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Onlookers gather on the east side of Seventh Street,
in front of Lincoln Library, waiting for a young bride and her dark-haired
groom to emerge from doors of First Presbyterian Church.
An elderly couple smiles at the newlyweds as if seeing
themselves as they were long ago, and a pair of teenage girls wearing
cardboard tiaras inscribed with the word “Grad” admire the
bride’s gown. Four homeless men also watch, albeit less intently.
They seem more interested in reaching a consensus as to which brand of
chewing tobacco is the best. As soon as the throng of well-wishers showers the
bride and groom with rice and the couple climbs into a carriage drawn by a
team of black horses, the crowd at the library disperses. Everyone, that is, but the homeless guys, who continue
their chaw talk. They have nowhere else to go — this is their
home, at least for now.
The library has just closed on a muggy Saturday
evening. During the day, the building is a refuge — a
warm chair during the winter months and a cool reprieve when the mercury
rises. At night, an overhang protects them from the rain.
Although daylight remains, one man has already begun
hunkering down for the night by preparing his bed, which consists of
several flattened cardboard boxes spread out over the brick outside the
northwest entrance. He’ll need all the rest he can get. As of Tuesday at noon — when volunteers,
officials from the mayor’s office, police and public works
departments filled two pickup truck beds full of belongings — if the
homeless still want to camp out at the library, they’ll have to do it
with significantly less gear. The little encampment, which has included more than
two dozen people at a time, has been a constant reminder of
Springfield’s tattered safety net and a lightning rod for some
critics who’ve wanted to rid downtown of tourist-unfriendly vagrants.
Last week, as a quick fix, the city announced plans to
provide lockers, to give the library’s homeless a place to keep their
possessions. The lockers are fastened inside a portable storage
unit that is parked outside St. John’s Breadline, on North Fifth
Street near
downtown. The city is paying $150 per month to rent the unit, which is
known as a pod.
Including the lockers, which will be moved to the
location of next winter’s overflow shelter, the total cost to
taxpayers is less than $3,000, city officials say. It’s a short-term solution, acknowledges Mayor
Tim Davlin, but one that’s necessary and more gentle than throwing
everything into a Dumpster, he says. “We have to weigh ourselves between trying to be
compassionate and trying to take care of the needs and making sure we have
a safe environment around our library,” Davlin said last week.
Springfield has been grappling with the problem of
homelessness for years. The most recent annual headcount, conducted by
local social-service providers seeking to qualify for government funding,
found just over 300 people sleeping on Springfield’s streets. Though
the overall number was down, the number of chronically homeless — a
term that likely describes many of the library residents — jumped by
13 percent.
Two of Davlin’s top lieutenants —
community-relations director Sandy Robinson and executive assistant Jim
Donelan — joined the survey, helping conduct interviews at the
library.
Donelan recalls, “I remember I asked one of the
gentlemen, who’s one of the regulars at the library, ‘We know
for a fact that there are beds at the SOS [Springfield Overflow Shelter].
Why are you here? Why do you choose to be here?’ And his answer was
‘I’m 45 years old, and I’m not going to have anybody tell
me what to do.’
“In other words, he didn’t want to abide
by the rules at the SOS shelter, and that was just the prevalent theme
throughout that night.”
The city’s response appeared to come in response
to the highly publicized attack on a new member of the City Council. Late
last month, Ward 2 Ald. Gail Simpson was attacked by a young homeless man
— not a library regular — near the Springfield Police
Department’s headquarters. Donelan and Robinson insist that the city was working
on its plan to address the library situation before the attack on Simpson
took place.
In the city’s discussions with advocates for the
homeless and representatives of the homeless population, Donelan and
Robinson say, the locker idea was deemed a first step. Long-term, the city believes that a day center and
“safe haven” will at least solve the library issue, but, he
notes, the question remains “What can we do today or tomorrow at the
library?”
As the city sees it, the issue is twofold and complex:
On one hand are the folks, each with a unique set of circumstances, who
choose to sleep at the library. On the other is their stuff, which as been
characterized as everything from an eyesore to a threat to public health
and even national security. “We weren’t comfortable with the notion of
a shutdown of the complex until we felt like we had a good understanding
the circumstances and took our best effort to at least assist individuals
who at least wanted assistance,” Robinson says.
Donelan says that the people working on a solution
sought “to draw a compassionate line in the sand” to indicate
what the city would tolerate at the library plaza. “The mayor wants to see progress and wants to do
it in a compassionate way,” Donelan says. “The pod is an
interim step.”
Tim Hawker, a short, friendly fellow who likes to
talk, is to Camp Lincoln Library what Ernie Slottag is to City Hall. Hawker acts as a spokesman for the other homeless
people at the library and as a representative in their dealings with the
city. He says that the pods are a good temporary fix that
will provide more security than the library denizens have now. “The city’s been working with us.
I’ll give them their due,” Hawker says. But he has reservations. Not exactly with the city’s blessing, many of
the homeless plan to continue sleeping at the library, which doesn’t
close until 9 o’clock on most nights. However, under the agreement with the city that locker
users signed, the pod is only accessible each day between 8:30 and 9 a.m.
and 4:30 and 5 p.m. Items cannot be left unattended outside. And because
library officials have banned bedrolls inside the building, many homeless
will have to sit outside for four hours each day — or wander the city
hauling their stuff. One man who first learned of the new storage rules and
hours when Hawker showed him an official notice on city letterhead,
expressed another concern: “Damn, that messes with my work
schedule.”
The storage pod is no panacea, everyone agrees. Hawker says that he wanted a day center, or oasis,
where people could shower, get a hot meal, and maybe use a computer to
submit online job applications. Hawker, who has slept at the library for roughly two
years because, he says, no one is interested in hiring him, realizes that
homelessness is a multilayered problem. “People want to say it’s all mental
illness and all drug abuse, but it’s not just one easy answer,”
he says. People are generally kind, Hawker says as he sits
beside three large serving trays full of food dropped off overnight by a
good Samaritan. Occasionally they’ll get dirty looks or curious
stares from people pulling up to drop off payments at City Water, Light
& Power.
“We just smile and wave, like, ‘Hey,
we’re just like you are — we just don’t have the
paycheck,’ ” Hawker says. In February, the weekend U.S. Sen. Barack Obama
launched his presidential bid, Hawker says, police officers poked through
their belongings, calling the inspection a “homeland-security
check.”
Late one night last week, a car full of rowdy young
men drove by and pelted the camp with laundry detergent wrapped in tissue.
“We didn’t get a good look. When people
throw things at you, you don’t get a description, kind of like when
somebody points a gun at you all you see is the gun,” Hawker says.
But no one was injured, nor did the library residents
report the incident to police, he says: “Out here, you learn to have pretty thick
skin.”
Earlier this spring, Robinson enlisted the help of
Rita Tarr, a longtime activist for the homeless, to distribute
questionnaires to people at the library to assess their individual needs. “This whole thing started with trying to not
group stereotype all the individuals that were around the library.
We’ve heard stories that they’re all dealing with mental
illness or drug abuse, but they all have different circumstances,”
Robinson says. It would have been difficult, he says, to establish a
blanket policy without understanding the range of issues facing library
dwellers. Robinson says they found that some folks were simply
stuck in Springfield and ended up at the library, so they worked with local
nonprofits to help them get to places where they had “more viable
alternatives.”
“Now certainly there was no effort, in a
wholesale sort of manner, just to offer a bunch of bus tickets out of
town,” Robinson says, “but when we did case management we were
able to make connections with family members or other relatives.”
So far a half-dozen people have received assistance to
travel to cities such as Memphis, Tenn.; St. Louis; and Princeton, Ill., as
well as Ohio and Texas. Then there the people who worked full-time but slept
at the library because they couldn’t scrape together enough money for
a deposit on an apartment. Robinson’s office put three or four such
people in touch with local housing agencies. Now, Robinson says, “We’re down to the
more hardcore individuals,” who, he contends, are basically choosing
not to accept better alternatives. “At some point we want a more comprehensive
approach,” he says. “At the same time, we can’t sit still
and wait for all the pieces of the comprehensive approach to be in place
and not do anything in between.”
Although several attempts have been made to get rid
the city of the homeless by banning them from the library and outlawing
panhandling, the homeless at the library aren’t breaking any laws. Their days there do appear to be numbered, though. The
city has hinted that once sufficient resources are in place, the library
camp will likely be broken. “If we can provide the appropriate alternative
resources, then I don’t think it’s terribly bad to ask them to
not to sleep at the library,” says John Kelker, chairman of the
Mayor’s Task Force on Homelessness, created in 2004. “Our library was not set up to provide care for
the homeless,” Kelker says. “We have to provide our best, and
cold bricks outside of the library is not our best.”
Now that the pod’s in place, the next goal is to
create a daytime oasis and a nighttime haven where people can sleep under
less stringent rules than those at other area shelters. Davlin says his office has been talking to
representatives of the Washington Street Mission, which serves coffee and
doughnuts until noon, about the possibility of having the mission serve as
a day center. Ken Mitchell, the mission’s executive director,
says that representatives of the mission talked to the city about expanding
the mission’s hours and having social services agencies on-site.
There’s a shower at the mission, but Mitchell says it’s not in
use because it became “too messy.”
Mitchell says that the mission could open the shower,
and possibly build additional ones as well as more restrooms and a laundry
facility if it had additional paid staff, some recognizable person with the
authority to kick people out when necessary. Right now, Washington Street
has five paid employees and 75 to 80 volunteers.
Representatives of social-service organizations all
agree that the lockers are a good start. Because many area homeless start their day at the
Catholic Charities breadline, the city thought that it would be an ideal
place for the pod. The contract, finalized last week, permits the city to
house the pod on the Breadline’s property and holds the city
responsible for opening, closing, and providing security at the pod.
People would not be allowed to loiter at the
Breadline. Catholic Charities executive director Steven Roach says that
each party is allowed to terminate the agreement at any time with two
weeks’ notice and that the contract will be reevaluated this fall.
Catholic Charities is not charging rent, but the city did agree to remove a
tree stump for the charity. Roach also says that the temporary storage facility
will affect the Breadline’s operation “not one bit.”
Few organizations have been interested in offering
day-center services, says Tarr, former director of Contact Ministries. “We’ve always lacked the resources,”
says Tarr, but a “day center would be ideal.”
She says that she is often asked by homeless people
applying for jobs or benefits, “What do I put for an address?
I’m staying at the library. What do I put for a phone number?”
The mayor says that he’s “working
diligently” with the Salvation Army, which plans to move from its
current headquarters to the Goodwill building on 11th Street. “It’s something that’s going to take
a year and a half, two years, so we have to find these short-term
solutions,” Davlin says. That project is still in the very early stages,
however, says Dave MacDonna, capital campaign coordinator for the Salvation
Army — soil sampling is still being performed at the Goodwill site. This week, the Army will open its fellowship hall as a
temporary shelter for the homeless during the Friends of Lincoln Library
Book Sale, which begins today. “People are probably not aware of the amount of
work that’s going on behind the scenes, and it’s not solely
directed at the people at the library,” says Kelker, the task-force
chairman.
“People are falling through the cracks; some are
working and have difficulty to make ends meet.”
Unfortunately, Kelker says, Springfieldians regard the
library’s homeless population as a barometer of the overall homeless
situation. In other words, because people are sleeping at the library,
there’s a perception that nothing is being done to remedy the
problem. He’s also aware of the criticism that the task force is too
large to be effective. His suggestion to critics: Join one of the task
force’s committees. “It takes a community to solve these
problems,” Kelker says, “and it’s not a Salvation Army
issue, a Helping Hands issue, or a city issue.
“I’m afraid we need a lot of cooks in the
kitchen on this one.”
Contact R.L. Nave at rnave@illinoistimes.com.
This article appears in May 31 – Jun 6, 2007.
