301 Winter 07 - Marshall

By Andy DeKeuster, Andre Francisco and Emily Vaughan

For two weeks winter temperatures in Chicago hovered around zero degrees and icy winds off Lake Michigan burned any exposed skin. Most Americans couldn't imagine surviving such weather without central heat. Even fewer could survive without the protection of four walls and a roof.

However, walking the streets in sub-zero temperatures with no place to go is the daily reality of more than 73,000 Chicagoans according to the Chicago Coalition for the Homeless, many of whom live in Uptown. In 1979 a man froze to death on the streets of Uptown, sparking the formation of Residents for Emergency Shelter (R.E.S.T). Its primary goal was to stop such incidents with emergency warming shelters where anyone could come off the frigid streets to find a cot for the night in a church basement.

These temporary fixes are no longer cutting it. In 2003, Chicago embarked on an ambitious proposal: the Ten-Year Plan to End Homelessness run through the Chicago Continuum of Care. Their motto, "Getting housed, Staying housed," is at the heart of the program. The Ten-Year Plan aims to replace overnight emergency shelter with long-term supportive housing that not only gives people a warm place to stay, but gives them skills and support they need to move off the streets for good.

A Scaled Down Chicago

Uptown is a microcosm of this citywide trend. The neighborhood is home to 197 health care and social service organizations, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. These organizations work to provide services for homeless people in all stages. Homeless men and women can drop in R.E.S.T's (now called Residents for Effective Shelter Transitions) emergency warming centers, or walk a few blocks west and find interim housing for their families at Cornerstone Community Outreach. Eventually, these and other services work together to find people a place of their own to call home.

"There's a big movement now to create more permanent supportive housing," said John Pfeiffer, a member of the Continuum of Care Policy Council, and CEO of Inspiration Corporation, an organization dedicated to creating housing opportunities. "It's small apartments, efficiency apartments with lots of services brought to the person in the apartment. There's almost no chance for someone to fail because there are all kinds of service interventions."

The plan for transitioning the shelters from providing temporary services to providing more long-term support revolves around three main points: prevention, housing, and wraparound social services once people are housed to prevent them from returning to the street. Wraparound services are varied but can include health care, job assistance or substance abuse counseling among other programs. Nearly all the shelters have made this initial shift in programming.

"Permanent housing is just a much smarter way to address the problem," Pfeiffer said. "Homelessness is really a lack of housing and shelter is not a replacement for housing."

Not Enough

"You go in [to a warming center] and there are 100 people sitting around," said James Giles, 66, a resident at Cornerstone Community Outreach. "It's like an internment camp...Having a bed and somewhere warm doesn't do it all the time...There are times I'd rather ride the el."

Emergency warming shelters help stop people from freezing to death, but not from staying off the streets. Organizations like Inspiration Corporation try to create a community atmosphere, contrasting what CEO John Pfeiffer calls the "desensitizing and dehumanizing" experience of some emergency shelters and soup kitchens. Pfeiffer credits the intimate cafe community as a major factor in helping move people from the streets to their own apartment.

"[Living in permanent housing] is a lot less destabilizing than the experience of going into a shelter, where your bed is in a different place every night, where there are a lot of people around you," Pfeiffer said. "It's a loss of privacy."

Permanent housing is the core of the new approach to ending homelessness, but affordable housing is hard to come by in Chicago. Many organizations, including Cornerstone, are outsourcing their clients to other cities including Galesburg, Ill., Elizabethtown, Ill., and Elkhart, Ind. Elkhart lies 110 miles east of Chicago and its opportunities for manufacturing jobs in saxophone construction, pharmaceuticals, electronic components and recreational vehicles make it an ideal place for low-income families to live.

One family left Cornerstone for Elkhart in November of 2005. They had been on the waiting list for Section Eight, a federal housing assistance program, for 12 years, but through Elkhart public housing received a five-bedroom home in less than a year according to Volunteer Coordinator Lyda Jackson.

"About two weeks before they moved, they got a letter from the Section Eight people saying 'Hey, just wanted you to know we haven't forgotten about you. You're number whatever-thousand-and-whatever on our list and we should be getting to your application in the next 36-48 months," Jackson said.

These permanent housing options may be drying up as these small towns reach the capacity of their public services. Many are displeased that Chicago is using their communities as an outlet for the city's lack of affordable and subsidized housing.

"They have a debilitating effect on a community," Mayor David Miller of Elkhart said. "Those folks who can afford to keep their house up...say 'I don't want to live around this. I'm going to go choose somewhere else.'"

A Model for Change

Inspiration Corporation makes a conscious effort to keep its residents close to headquarters in Uptown. Its focus on housing makes Inspiration an exemplary organization for the Ten-Year Plan. Its first goal is to get people into their own apartment. Throughout the process, clients can access its comprehensive service programs including intensive case management, a meal program, health care and employment services. Inspiration's job training program is the model for social services in a city short on employment programs for the homeless. Inspiration is one of only four employment programs in Chicago according to Pfeiffer.

The Inspiration Cafe offers a 13-week culinary program, according to its Web site. The program offers job training including basic culinary skills, sanitation, safety and restaurant service. Each graduate of the program is qualified for a food-service sanitation and safety license. Students also gain valuable experience by working for nine weeks in Cafe Too, Inspiration Cafe's fully functioning public restaurant. Inspiration's program is a model because it acclimates participants to the customs of having a job while giving them tangible skills in the form of a certificate.

"That's our great strength," Pfeiffer said. "That's where we devote the bulk of our program dollars: to employment services. We think that [is] the greatest chance of helping someone rise to a higher level of skill and employability and ultimately fulfillment. If you give someone that opportunity to build their skills, go back to school, they're much more likely to remain self-sufficient."

Inspiration's employment programs are widely used by other organizations in the neighborhood like Cornerstone Community Outreach and R.E.S.T. Limited funding requires all homeless shelters to rely on support from each other to provide the most comprehensive services for the homeless.

"Together we're able to do more for the clients than we would be able to do individually," Pfeiffer said. "There's not enough money to do all this work so you have to be creative and partner with other agencies to create 2+2=5 to create more than your limited resources can allow."

Following the trend

The push for permanent housing has sparked changes in some of the older shelters in the neighborhood. Cornerstone, run by the evangelical Christian group Jesus People, USA, originally developed as a response to the homelessness problem they saw when they moved into the neighborhood in 1978. Homeless mothers and children would show up on the doorstep of their building on Wilson, Friendly Towers. Jesus People originally provided overnight shelter in their dining room. Soon, their lobby was routinely filled with homeless guests on cold nights.

"Sometimes there we so many you couldn't even lay down," Volunteer Coordinator Lyda Jackson said. "But what was the alternative? Say 'You can't come in? Go freeze out in the sub-zero temperatures?'"

Over the past 18 years Cornerstone has continued to adjust and expand its program as new needs arose. It now provides facilities for single women, intact families and teenage boys in addition to its first focus, single moms with children. It has further altered its program to comply with the Ten-Year Plan by converting one facility into permanent housing. Leland House was an interim housing building where residents could stay for up to two years. Now the 18-unit building permanently houses families with a history of HIV or mental illness.

"They [don't] have to worry that two years down the road they would have to go out on their own ," Jackson said. "But they are still followed by caseworkers and case managers and they get subsidized rent."

R.E.S.T. has also transformed from emergency shelter to a multi-faceted program addressing the issue from all angles. Its men's and women's warming centers are still open, but it has added a four-month interim housing and 18-month service support to obtain permanent housing in compliance with the Ten-Year Plan. Case managers work individually with clients and outline a course of action.

"We listen to what people need," Development Director Ellen Kilmurry said. "Then you figure out how to supply it. That's really a huge piece. Considering these people haven't been listened to in years, that's the first step to building dignity and self respect."

Kilmurry estimates that about 2,000 people go through R.E.S.T every year, but that many of these people are just using the emergency shelters. She surmises that the number will decrease in coming years as more people enter into the interim housing. They currently support 133 people in permanent housing.

"We hope 10 to 15 percent, that's 30 people, stay successfully housed for 18 months," Kilmurry said.

Making Strides

The Ten-Year Plan is in its fourth year and the organizations partnered with it, such as Cornerstone and R.E.S.T., have generally responded to the city's call for reform. But great obstacles in eliminating homelessness, even just in Uptown, still exist. John Pfeiffer thinks the plan is making broad progress, but he says the goals can only be met in the outlined time frame if funding increases by 25 percent. Still a majority of the 140 programs associated with the 10-Year Plan have adopted its strategies and program models.

Inspiration Corporation has fully incorporated The Ten-Year Plan's recommendations. At the Cafe, the TV is always turned up too loud, but it still gets deafened by the el every 10 minutes. Children and old adults wait at the brilliantly painted tables with murals of flying muffins against fertile landscapes covering the walls. The atmosphere is comfortable but busy with people working to better themselves.

Inspiration's intensive program focuses on the individual. While its atmosphere is designed to build community, the most intimate aspects of the process are between the guest and the case manager. The cafe is very careful to protect the privacy and identities of its clients.

"The heart and soul of it," Pfeiffer said, "is the concept of dignity and respect."