It is quarter of five, too early for sun’s first rays. A half-dozen people are snoozing in pre-dawn darkness on walkways around Lincoln Library.
None have anything thicker than cardboard to cushion them from pavement beneath. Half don’t have even that. They are easy to spot, given abundant lighting that surrounds the building a shout away from police headquarters. Those with bicycles have them parked between their bodies and the building, tight together, so that they will be startled awake should thieves show up.
The night has been mercifully mild, with the temperature bottoming out at 66. A man who prefers that his name not be printed – he says he was born and raised in Springfield, where he still has kin – sits on a bench outside the north entrance, as if keeping watch over folks sprawled in front of him. Extraordinarily thin with a gravelly voice fat as he is gaunt, he says that he sleeps outside the library off and on. He says he used to drink, but that messes with your mind too much. Now, he spends much of his time just walking.
He’s got a brother who occasionally provides a bed, but he can’t stay there permanent, the man explains, because they both get Social Security, and there’s a limit on how much income a household can have. He’s had a fitful night, sitting on this bench, then sleeping, then sitting again. “I’m used to a bed,” he says.
Why are people with no tents or sleeping bags camping here? The man with no home sounds remarkably like those with homes who say it’s a matter of laziness. “They come here because it’s easy – they think it’s easier than going home and paying bills,” he says. “But it’s really not easy. … I got jumped. It hospitalized me, you know.”
There are fewer homeless outside the library than there were a few weeks ago, he says, before Mayor Jim Langfelder asked the city council to ban camping outside the library and what to do about homeless people became the issue du jour. Police, the man says, have shooed people away, focusing on the drunk and the stoned. “People drink, they do their drugs, they mess things up for people,” the man says. “The police come over. They need to come over – there’s children here. … People leave, and they come right back here.” Folks offering a better way also have appeared. “Like churches and things like that,” the man says. “Every now and then they come and try to help.”
Erica Smith, executive director of Helping Hands shelter, which bars anyone who can’t pass a Breathalyzer, says that a shelter employee and others have been visiting folks outside the library, trying to build relationships that can ultimately help get the homeless off the streets. “It may be as simple as having a conversation,” Smith says. “‘How are you doing? Are you getting enough to eat? Does your leg hurt? Do you need help getting an ID?’”
That’s a short-term response, Smith says. A long-term plan has proven elusive. Just finding a place for the homeless to pee has proven nigh impossible. The search for a downtown restroom, portable or otherwise, has lasted months, according to Ward 5 Ald. Andrew Proctor, who says he hopes to find a spot soon.
Support is growing for a shelter patterned after the city’s winter warming center, which accepts people, typically drunks, whom other shelters won’t admit, says Smith, whose organization staffed the warming center last winter. The center on Madison Street, which the city spent $32,000 fixing up, is slated for eventual demolition as part of a planned expansion of the 11th Street rail corridor.
Smith insists the homeless need services, not just a building. “If you have heart disease in your community, you don’t just build emergency rooms,” she says. Ward 7 Ald. Joe McMenamin, who favored the mayor’s library camping ban, suggests an everyone-welcome outdoor shelter, patterned after the winter warming center, with the money coming from Capital Township. The alderman admits having no detailed plan, but he notes that the township is supposed to help the needy. “They should, in my opinion, be taking the lead on the homeless problem, given their current role,” McMenamin says.
Smith sounds skeptical. “I would really have to think that idea through,” she says. Tom Cavanagh, Capital Township supervisor, sounds pissed off. “It’s not a serious proposal – if it was serious, he’d pick up the phone and call me,” says Cavanagh, who wasn’t happy with an email the aldermen sent to city officials asserting that the township has $2 million in uncommitted funds. “McMenamin’s just grandstanding.”
Cavanagh, who is also Sangamon County treasurer, says the township collects $2 million a year in taxes, spending half on property assessment costs and the remainder on such things as rental and utility assistance to help the poor. There’s $288,000 in reserve, “which I consider to be contingency money,” Cavanagh says. Couldn’t the township come up with some money for the homeless?
“It’s conceivable,” Cavanagh answers. “We have the ability to help here and there.” But not until the mayor calls. “I will hold Mayor Langfelder to his word: He is coming up with a plan,” Cavanagh says. “Until such time as we see that, we’re pretty much in the dark.”
Outside the library, someone sits up, throws his blanket aside, looks around and rises slowly to his feet, his day begun just as birds start singing. The man on the bench says he can’t think of a place better than this for the folks who are here now.
“I imagine there is,” he says. “But I wouldn’t know where it’s at.”
Contact Bruce Rushton at [email protected].
