HUMBOLDT PARK — Humboldt Park neighbors are begging officials for solutions as the unhoused population in the neighborhood’s namesake park continues to swell.
Before the pandemic, only a few people were living in tents in the sprawling Northwest Side park. But the park’s tent city has since grown to include about 40 people, their bright orange tents visible from North and California avenues.
New Ald. Jessie Fuentes (26th) said her office has received an onslaught of complaints and concerns from neighbors about the growing encampment, which has taken over several areas of the park.
The majority of disquieted neighbors want the city to help residents of the park find stable housing, Fuentes said. Some also have health and safety concerns about the tent city, like residents using the park and nearby alleyways as a bathroom.
“At least every day there’s someone who reaches out about the encampment,” Fuentes said.
Ryan and his family moved into a single-family home about a block away from the park in 2019.
Ryan, who declined to provide his last name, said he used to go to the park a few times a week with his young daughter, but they don’t go nearly as often with the encampment and the trash and debris that has accumulated in the park over the last few years.
“I don’t really want to take my daughter to see the ducks when people are tweaking out on a bench,” Ryan said.
Ryan said he’s concerned about the safety and wellbeing of the people living in the park and he doesn’t want to see “a bulldozer go in and remove people.” People living in the park deserve respect and shelter — and despite calls from neighbors, “nothing seems to be getting done,” he said.
“They’re humans and everybody needs a place to live. We just want an understanding of what the city is actually doing — what they can do to create affordable housing or convert properties that aren’t being used into places that can work,” Ryan said.
Similarly, nearby homeowner Brian Duncan said the city isn’t doing nearly enough to help tent city residents, several of whom are struggling with substance abuse and mental health problems.
“The number of people that we see defecate in our alley …,” Duncan said. “In our building, we’ll all text each other and be like, ‘There’s another one just passed out in the alley.’ And at what point in time does the commitment to these individuals kick in? When does the respect kick in?”
‘We’re Trying To Build Real Solutions’
Dozens of neighbors packed into a Chicago Housing Authority office along the park last week for a town hall meeting called to discuss the encampment and other housing matters in the 26th Ward.
In remarks at the meeting and in an interview with Block Club, Fuentes said she’s committed to getting residents out of the park and into permanent housing with help from city agencies, like the city’s Department of Family and Support Services.
“The growing tent encampment makes me angry because no one deserves to live in a tent. Everyone deserves to be housed,” Fuentes told a group of at least 60 neighbors.
Fuentes denounced some neighbors for saying residents “are there because they want to be there, or all suffer from substance abuse problems and are beyond repair — all broad-stroke statements that aren’t rooted in facts.”
“I’ve walked the encampment and I’ve interviewed every single individual. … We have veterans, people who have served this country. We have individuals working full-time jobs living in tents because they cannot afford rent, individuals who suffer from mental health issues and substance abuse — and they deserve wrap-around care, rapid housing and stability,” Fuentes said.
Fuentes was joined by Cook County Commissioner Anthony Joel Quezada, who represents a large swath of the Northwest Side, Humboldt Park’s Park District-appointed area manager Raquel Maldonado, officials with the Department of Family and Support Services’ homeless prevention program and homeless advocates, like Bruce Parry with the Illinois Union of the Homeless.
Officials said the situation in Humboldt Park, like in other parts of the city, requires a collaborative, multi-pronged approach. Many if not all of the people living in the park fell on hard times during the pandemic, they said.
Fuentes said the pandemic relief dollars that Ald. Maria Hadden (49th) used to house residents of Touhy Park are no longer available, but they’re working on finding additional sources of funding to match residents with housing and medical care.
“If you want a fake answer, if you want a shallow answer, if you want to just criminalize people, you’re not going to get that here. Here, we’re trying to build real solutions,” Quezada said.
Of the 40 people living in the park, 34 have signed up for the city’s “rehousing” system, officials said.
The city is hosting “accelerated” moving events for residents of Humboldt Park, a program that has been successful in quickly reducing tent city populations in Rogers Park and elsewhere. The one-day events allow for residents to move in two weeks, as opposed to several months.
Fuentes said she’s also looking into opening a shelter nearby and converting about 20 boarded up CHA apartments in the area into housing for park residents. She said she met with CHA CEO Tracey Scott who told her they will develop a plan for those units after doing an “assessment.”
“My office is going to stay on top of CHA so it’s done quickly,” Fuentes said.
On top of housing, advocates are pushing city officials to reopen one of the park’s public bathroom that has been closed for many years and is located right next to a cluster of tents. As of Friday, an online petition calling on the Park District to restore the bathroom had drawn more than 500 signatures.
The Park District has been notified of the issue and officials are looking into making repairs to the bathroom, but plans won’t be discussed until next year, Maldonado said. In the meantime, the park has three other “comfort stations,” including one in the field house and two others by Little Cubs Field and Augusta Boulevard, she said.
The Park District is also bringing an additional porta-potty to the tent city area, Maldonado said.
Officials used the meeting to update neighbors on the encampment and share possible solutions. Neighbors were asked to write down questions on notecards, but officials only answered a handful of those questions at the very end of the event.
Neighbor Reba McCain said the meeting was “very informative” and she’s hopeful Fuentes and other officials will live up to their promise of helping park residents.
“It’s just a step, it’s just a beginning and perhaps if we all work together we expand our humanity a little bit, we can definitely get Chicago on the map for taking care of homelessness,” McCain said.
Yet Duncan, who lives just north of the park, left the meeting more frustrated than when he arrived.
“It was a typical city-run meeting. It was a lot of bureaucracy,” he said. “I guess we’ll have to wait and see. It does seem like a lot of passing the buck, using a lot of buzzwords, even though they say they’re not passing the buck.”
‘It’s Sisyphus Pushing The Rock’
On a recent weekday, several park residents sat in camp chairs underneath big shady trees in Humboldt Park to stay cool in the blistering heat, including a 62-year-old man who goes by the name Mississippi.
Mississippi’s life was upended about three years ago, when his girlfriend died from cirrhosis of the liver. His sister died not long after that, which sent him even further into a depression, he said while fanning himself with a white T-shirt.
For 17 years, Mississippi held down a job as a cook at Roberto Clemente Community Academy. But after the deaths of his girlfriend and sister, he stopped showing up to work on time and eventually lost his job.
With nowhere to go and no family members to rely on, Mississippi started living in a tent in Humboldt Park.
“It ain’t no book story. It’s just survive, survival of the fittest,” he said.
Mississippi could soon see some relief as he was recently approved for an apartment in Garfield Park with help from officials who stop by the park. He hopes the arrangement works out.
“Once I get it, things will change,” he said.
Mississippi is neighbors with Alan Thomas, a newcomer to the park.
Thomas, a veteran, set up his North Face tent in Humboldt Park about three and a half weeks ago after he was evicted from a veteran building in Garfield Park, his home of a dozen years, through no fault of his own, he said.
“They are not about protecting veterans’ lives or offering stability,” Thomas said of the veteran building.
“I complained because it took them seven and a half years to get the ADA door fixed. I complained about everything. No regular hot water — you have to time your showers and doing your dishes to the system. … And in the winter, it’s inadequate if it gets really cold. So they’re slumlords parading as if they do-gooders, and I stood up to them. That’s how I wound up here, not for lack of payment of rent.”
Thomas is an Evanston native, a self-described leftist and jazz DJ who volunteer-hosted jazz programs on radio stations like University of Chicago’s student radio, WHPK-FM, and WORT-FM in Madison, Wisconsin, for years. His only income comes from disability and Social Security, he said.
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Living in the park hasn’t been easy for Thomas. The people are friendly and neighbors kindly drop off food and supplies, but he has to take a bus to Jesse Brown VA Medical Center to take a shower and bathrooms are in short supply, he said.
“It’s Sisyphus pushing the rock,” he said. “It tends to roll back down on you. But you’ve got to get back up and keep pushing.”
Thomas said he wants a new apartment, but only if it’s “somewhere the landlord knows how to run a building.”
“Another slumlord building in a segregated neighborhood? No, I’m not ready to do that,” he said.
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