Homeless tent camp stirs neighbors’ vitriol on Northwest Side

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

After a rapid increase in the number of tents sheltering homeless people this summer, Foster says her 14-year-old daughter and 12-year-old son are steering clear of Gompers Park, a 42-acre sanctuary at Foster Avenue and Pulaski Road.

The park was a favorite spot for Foster’s family, and the children would dip their feet in a fountain that flowed into a nearby lagoon. That fountain was shut off after residents complained that unhoused people were using it to bathe and wash dishes.

Like many of her neighbors, Foster wants to know why Mayor Brandon Johnson isn’t moving to address the 25-plus tents at Gompers after clearing out other sites across the city and spending more than $800,000 on a fence to keep people out of a site south of downtown where a high-profile tent city once existed.

The cost to address Gompers “isn’t as much as he spent on a fence,” Foster says.

As much as neighbors complain, Johnson is so far not budging. His administration says there’s no money left for Gompers after spending $70 million in federal dollars for homelessness since 2020. There will be no accelerated move from the Northwest Side park this year, the city said in a statement. City officials and nonprofit groups will continue to monitor the situation, the statement added.

On Monday, Sendy Soto, Johnson’s top official in charge of addressing homelessness, will attend a community meeting next to the park to face a crowd of neighbors fuming about the homeless camp. They complain about drinking and drug use, open fires and erratic behavior.

Earlier this year, city officials told the Sun-Times there was one tent in the park last spring and seven unhoused people. Residents say there have been varying numbers of tents over two years. Two encampments — one close to Pulaski and another near Foster — continued to grow this year.

Neighbors say the homeless campers refuse to move, and the city should use a tactic known as an “accelerated moving event” to give the park’s inhabitants no choice but to leave.

The same process was used this summer, first when 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, in line for more permanent housing. Then city officials made the same offer at another large tent city in Humboldt Park, according to its alderperson.

The city’s uneven tactics

The approach to helping unhoused people in Chicago has been uneven this year.

In addition to clearing out a highly visible campahead of the Democratic National Convention, the city closed a popular shelter in a former hotel earlier this month. A hotline for shelter abruptly shut down for most of the summer and only restarted recently on a part-time basis. A number of City Council members are currently pressing the mayor to improve plans for unhoused people during extreme weather.

Earlier this year, Johnson was not able to garner enough support from voters for a referendum, Bring Chicago Home, that would have used the real estate transfer tax on high-end properties to generate more money to tackle homelessness.

City officials acknowledged that they stepped up individual counseling recently at Gompers because of drug use and are visiting the camps every other week. A syringe was laying on the ground near the wetlands portion of the park during a recent walk.

Park campers welcome help

On a recent Wednesday morning, the people living in the park included a mix of day laborers awaiting jobs and others bailing out their tents following recent rains.

Brian Bayawa, 51, who is living in the park, is a longtime caregiver to elderly patients. He became homeless about six months after a client died and temporary work dried up.

After briefly staking out another city park, he says he settled at Gompers.

Bayawa’s not sure of his next move but he says he welcomes help to find subsidized housing and a way to get back to work.

Likewise, Oscar, 50, says he would welcome a conversation about housing assistance after living on the streets for almost five years. Oscar, who asked to be identified by his first name, is a handyman who lives apart from the two tent encampments.

A 33-year-old man who identified himself as Ivan says in Spanish that he would like to talk to officials about getting a housing placement.

The complexities of each individual case often make finding permanent housing difficult.

Officials are pressing the city to act

Ald. Samantha Nugent (39th) says she hears the many residents’ concerns and has asked City Hall for help at Gompers.

She’s been joined by four Democratic state legislators, including state Rep. Mike Kelly, who also sent a letter to Johnson this week.

The accelerated moving process, which involves working with each individual to find shelter, “would be the most appropriate way to do this,” Nugent says.

Earlier this summer, one such event got 16 of 17 people living along the North Branch of the Chicago River around Foster into shelter, Kelly says.

“We think it's the most successful path to getting people off the streets and getting them the help they need,” says Kelly, whose Northwest Side district contains Gompers Park.

“That's the biggest part. If people are just removed, the services can't find the people who need the help,” he says.

Nugent says she believes most encampment residents are resisting leaving.

As for city officials, “I’m frustrated with them,” Nugent says. “We’re told they’re not able to do this at this time.”

That doesn’t sit well with Gail Beitz, who has lived near the park for 46 years and speaks for the Restore Gompers Park Coalition.

Open fires, drinking and drug use are illegal and should be cracked down on, Beitz says. Her organization, which counts more than 300 members among a Facebook group, has been putting heavy pressure on Nugent in recent months.

“We pushed her and we pressed her,” Beitz says. “They need to enforce the rules and regulations in the park.”

Neighbors also point to an Aug. 6 armed robbery of a 21-year woman in the park and other alleged crimes as reasons to clear the encampment. But it wasn’t clear if the two men the victim described to police as her assailants are part of the tent city, and no one has been arrested.

The Chicago Police Department declined to comment on crime at the park this summer, saying they required a public information request.

Beitz and others also allege that crime has increased in the surrounding area.

Source of crime is unclear

It’s difficult to track and measure if crime is tied to encampments because often those locations aren’t tracked, and the smaller ones are intentionally meant to be invisible, says Jamie Chang, associate professor of social welfare at the University of California Berkeley.

Still, it’s a common perception that an encampment will increase crime in a neighborhood because of the assumption that its inhabitants have criminal records, says Deyanira Nevarez Martinez, an assistant professor of urban and regional planning at Michigan State University. But people overlook that if someone has a criminal record, some of those crimes could be tied to living in poverty, she says.

The stigma that still exists around homelessness also plays a role in how communities have tried to solve this issue, Chang says.

“That sort of othering and that stigma that exists between people who are unhoused and housed is such a chasm, and that is one of the root causes of this homelessness crisis,” Chang says.

Since this summer’s Supreme Court ruling upholding bans on sleeping outdoors, more cities across the country — including in Illinois — are passing local laws to criminalize encampments, Nevarez Martinez says. Rosemont passed an ordinance in August banning people from sleeping outside, the Daily Herald reported.

Many areas having issues with homelessness have also been resistant to new development needed to curb the housing crisis happening across the country, she says.

“We can’t have it both ways,” Nevarez Martinez says. “We are either going to have the affordable housing, the multifamily housing and shelters so that our unhoused neighbors can be indoors or we’re going to have the situation that we currently have, which is people living outside. We really, as a society, need to come to terms with that and really ramp up our development and our services for our unhoused neighbors.”

People living in encampments should be moved to permanent supportive housing where they will have a place to live while also receiving services like case management, rent management and help around mental health services, Chang says. “Sweeping people without meaningful pathways to stable housing really does do a lot of harm to this community.”

The clearing of encampments can also be costly for municipalities, she says. “I think that there’s an argument to be made that those funds should be spent and can be spent in different ways."