Social service providers recommended Thursday that the city and state maintain their current supply of shelter beds as officials move to combine Chicago’s legacy homeless shelter system with the system for migrants.
The recommendation — discussed during a community meeting for nonprofits and public agencies at Deborah’s Place shelter in Garfield Park — was one part of a long-anticipated sketch of what officials have dubbed a “One System Initiative” to serve anyone in Chicago who needs a place to stay, regardless of their immigration status.
Advocates for both asylum-seekers and homeless Chicagoans have supported the move toward a unified shelter network, saying it will boost resources for the unhoused population in the city. Others warn it will overwhelm an already overstretched system, as the groups have very distinct mental health, language, legal and other needs.
Other proposals dealt with a permanent “access point” for people seeking shelter, ensuring that care and resources on offer were uniform across shelters, streamlining data collection and training and information access for shelter staffers.
The group also presented suggestions for when people exit shelter, including incentives for landlords to provide affordable housing and neighborhood-based support centers that could provide assistance with mental health and workforce development, among other needs.
City and state leaders in attendance stressed that none of the 14 recommendations were final and that the meeting, which did not cover how they might be funded or implemented, only marked the first phase of the planning process.
On Thursday, LaShunda Brown of Primo Center spoke about the first scaled-up efforts her organization had made to help serve migrants arriving in Chicago. Brown, one of the service providers who helped put the slate of proposals together, said that while new arrivals did have some different needs from the existing homeless population, she said, “they (also) needed everything we needed as Chicagoans, as U.S. citizens.”
Brown helped put together the final list of proposals and said “having a better understanding of what (migrants’) needs are” was a key to a successful single system. “I’m sitting here telling you it can be done,” she said. “I see it five to six days a week.”
“Services will be more distributed,” said Ana Gil-Garcia, founder of the Illinois Venezuelan Alliance, who has been attending planning meetings for the One System Initiative since March. “Even though there were some people who were skeptical that this process would work.”
The system for migrants is markedly different from the system for homeless Chicagoans, according to experts who work in both areas. One of the biggest distinctions is how quickly the shelter system was set up for migrants, who started coming to Chicago in the thousands in August 2022 on buses sent by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.
Busing ramped up last fall, to the point where many migrants were forced to sleep on the floor of the city’s 22 police stations and in airports for weeks, waiting for shelter placement.
In a little more than two years, more than 48,000 migrants have passed through the city and tens of thousands have settled here. But there are still roughly 5,000 currently staying in 17 shelters run by the city and state, according to recent data. In total, it has cost the city and state more than $460 million to temporarily house them and provide support for them.
Though not at the same rate as the asylum-seeking population, Chicago’s nonmigrant homeless population is also on the rise: According to the city’s 2024 Annual Report on Homelessness, the tally of people in and out of shelters in January was just under 5,000 — up by about 1,000 since 2023.
The two populations overlapped last year when some nonmigrant homeless people ended up staying alongside migrants on police station floors. As the numbers of people crossing the border have slowed in recent months due to a June executive order by President Joe Biden and city officials have slowly started closing migrant shelters, Gil-Garcia said the two populations are continuing to overlap, even before the unification plans.
“But the homeless population has been receiving less money … so this will at least lead to some equity in terms of budget,” she said.
There are currently just over 11,000 beds allocated to asylum-seekers. There are about 3,000 city-funded beds in the legacy shelter system, according to the report.
The new system likely won’t begin until next spring, according to several people involved in planning interviewed by the Tribune.
In the meantime, shelter workers will need to be trained in multiculturally responsive mental health care strategies, especially for migrant kids, said Aimee Hilado, a professor, clinician and expert on immigrant trauma at the University of Chicago’s Crown Family School of Social Work. Hilado, who was involved in workforce development conversations for the new plan, said she was impressed by how many people came together to provide housing to thousands of migrants last fall.
“We were able to respond to the migrant communities and their housing issues in that seamless way. Could that not extend to others?” Hilado asked.
Some social service providers geared toward nonmigrant homeless people told the Tribune Wednesday that they’d already begun to serve some asylum-seekers alongside their longtime clientele.
Betsy Carlson, the chief program officer at youth-focused Covenant House Illinois, said her organization had seen a few dozen migrants seek help from their drop-in center and shelter programs over the last two years. She thought it made “a lot of sense” for the city to run a single shelter network, but worried about possible competition for beds without a boost in funding.
“My main concern is about the resources to make sure that we really can be serving people properly,” she said. “We’ve needed more resources for the folks that we were already serving from before we started having buses arriving in Chicago.”
On Thursday, Beth Horowitz of All Chicago acknowledged that the homelessness response system has “historically been very resource poor” and said she saw potential in a combined system for more services and less scarcity.
“What is so nice about all the pieces that you might put together is how differently things can operate when there is enough (as opposed to) when there is not enough,” she said.
Nubia Willman, former chief engagement officer and director of the Office of New Americans for Mayor Lori Lightfoot, helped respond to the first buses that came into Chicago in 2022. She said Lightfoot’s administration decided to keep the systems separate partially because people were arriving with such acute needs.
But she stressed that immigrants and unhoused Chicagoans have needs beyond shelter.
“This is a workforce issue, an education issue, an integration issue,” Willman said. “We need to have robust plans for all of those things.”
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