At the eighth annual Mayor’s Prayer Breakfast, held on a dreary, rainy Tuesday morning at the Crowne Plaza hotel on Dirksen Parkway, Mayor Tim Davlin joked about people arriving in “canoes” and “pontoons.” He could have mentioned another boat, counting the number of SUVs in the parking lot. Minutes earlier, a Catholic priest waiting to enter the hotel ballroom recalled that it snowed during last year’s prayer breakfast. Considering that the topic of this year’s keynote address was homelessness, the comment was appropriately both somber and slightly optimistic.
Not that Davlin isn’t taking homelessness seriously.
The previous night, the mayor announced a campaign to eliminate chronic homelessness
in the city by 2013. Davlin follows mayors across the country who are making
similar proclamations, joining President Bush who pledged late last year to
end homelessness in ten years. “It’s a laudable effort,” said one executive
director of a local mission. “But I’m skeptical.”
Davlin’s announcement came at the beginning of National Hunger and Homelessness
Awareness Week. The mayor’s Task Force on Homelessness hosted a reception Monday
at the Old State Capitol for Philip Mangano, director of the U.S. Interagency
Council on Homelessness, who gave the keynote address on Tuesday at the prayer
breakfast. At both events, Mangano compared homelessness in America to slavery;
both are moral evils that require absolute intolerance. He urged that “God should
disturb our peace” until Springfield and the nation take homelessness seriously.
More than 700 attended the breakfast, the proceeds from which will be donated
to the Heartland Continuum of Care, an umbrella group of more than 70 organizations
and government agencies that assist the poor and homeless.
This summer Heartland Continuum volunteers canvassed Springfield to count
the homeless population. Davlin was one of many surprised by the results. The
volunteers counted 405 people living in shelters or sleeping in the streets.
The count was a step toward obtaining a federal grant to fight homelessness.
Rita Tarr, executive director of Contact Ministries and co-chair of Heartland
Continuum, says Heartland probably uncovered only a fraction of the real homeless
population. The group’s aim was to count the chronic homeless — those who have
been homeless for a year or who experience multiple homeless episodes. Many
health and social service professionals also consider those who lack a stable
home as homeless. They move frequently because of constant eviction or poor
living conditions and often stay with friends and relatives for extended periods
of time. When these people are taken into account, Tarr says the actual number
of homeless in Springfield probably is somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000.
Tarr, who has been named as chair of the mayor’s task force, and Faith Sanderson,
Sangamon County Homelessness Education Liaison, led a brown-bag lunch discussion
on homelessness Tuesday afternoon at the University of Illinois at Springfield,
which is holding homelessness-awareness events throughout the week. Sanderson
says she deals with about 200 to 250 homeless students a year in Sangamon County.
There are about 45,000 to 60,000 homeless students statewide, she says. Homeless
students are particularly prone to falling behind. Sanderson says when students
switch schools, they lose an average of four to six months of academic progress.
In Springfield, more than one out of every two public school student comes from
a low-income family and one in four ends the academic year at a different school.
Homelessness in Springfield is partly due to the economy and partly due to
a “deplorable” affordable housing market, Sanderson says. In Springfield, the
salary required to afford the average two-bedroom apartment is $10.60 an hour
— about $4 more per hour than the minimum wage, which Gov. Rod Blagojevich recently
increased in Illinois to $6.40. In larger cities, the required salary for a
comparable unit is about $15.48 an hour.
She says education is the key to ending the homeless cycle, which, for some
families, can be several generations long.
The old model of a shelter that merely acts as a roof over someone’s head
is being replaced by the new model — the shelter that helps the homeless make
the transition from the streets to their own homes. Some shelters in town are
offering job training and college credit to adult residents.
Tarr says it will take about a year for the task force to develop a plan of
action to end chronic homelessness. The group is forming several subcommittees
and has to come up with a working definition of homelessness, she says. No one
is saying it will be easy.
“These are deep problems,” says Ken Mitchell, executive director of Washington
Street Mission, on North Fourth Street. Washington Street Mission doesn’t house
the homeless but provides breakfast to several dozen people every morning, tutors
at-risk children, and provides free-clothing — giving away about 10,000 items
to about 500 people every month. Issues of addiction, mental illness, and unemployment
all require resources that never seem to be adequate, he says.
Although Mitchell says homelessness ultimately “boils down to a matter of
individual choices,” he concedes that “a lot of people would choose differently
if they had different options. Some people are not capable of making good choices.
The choice to change your life is difficult.”
Homeless, hunger events continue
Homelessness- and hunger-related events at the University of Illinois at Springfield
continue through Saturday. Upcoming events include:
Friday, Nov. 21
Mike Teegarden, civil rights activist for the homeless, speaks at the Public
Affairs Center at 7 p.m. in conference rooms C and D.
At the UIS men’s basketball game against Lindenwood, non-students can bring
two cans of non-perishable food for free entry. The game starts at 7 p.m.
Grave of the Fireflies shows at PAC, conference rooms A and B, 9
p.m. The animated film is about two Japanese children made homeless during World
War II after American napalm bombs destroy their village.
Saturday, Nov. 22
UIS faculty, employees, students, and related family members can help clear
two Habitat for Humanity sites in Springfield. Call 217-786-2289 for more details.
This article appears in Nov 20-26, 2003.
