With unemployment, foreclosures, and evictions all on the rise, social service providers warned months ago that ignoring homelessness, hunger, and other social service needs in Illinois wouldn’t make the problems go away.
Just as the cold weather sets in, demand for help among the state’s neediest is predictably surging—even in some unlikely places. Demand at suburban and rural shelters and food banks is reportedly spiking, growing between 50-90 percent is some suburban Cook County locations as compared with last year.
Sadly, those startling figures haven’t prompted state officials to develop a crisis intervention plan yet. And it looks like the worst is yet to come. From today’s Daily Herald:
The nation’s recent economic struggles likely play a role in the increasing business at local shelters, the true impact of those crises hasn’t been felt yet, said Dennis Hewitt, executive director of PADS of Elgin, which operates a single year-round shelter in that city for residents of Dundee, Elgin and Hanover townships.
Most people who lose their homes first rely on friends or family for shelter, Hewitt said. Then people turn to churches and social-service groups to help them get by temporarily.
When those wells run dry, Hewitt said, people turn to PADS.
“Once they come to us, they will have exhausted every other resource,” he said. “And I think in this economy, they are out there.”
Even before the hidden demand emerges, shelters are already running short on space. In some suburban-Chicago communities, folks were turned away last month. And in the city, over-crowded shelters showed 1,139 people to the door during one October week alone, according to a survey conducted by the Chicago Department of Human Services.
It’s not just private groups that are struggling. In Central Illinois, public agencies have also become increasingly desperate; United Way executive Rhonda McCowen told the Mt. Vernon Register-News that “it’s an issue that many don’t realize is going on,” adding she had received calls from emergency rooms because “there’s nowhere else to go.”
In the absence of a statewide, regional, or Chicago plan (the Greater Chicago Food Depository offered a list of policy solutions here), nonprofit agencies can only pick up so much slack, Chicago Coalition for the Homeless policy director Julie Dworkin tells us. The reality is that Chicago shelters are coping with reduced federal funding, including a 10 percent across-the-board cut from the department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). State homeless and human services grants have remained flat or been reduced, too. To make matters worse, a $4 billion backlog on state reimbursement checks has some agencies wondering if they’ll be able to keep their doors open through the winter.
“What they’re going to do, I don’t know,” says Dworkin.”There is concern … The budget situation is so bad right now, I don’t know where the money is going to come from.”
Image used under a Creative Commons license by Flickr user danny.hammontree.
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