Nicole Foster says her children can no longer go to a Northwest Side park because she fears for their safety.

After a surge in tents sheltering homeless people there this summer, Foster says her 14-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son are staying away from Gompers Park, a 42-acre sanctuary at Foster Avenue and Pulaski Road.

The park was a favorite place for the Foster family. The children enjoyed dipping their feet in the fountain flowing into the nearby lagoon. However, the fountain was closed after local residents complained that homeless people were using it for bathing and washing dishes.

Like many of her neighbors, Foster wants Mayor Brandon Johnson to do something about the more than 25 tents in Gompers. Eventually, they point out, the city cleaned up other homeless camps across the city – even spending more than $800,000 on a fence to keep people out of the area south of downtown where the famous tent camp was located.

The costs of contacting Gompers “are not as high as the costs of a fence,” Foster says.

But the Johnson administration says there is no more money for Gompers because the city has spent $70 million in federal money fighting homelessness since 2020. The city says there will be no pressure to move people out of the Northwest Side park this year, only continued monitoring.

On Monday, Sendy Soto, Johnson’s top anti-homelessness official, plans to go to a community meeting near the park to meet with neighbors unhappy with the homeless camp, which they say was a place for drinking and drug use and open flames and erratic behavior. behavior.

City officials say they have recently stepped up individual counseling at Gompers for drug use and are visiting the camps every two weeks.

City officials reported earlier this year that there was one tent in the park last spring and seven people had no housing. Neighbors say the number of tents has varied over the past two years and that two encampments have expanded this year – one near Pulaski and the other near Foster.

Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times

Neighbors say homeless campers don’t want to move. They want the city to use a tactic called “expedited removal” so that park residents have no choice but to leave.

The same procedure was used this summer, when for the first time a tent city full of homeless people was moved from the North Branch of the Chicago River between Foster and Bryn Mawr avenues into apartments or temporary shelters, putting them in line for more permanent housing. City officials then made the same offer in another large tent city in Humboldt Park.

This year, the city’s approach to helping homeless people was varied.

In addition to clearing a highly visible camp outside the Democratic National Convention, the city closed a shelter in a former hotel earlier this month. The shelter hotline was abruptly shut down for most of the summer and only recently reopened on a part-time basis. Many Chicago City Council members pressed the mayor to improve plans for unhoused people during extreme weather.

Earlier this year, Johnson couldn’t find enough voter support for a referendum called Bring Chicago Home, in which a tax on high-end real estate transfers would be used to increase funding to fight homelessness.

On a recent morning, the park was home to both workers hoping to find work and others saving their tents after recent rains.

Brian Bayawa, 51, who is one of the people staying at the park, says he has been caring for elderly patients for a long time and became homeless about six months after the client died and the temporary observation center closed. After briefly observing another city park, he says he settled on Gompers.

Bayawa isn’t sure what comes next, but he welcomes help finding subsidized housing and getting back to work.

Likewise, a man who asked only to be identified by his first name, Oscar, says he would welcome the opportunity to get housing assistance after nearly five years of living on the streets. Oskar, 50, says he is a handyman and lives out of two tent camps.

A 33-year-old man who identified himself as Ivan says in Spanish that he needs help from the city authorities with accommodation.

Nugent, lawmakers urge action

Ald. Samantha Nugent (39th) says she reached out to City Hall for help in Gompers. She was joined by four Democratic lawmakers, including state Rep. Mike Kelly, who sent a letter to Johnson.

An expedited relocation process that includes working with each person to find alternative shelter “would be the most appropriate way to achieve this goal,” Nugent says.

Earlier this summer, Kelly says, a similar move sheltered 16 of 17 people living along the North Branch of the Chicago River near Foster.

“We think this is the most effective way to get people off the streets and get them the help they need,” says Kelly, whose Northwest Side neighborhood includes Gompers Park.

“That’s the most important part,” he says. “If people are simply removed, services will not be able to find those who need help.”

But Nugent says most of the camp’s residents don’t want to leave.

As for city officials, “I’m frustrated with them,” Nugent says. “We were told they were unable to do so at this time.”

This doesn’t sit well with Gail Beitz, who has lived near the park for 46 years and is part of a group calling itself the Restore Gompers Park Coalition. Beitz says open fires, drinking and drug use should be eliminated. Her organization, which claims to have more than 300 members in the Facebook group, is putting heavy pressure on Nugent.

“We pushed her and pushed her,” Beitz says. “They have to enforce the rules and regulations of the park.”

Tyler Pasciak LaRiviere/Sun-Times

Neighbors point to an Aug. 6 armed robbery of a 21-year-old woman in the park and other crimes as reasons to clear the encampment, although it is unclear whether the two men the woman described to police as her attackers are part of the tent city and no one was arrested.

The Chicago Police Department declined to comment on the case.

Beitz and others say crime is also on the rise in the area.

There have been moves to ban encampments

According to Jamie Chang, an associate professor of social work at the University of California, Berkeley, it is difficult to track and measure whether crime is linked to nearby homeless encampments. because often these locations are not tracked and smaller ones are intentionally made invisible.

Still, it’s widely believed that the encampment will lead to more crime nearby because people often assume that people living there have criminal histories, says Deyanira Nevarez Martinez, an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at Michigan State University. But even if this is true, some of these crimes can be linked to a life of poverty, he says.

Chang says the stigma surrounding homelessness also plays a role in communities’ attempts to address the issue.

“The kind of difference and stigma that exists between homeless people and housed people is a huge gap, and it’s one of the main causes of the homelessness crisis,” Chang says.

Nevarez Martinez says since the Supreme Court’s ruling this summer upholding the outdoor sleeping ban, more cities in Illinois and elsewhere have enacted measures to criminalize encampments. In August, Rosemont passed an ordinance prohibiting people from sleeping outdoors.

According to Nevarez Martinez, many areas affected by homelessness are resistant to the new investments needed to curb the housing crisis across the country.

“We can’t have it both ways,” says Nevarez Martinez. “Either we will have affordable housing, multi-family housing and shelters so that our unhoused neighbors can stay in their homes, or we will have the situation we have now, which is people living outside. We really, as a society, need to come to terms with this and really accelerate our development and services for our unhoused neighbors.”

Chang says people living in homeless encampments need to move into permanent, supportive housing where they have a place to live while also getting help with rent, mental health needs and other services.

“Sweeping away people without meaningful pathways to stable housing really does a lot of harm to this community,” Chang says.

Cleaning up encampments can be costly for municipalities, he says: “I think there’s an argument to be made that these funds should be spent and that they could be spent in a variety of ways.”