With more tough winter weather hitting Chicago this week, homeless shelters found themselves attempting to aid as many people as possible while taking precautions against the omicron variant of COVID-19.
“It’s a very delicate kind of balance that we try to maintain between addressing the need for shelter beds and at the same time keeping everyone safe,” said Richard Ducatenzeiler, executive director of Franciscan Outreach.
Recent single-digit low temperatures and snow across the area have had Chicago’s homeless population more likely to seek out shelter, leaders of care organizations said. Shelters are wrestling between wanting to provide for as many people as possible while also keeping everyone safe under one roof.
Ronald Childers, guest services manager at Pacific Garden Mission, said the shelter has tried to mitigate the risk of COVID-19 spreading by implementing increased hand-washing, masks, temperature screenings for new guests before they enter the building and regular testing. Pacific Garden Mission also has held a number of vaccination clinics to ensure as many of the shelter’s guests are vaccinated as possible.
Childers said it was initially a struggle in 2020 when COVID-19 first hit because there was so little information known about the virus at that time and people were afraid. He said in the early stages, the shelter was “bombarded” and had a lot of people in the building.
“Two years later, we’re still fighting this disease and all the variants,” Childers said. “We’ve learned a lot of things and implemented a lot of new policies and procedures. We have had to turn some people away, and that’s difficult, but it’s rare that we have to do that. Most of the time we can make accommodations and help people that need our help.”
Ducatenzeiler said his organization had been able to move about 20 guests over the last couple of weeks to a hotel for extra housing. “Those resources have been extremely helpful and then obviously that opens up space for new residents to come into our shelters,” he said.
The total amount of shelter space in the city has been reduced since the beginning of the pandemic due to health and safety needs, so organizations have had to create space in new ways to support as many people as possible, especially in the winter months when more people are looking for shelter.
Much of the area saw snow this week along with low temperatures. The coldest temperatures and wind chills of the season so far were reported in the area late last month.
Kimberly Howard, project manager with the city’s homeless services division at the Department of Family and Support Services, said about 3,200 shelter beds around Chicago are supported by the department’s funding, which is roughly 75% of all the beds in Chicago. About 300 of those beds are known as alternate shelter beds, which have been operating in response to the pandemic.
Alternate shelters are the city’s way to reduce the number of people in any given space by opening up space elsewhere.
Howard said the department has worked with its shelter partners to open a total of nine alternate shelters in the last two years. One of the alternate shelters, Harbor Light Emergency Homeless Shelter, located at the Salvation Army Freedom Center in Humboldt Park, opened through a partnership with the Salvation Army in response to the extreme cold temperatures recently, Howard said. That shelter will be open 24 hours a day.
Most of the department’s roughly 50 shelter partners operate around the clock, but a handful are normally only open overnight. Howard said the city will work with those few shelters during extreme weather conditions to be able to stay open during the day as well so no one has to leave in the morning.
The city also has warming centers available to anyone experiencing homelessness or “anyone who needs access to a warm, safe place,” Howard said. The warming centers are accessible at any of the city’s six community service centers when temperatures are at 32 degrees or below from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday. The Garfield Community Center in East Garfield Park is the only warming area open continuously, Howard said.
Howard said other major pieces to tackling homelessness during the winter and pandemic are creating pathways to stable or long-term housing, constant outreach to the homeless population, which includes distributing hats, gloves, hand warmers and more, and making sure to provide protective gear and other necessary supplies to shelters.
Through the city’s expedited housing initiative, some 1,300 individuals and families have left the streets or the shelter system and gone into housing over the past year, Howard said. These efforts are continuing in 2022, with hundreds more households being helped in the next couple of months.
“The best way we can help shelter capacity is creating a robust way out of shelter housing,” Howard said. “That is our focus and that is the key strategy in our pandemic and cold weather response. Having 1,300 households move from shelter beds into homes helps us open up more space for more people in the shelters.”
Though Pacific Garden Mission isn’t an official partner of the city’s homeless services division and isn’t included in the 75% of shelter beds funded by the city, Howard said the two do work closely together. The shelter on the Near West Side was housing 500 to 700 people every day under normal operations before the pandemic, Childers of Pacific Garden Mission said. Capacity is down to about 400 due to social distancing needs, he said.
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Franciscan Outreach, an organization with three shelter locations under its umbrella, has also put in place mitigation measures for its staff and guests and encourages all guests to get vaccinated. The largest of the three locations is in North Lawndale and currently has a capacity of 200. The Pilsen location can hold 40 guests, while the East Garfield Park location can house 70. Executive Director Ducatenzeiler said all locations were currently at or close to capacity.
Ducatenzeiler said the organization hoped to add 25 to 30 beds at the North Lawndale location over the next couple of weeks.
Childers of Pacific Garden Mission said the shelter has had to turn away no more than 10 to 20 people at the most due to using other spaces around the shelter’s 35,000 square-foot facility for emergency housing. The building has a couple of extra dormitories and also common areas that aren’t used overnight where they are able to put mats down and allow people refuge from the elements. The shelter is able to accommodate an extra 75 people under these circumstances.
Those people then have to leave the building when the shelter’s general population is getting ready to come back for the day to use the common areas, but Childers said everyone is connected with partner organizations to either find other temporary accommodations or more long-term or stable housing.
“We don’t see it as a burden really, more as a calling,” Childers said. “It does us good to be able to help as many people as we can in any way that we can.”