, director of the Law Project at the Chicago Coalition to End Homelessness, at a news conference at the park.
The Humboldt Park encampment is one of the roughly 100 encampments that have sprung up in recent years as the city contends with a spike in homelessness due to a variety of factors, including a shortage of shelter beds after the pandemic, a lack of affordable housing and the recent migrant crisis that brought tens of thousands of asylum-seekers to Chicago. Friday’s closure is the last step in an 18-month process meant to house the people staying there, although not all the park’s residents have been placed in housing. The neighborhood’s alderman called it the largest effort of its kind in the city’s history.
Ordinances that allow fines and possible jail time for people who sleep outside have become increasingly common across the country in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court decision Grants Pass v. Johnson this summer that allowed municipalities to enforce bans on people sleeping outdoors. About a month after the ruling, California Gov. Gavin Newsom ordered state agencies to start removing homeless encampments on state land. About a third of the nation’s homeless population resides in California.
In Illinois, Peoria last month became the largest city in the state to pass a measure penalizing public camping, joining north suburban Mundelein, downstate Effingham and suburbs of Peoria, East Peoria and Pekin. Meanwhile, Chicago officials, such as Chief Homelessness Officer Sendy Soto, have ruled that out on the grounds that it would make an already hard-to-reach population even more difficult to care for.
On Wednesday, advocates speaking outside what was left of the encampment, littered with yellow clearing notices, said they feared possible criminal enforcement against people who remain in the park Friday. In particular, they said the recent practice of fencing off former tent city sites “mirrors the hollow cruelty of criminalization.”
“We do not agree with the practice of closing off public space,” Nix-Hodes said. “The intention is to expedite (the) connection to housing as quickly as possible, not to remove outdoor options for people.”
The city has used what is known as an “accelerated moving event,” which condenses the process of placing a person in housing, to shut down tent cities that have sprouted up under viaducts, beside highways and in parks since March 2023. Though homelessness experts and advocates typically support the use of these events as a best practice for helping encampment residents find housing, those who work at Humboldt Park have criticized the process as incomplete, potentially traumatic and harmful to those who might experience homelessness in the future.
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Nix-Hodes and other social workers applauded the city’s efforts to place park dwellers into permanent housing and Fuentes’ work to open new homeless shelters in the neighborhood. According to Fuentes’ office, a total of 106 people who were living in the park have been matched with housing since last year through three accelerated moving events.
But Nix-Hodes said Wednesday that not everyone in the park had found housing and even those who had and were waiting to move in could be knocked off-track by Friday’s closure. Of the 63 people who were most recently matched with housing, she estimated that 30 remained in the park as they waited to move into permanent housing. Around 30 more people had no housing option currently on the table, she said.
In a social media post Wednesday, Ald. Jessie Fuentes, 26th, said that claims from advocates that the process had been rushed “overlook the thoughtful planning and trauma-informed outreach that have guided every step of this effort.”
“Leaving individuals exposed to harsh winter conditions is not acceptable,” she wrote.
Other outreach workers said they were worried about people losing important paperwork, medical supplies or other belongings in the shutdown. They also fear that the park’s closure to the homeless will make it more difficult for social service organizations to help people from access services and possible future chances at permanent housing.
“One of the largest barriers to housing people is not being able to find them once a rare housing opportunity becomes available,” said outreach worker Ryan Spangler.
Jose Miranda, a Humboldt Park resident who used to live in the park, said preventing people from staying in the park wouldn’t solve the problem of homelessness.
“We need some more housing that people can afford, and we need it in neighborhoods that people are familiar with, where they’re going to actually feel safe,” he said. “In the meantime, people need to access public places because there’s nowhere else for them to go.”
The city plans to stick with its previously-stated Friday closure date, according to a Wednesday statement from the Department of Family Support Services. City workers are still “providing intensive outreach” to house and shelter the remaining residents and help with documentation, treatment for substance use disorders and other needs, the statement said.
Fuentes’ office last week pushed back on characterizations of the closure process as criminalization. In a statement to the Tribune, Fuentes’ chief of staff Juanita García said the office was “committed to a human-centered process that prioritizes support.”
“Our focus remains on connecting encampment residents to resources that support their transition to stable living conditions while addressing public safety and public health concerns,” she wrote.
Since the summer, the city has cleared a number of homeless encampments as part of a larger initiative to close down such sites and relocate residents to shelters or other housing. Advocates for the homeless, however, have criticized such strategies as insufficient and potentially traumatic for encampment residents, emphasizing that the only solution for homelessness is permanent housing.
Chicago Tribune’s Sylvan LeBrun and The Associated Press contributed.
