A proposed ordinance intended to help police get rid of homeless encampments on public land would declare them illegal and make violators subject to as much as $750 in fines and two years in jail.
The proposal, scheduled for emergency passage by the Springfield City Council at its 5:30 p.m. meeting on Sept. 3, has attracted scorn on social media and pleas for the City Council to put off a decision so there can be a broader discussion on the plan.
“I am convinced that criminalizing homelessness doesn’t solve it,” Josh Sabo, executive director of Heartland HOUSED, told Illinois Times. “We need to move forward very carefully so we don’t make the problem worse instead of better.”
Sabo, who works with the Springfield-based Heartland Continuum of Care to address the needs of the unhoused in Sangamon County, said advocates for the homeless were surprised to learn Sept. 1 about the ordinance proposed by Mayor Misty Buscher and Ward 5 Ald. Lakeisha Purchase. Advocates also were surprised that the proposal was being considered for emergency, or fast-tracked, passage.
Purchase declined to answer questions about the ordinance until after the Sept. 3 meeting, and city spokesperson Haley Wilson said Buscher and Police Chief Kenneth Scarlette didn’t have time to speak with Illinois Times before the meeting.
Sabo said the ordinance is similar to local ordinances that are being adopted in municipalities around Illinois and throughout the country in the wake of a June ruling by the U.S Supreme Court.
The Journal Star of Peoria reported that the Tazewell County communities of Pekin and Morton already have adopted such an ordinance as an incentive for unhoused people to accept social services that can help them get into affordable and safe housing.
Peoria’s city council on Aug. 13 conducted a six-hour meeting to debate the topic but made no decision. City officials still are considering an ordinance prohibiting camping on public land as a tool that officials said could be used to nudge unhoused people to get economic, medical and mental health assistance, and eventually stable housing.
However, the National Alliance to End Homelessness condemned the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in the case of City of Grants Pass, Oregon v. Johnson. The alliance said in a news release that the ruling allows localities to “arrest, ticket and fine people for sleeping outdoors on public property, even if leaders have failed to produce enough affordable housing or shelter for everyone in the community who needs it.”
The alliance said the ruling “will do nothing to address the primary cause of homelessness in the United States: a severe, prolonged, nationwide shortage of affordable housing.”
Ann Oliva, chief executive officer of the alliance, said, “This decision sets a dangerous precedent that will cause undue harm to people experiencing homelessness and give free reign to local officials who prefer pointless and expensive arrests and imprisonment rather than real solutions.”
A news release from Heartland HOUSED said the Springfield & Sangamon County 2022-2028 Strategic Plan to Address Homelessness was completed in late 2022 “and is our first comprehensive, communitywide framework to work toward functionally ending homelessness. Much work remains to create a community where the experience of homelessness is rare, brief and non-recurring, but the collaborative efforts we have seen between organizations and government partners has been a promising sign.”
About 1,200 homeless people receive services in Sangamon County each year, Sabo said. That number dropped to about 700 during the COVID-19 pandemic as social-service agencies received a pandemic-related boosting in funding for services and the state enacted a ban on evictions, he said.
The number has returned to pre-pandemic levels, Sabo said.
At any point in time, about 390 people are homeless in Springfield and the rest of Sangamon County, Sabo said. That number refers to people in shelters or outdoors in unsheltered settings.
The Heartland HOUSED news release said the proposed Springfield ordinance “deserves careful community consideration and community dialogue, not emergency passage in the midst of a holiday weekend. The ordinance raises a long list of questions that must be answered.”
Sabo said he wondered how the ordinance would expand powers that police already have. And he said he worried that any fines or jail time that violators would receive would only create more barriers to them stabilizing their lives and getting into safe housing.
Several homeless people camped out in the public right-of-way on the east side of North Fifth Street, just south of North Grand Avenue in Springfield, said they don’t want to be forced to leave.
Heather “Megan” Cochrane, 48, said she is working with a social-service agency to get into stable housing, “but it’s not happening fast enough.”
She said she doesn’t want to go to the Helping Hands shelter near South Dirksen Parkway because it’s too far from St. John’s Breadline at 430 N. Fifth St., where she likes to eat. She said she likes to be outside.
“Here you can be free,” Cochrane said.
Maceo Euells, 42, said volunteers sometimes bring food for him and the other unhoused people in the group, and most people don’t bother them.
“It’s a free country,” he said, adding that he is waiting on documentation – including a birth certificate and Social Security card – that can help him get a slot in public housing.
Tommy Keller, 63, said he, too, is working with an agency to get into housing.
Keller, who said he has been homeless almost five years, said he hopes he isn’t forced to move.
“I’m crippled,” he said. “I can walk, but not very far.”
Looking at a handful of other unhoused adults at the campsite, he said: “These are my friends. I love it here.”
Erica Thomas, 46, a self-employed graphic designer, said she has been living out of her car since March 7 and has been interviewing homeless people at the North Grand site for a journalism project.
She called the proposed ordinance “appalling.”
“It is absolutely criminalizing homelessness by calling it public camping,” she said.
Dean Olsen is a senior staff writer for Illinois Times. He can be reached at dolsen@illinoistimes.com, 217-679-7810 or x.com/DeanOlsenIT.
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This article appears in “A message of freedom and joy”.
