Community leaders who plan to put out a strategic plan this spring for eliminating homelessness in the Springfield area hope to avoid previous failures stemming from neighbors who may want more services for this much-maligned segment of society, but not in their backyards.
“We support a comprehensive plan to address homelessness, as long as the community is rallied behind it,” Becky Gabany said on behalf of Memorial Health, the Springfield-based health care system where she is system director of community health.
Gabany serves on a steering committee within Springfield’s Heartland Continuum of Care that began work in 2019 to come up with a strategic plan to address homelessness in the city and the rest of Sangamon County.
The committee is looking into an issue that has perplexed policymakers in the area for decades and last was addressed in a long-term way by the late Springfield Mayor Tim Davlin in 2004 with a 10-year plan to end homelessness.
A report will be released to the public in the next few months, and more public meetings will follow to gather support for what is proposed, according to Josh Sabo, coordinator of the Continuum of Care.
Work on a new plan began about the same time as, and partially because of, the failure in late 2019 of Helping Hands of Springfield’s proposal to develop a $3 million Center for Health & Housing in a vacant building at 521 S. 11th St., Gabany said.
The center would have expanded the city’s temporary emergency shelter capacity and offered on-site behavioral health services, a drug detoxification area and office space for employees working to develop more permanent supportive housing for homeless people in the area.
The 11th Street site received Springfield City Council approval for rezoning, but the project ultimately fell apart amid opposition from residents of nearby neighborhoods and a threatened lawsuit by the Springfield chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
In addition, Mayor Jim Langfelder raised questions about the proposal after the zoning vote even though the city’s Office of Planning and Economic Development, which the mayor controls, played a role in assisting Helping Hands in choosing the 11th Street location.
Memorial Health, citing a lack of community consensus, withdrew its financial and other support for the site.
Three other efforts to expand and improve services for the homeless in the area since 2006 – in downtown Springfield, on the east side and on the north end near Oak Ridge Cemetery – also failed to proceed, in part because of concerns known as “not in my back yard.”
Sabo said the Center for Health & Housing would have addressed many issues facing the homeless.
Options now being considered for long-term solutions include “an expansion of permanent supportive housing and other supportive housing programs, increased resources devoted to preventing homelessness and helping people to remain in housing, and new processes for coordinating mental and behavioral health services with housing programs,” Sabo said.
The new strategic plan, he said, will help the community reach consensus on various approaches for ending homelessness locally and broaden the current response beyond emergency homeless shelters.
“The last thing we want is a 30-page document that floats around the community, and nothing changes,” Sabo said. “Without a doubt, our community needs to expand what’s available.”
The strategic plan is being put together with $160,000 from Springfield and Sangamon County government, Memorial Health, HSHS St. John’s Hospital, Southern Illinois University School of Medicine, Springfield Housing Authority, United Way of Central Illinois and the Community Foundation for the Land of Lincoln.
The Continuum of Care hired San Francisco-based Homebase, a nonprofit that works with communities nationwide on homeless issues, and the local LathanHarris consulting firm to guide the process.
According to Homebase’s summary of statistics on homelessness, the latest “point-in-time” count required by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development showed 294 homeless people in Sangamon County in 2020.
Of the total, which is considered a conservative estimate of the real number of homeless in the community, 251 were sheltered, or had a roof over their heads, and 43 were unsheltered.
The overall total compared with 284 in 2019 and 271 in 2018. The totals don’t include estimates of people who are “couch surfing or otherwise at risk of homelessness,” according to a data summary by Homebase.
Black people make up 13% of the population of Sangamon County and 20% in Springfield, while whites make up almost 77% of the county’s population and 68% of the city’s population. Hispanics make up about 3% of the population of both Springfield and Sangamon County as a whole.
Among Sangamon County’s homeless, 42% are Black, 51% are white, and 2% are Hispanic, according to HUD statistics.
It’s unknown whether the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in more local homelessness related to a pandemic-related loss of jobs, Sabo said.
“We know more people received homelessness-prevention services like rental and utility assistance,” he said. “We also know that new rapid-rehousing programs and programs like the Emergency Housing Voucher program with the Springfield Housing Authority have helped more people enter into supportive housing since the start of the pandemic.”
The steering committee has held several virtual and in-person public meetings and received information and opinions from focus groups. Gabany said the committee has tried to “bring diverse voices” to the process, even if diversity brings disagreement.
Marcus Johnson, chief executive officer of the Springfield Urban League since July and a member of the committee, said, “Our goal as a planning committee is to make sure all the voices are heard before moving forward in any direction.”
Teresa Haley, president of the Springfield and statewide NAACP, said her group hasn’t been involved in the strategic plan formulation in recent months, but Gina Lathan, chief executive officer of LathanHarris, said the NAACP will be contacted.
Haley said the local NAACP remains steadfast in its opposition to more homeless shelters and other human-service agencies and services locating on the east side of Springfield.
Locations for shelter and long-term housing for homeless people “should be spread throughout the city” to make the homeless “blend in with the community,” she said. “We are trying to grow the east side. We don’t want anything to depress our property values.”
Sabo said Springfield has had “an over-reliance on shelters. … Addressing homelessness is really a systems issue. It’s not about any one location.”
And yet, he said enhanced services need to be based somewhere, and so the strategic plan will include education for members of the community on the challenges that homeless people face and how reducing homelessness can help everyone in the community.
Lathan said one way to address equity issues in any homeless strategy is to make sure people with diverse backgrounds are involved “at the front end” of any plan, rather than them being surprised by it.
“We want to ensure equity to make sure one community is not overburdened and that this is truly a community-led endeavor,” she said.
Dean Olsen is a senior staff writer at Illinois Times. He can be reached at
dolsen@illinoistimes.com and 217-679-7810.
This article appears in Meet us at Southtown.
