News Archives - Page 17 of 74 - Chicago Coalition for the Homeless

Block Club Chicago: Smoking, Urination And ‘Unruly Behavior’ Is On The Rise On Trains, CTA Riders Say. But Will Private Security Fix Problems?

Posted on March 3, 2022June 2, 2022 by Vanessa Álvarez

By Mack Liederman March 3, 2022 9:59 a.m. CT

Passengers wait for an arriving O’Hare-bound CTA Blue Line train at the CTA Jackson Blue Line station in the Loop on Feb. 25, 2022.

CHICAGO — When Max Merkow steps onto the train for his morning commute, most days he’s hit with clouds of weed and cigarette smoke.

“People have gotten more ballsy as of late,” said Merkow, who rides the Red and Blue lines. “Smoking on the trains is a daily occurrence. Especially in the last few months, it’s gotten absolutely rampant.”

Merkow isn’t the only one noticing. Riders across the city have lit up social media in recent weeks complaining about conditions on public transit, including smoking, littering, urination, public defecation and unruly behavior.

Chicago Reader: Lukewarm welcome

Posted on March 2, 2022June 2, 2022 by Vanessa Álvarez

By Katie Prout

March 2, 2022

I didn’t expect to be escorted off the premises of the city’s only overnight warming center on a 28-degree evening, though perhaps I should have. After all, I’d been warned. Last fall, when I learned I’d gotten this job, I asked people who live on Lower Wacker what kinds of stories they’d like to see in the Reader. Repeatedly, folks suggested I take a look at the city’s six official “warming areas” run by the Department of Family & Support Services (DFSS). “What about them?” I asked.

The Night Ministry: COVID Continues to Create Barriers for Chicago’s Homeless Population

Posted on February 28, 2022June 2, 2022 by Vanessa Álvarez

The temperature is dropping on an already cold January morning. Still, Marcus, a client of The Night Ministry’s Health Outreach Program, has removed his coat and sweatshirt and pulled his arm out of his shirt sleeve so Stephan Koruba, The Night Ministry’s Senior Nurse Practitioner, can give him a COVID vaccination booster.

Marcus had lost his vaccination card a few months prior when the tent he lives in on the edge of downtown Chicago was ransacked. Koruba scrolls on a phone to locate Marcus’s electronic vaccination record and then issues him a new card with the date, brand, and vial number of his first vaccination, and now his booster.

Photographer captures the ‘Faces of Homelessness’ of Chicago

Posted on February 8, 2022June 2, 2022 by Vanessa Álvarez

By Brenda RuizFeb. 8, 2:04 p.m. CT

A ne exhbit and forthcoming book aim to pput a face to Chicago’s homeless population.

Reset chats with photographer on how he hopes the book will dispel myths around homelessness.

Chicago Suntimes: These are some of the faces of homelessness in Chicago, captured by Jeffrey Wolin

Posted on February 4, 2022June 2, 2022 by Vanessa Álvarez

By Mark Brown Feb 4, 2022, 11:00am CDT

When photographer Jeffrey Wolin began work four years ago on a project about people experiencing homelessness in Chicago, he worried for a time that his concept would be obsolete before he could finish.

Surely, this country would soon step up to solve the homelessness crisis, he thought.

In his new book, “Faces of Homelessness,” Wolin betrays no lingering naivete about quick solutions as he explores the scope and depth of this deeply entrenched social problem.

Chalkbeat Chicago: Illinois Students missed a lot of school last year: it’s a sign that something isn’t working

Posted on January 31, 2022June 2, 2022 by Vanessa Álvarez

By Max Herman

For the past 19 years, when students in Kane County have missed school, Kari Glenn has visited their homes to see what’s preventing them from attending classes.

As a truancy officer, she says this year has been the hardest.

In one of the families Glenn works with, the single parent died, leaving behind four young children. “Now they’re going to be living with a relative and that relative isn’t completely prepared to take on four little kids,“ she said.

Chicago Suntimes: ‘The need gets larger and larger’

Posted on January 23, 2022June 2, 2022 by Vanessa Álvarez

By Neil Steinberg Jan. 23, 2022

The Night Ministry’s case manager Sylvia Hibbard checks on a person living at a homeless encampment — offering services from the street medicine van, such as free health care, food and other survival supplies — at North Kedzie Avenue and West Belmont Avenue Wednesday morning on the Northwest Side. — The Night Ministry’s case manager Sylvia Hibbard checks on a person living at a homeless encampment, offering services from the street medicine van, such as free health care, food and other survival supplies — at North Kedzie Avenue and West Belmont Avenue Wednesday morning on the Northwest Side.
Ashlee Rezin/Sun-Times

“We’re missing an outreach worker who normally drives, answers the phone, plans the route and does needle exchange,” Koruba says. “We have a reduced presence due to COVID. We’re struggling a little bit.”

So those duties are now theirs, the missing worker one tiny twist of the vise that is slowly crushing frontline social service agencies at the beginning of the third year of the COVID-19 pandemic.

CCH method for quantifying doubled-up homelessness published in leading housing policy journal

Posted on January 21, 2022May 31, 2022 by Vanessa Álvarez

By Sam Carlson, Manager of Research and Outreach

On Monday, Housing Policy Debate published CCH research on quantifying doubled-up homelessness, adding credibility to the years-long Homelessness Data Project research on measures of homelessness.

Many definitions of homelessness include “people temporarily staying with others”—doubling-up because of economic hardship or housing loss. Temporarily staying with others can have negative consequences that should be addressed, but the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s methods for enumerating homelessness exclude these arrangements, and Department of Education counts of doubling-up include only school children.

Counter Punch: At the Bottom of the Empire: Homelessness, Housing Injustice, and Jesse Jackson’s Call to “Eradicate Poverty”

Posted on January 21, 2022June 2, 2022 by Vanessa Álvarez

By DAVID MASCIOTRA Jan. 21, 2022

“The bottom of the Empire,” was Reverend Jesse Jackson’s description of who Martin Luther King was seeking to serve with his politically revolutionary ministry of the 1960s. Jackson was standing in the Reverend Martin Luther King Legacy Apartments on the West Side of Chicago to give a press conference on, what would have been, King’s 93^rdbirthday, January 15, 2022. Joining Jackson were representatives from the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless and the Illinois Union for the Homeless. The city of Chicago has transformed the lobby of the King Legacy apartment building into a small museum, showcasing the governmental-capital conspiracy that created the “ghetto.” Through decades of redlining and other discriminatory lending practices, public infrastructural programs to preserve segregation, police enforcement of residential borders, and “neighborhood covenants” among white homeowners and landlords to never sell or rent to Blacks, Northern cities became white fiefdoms.

WBEZ Chicago: Annual homeless count aims to bring resources to Chicago area’s unhoused

Posted on January 21, 2022June 2, 2022 by Vanessa Álvarez

By Brenda Ruiz Jan. 21, 2022

A homeless man Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2021, gathers his belongings at the Chicago Transit Authority’s Clark & Dearborn bus station. On Wednesday, aldermen extended an agreement house homeless residents at a downtown hotel as the pandemic continues into the winter. Charles Rex Arbogast / Associated Press

People experiencing homelessness face many challenges when temperatures drop quickly like this week.

Reset hears from two advocacy groups on an upcoming homeless count and what resources they have in frigid weather.