PHOTO/BRETT JELINEK
CHICAGO, IL — The homeless are trying to survive and make it, we’re not trying to bother anyone. In Uptown, under the viaducts of Lake Shore Drive, there are encampments, “Tent City” or “Uptown Tent City,” AS WE are called.
Recently, the Commissioner of the Department of Family Support Services (DFSS), the agency designated to implement policy affecting the homeless, said that on any given night in Chicago the shelters are 95% full. Three are set to close this winter, one in Uptown 1/2 mile from Tent City under the viaducts. Tent City is expected to swell in size as a result.
In spite of this DFSS recently tagged our tents for removal, likely at the direction of the alderman. Chicago’s true policy toward homelessness, and that of many cities, is one of refusing to recognize it. The homeless are not powerful enough for their concerns to be considered. They are insects to be swept away.
The central issue for all homeless people, under the viaducts or elsewhere, is not of tents or of encampment cleanings, however, but that of housing. Without housing we must be preoccupied with day-to-day survival and cannot advance our lives or even very well live them.
Housing is increasingly inaccessible, becoming more and more a luxury rather than a basic right. In our two-tiered economy, there is an entire stratum of low wage workers, unskilled laborers and unemployed for whom housing is becoming so prohibitively expensive, as to make it so they must often do without it. Then, employment becomes very difficult and re-entry into either the job or housing market, a tremendous feat. Once homeless, people are commonly homeless for 15 or 20 years, or even more.
The “Housing First” model for housing the homeless, in which housing is provided to homeless persons unconditionally and the recipient’s personal and financial problems are dealt with afterwards, is the only one that will work now. The barriers to housing are too great and often unreasonable. One elderly couple currently living under the viaducts, both of whom have income, can’t be approved for housing because of a 40-year-old criminal conviction of her husband. Both husband and wife have cancer and the wife is refused treatment because she doesn’t have a conventional home that her healthcare providers insist is necessary for the treatment’s best success.
Twenty years ago I was homeless (as I am again now). I found a job and rented a cheap room with my earnings. I worked my way out of homelessness with nobody’s help at all. Today that can’t very well be done, our society and political economy has changed immensely. The job I got then is gone and so is the cheap SRO I rented. There is an entire class in our society for whom housing is not a right. We are fast becoming like an “underdeveloped” country. We need more regulation of the housing industry, more power for workers and other ways of addressing income inequality to resolve the housing crisis.
