Who Are The Chicago Homeless?
Some Implications for Intervention
Chicago still has thousands of homeless persons—doubled up with relatives in their homes, living outdoors, sleeping on the trains, staying in shelters, and sleeping outdoors. A variety of interventions and models for assisting them are discussed and tried in an ongoing basis.
At the very beginning of this discussion, it is essential to understand that there are all kinds of unhoused persons making up the homeless population of this city. There are men, women, and children, representing people who have been on the street for one day to many decades. They are of all races, colors, cultures, languages, religions, traditions, single or family units, neighborhoods, and orientations. Then we need to understand how Chicago unhoused people differ from the homeless nationwide.
It is important to consider the question “Who are the Chicago homeless?” What do they look like? What is their race? What is their age group? It is also important to consider how they are different from their counterparts in other cities in the US.
It is interesting to note that although Black Chicagoans make up less than one-third of the city’s population, they make up almost 80 percent of the homeless in town. The Chicago Coalition for the Homeless (CCH) has detailed figures (https://s6624.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-Fact-Sheet.pdf).
It is also interesting to note that nationally, only about 40 percent of the homeless population is Black (https://s6624.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-Fact-Sheet.pdf).
This disconnect between the high number of Blacks without housing and the low number of Blacks in the city is important to think about. Less than one-third of the population in Chicago. In fact, only 29.62 percent of Chicago residents are Black (https://worldpopulationreview.com/us-cities/chicago-il-population).
Just how many homeless persons are there in the city? The CCH states, “An estimated 58,273 people were experiencing homelessness in Chicago, IL in 2019, immediately prior to the COVID–19 outbreak, per an analysis by CCH using data from the Chicago Homeless Management Information System and the U.S. Census American Community Survey” (https://www.chicagohomeless.org/estimate-of-homeless-people-in-chicago/).
And well over 46,000 of these people are Black.
We know that nationally the homeless population is in fact growing—for all races. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) released its 2020 Annual Assessment Report on March 18, 2021. According to the report, “580,466 people experienced homelessness in the United States on a single night in 2020, an increase of 12,751 people, or 2.2 percent, from 2019” (HUD Releases 2020 Annual Homeless Assessment Report Part 1 | HUD.gov / U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD)).
But why are there so many Black homeless people in Chicago? Would there be a lot fewer Black homeless people if there were a reduction—overall—of homeless people?
Well, the facts speak pretty clearly where some of the homelessness is coming from—at least for the Blacks. First, the salary and wage gap between Blacks and Whites has grown to 40 percent—the highest it has been since the 1960s (https://s6624.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-Fact-Sheet.pdf). Housing is expensive in Chicago.
Second, many neighborhoods of Chicago with the highest concentration of Black residents are the same ones with the largest clustering of low-income jobs. This is no surprise to anyone in Chicago, once they think about this statement for a moment (https://s6624.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-Fact-Sheet.pdf).
Third, 60 percent of the homeless are formerly-incarcerated persons. The high percentage of Blacks in the justice system is well documented. In Illinois, Blacks are over-represented in prisons and jails. In fact, there is a big disconnect between figures here—to the tune of 56 percent of the incarcerated population being Black even though they represent less than 16 percent of the state population (https://www.prisonpolicy.org/profiles/IL.html).
There have been research studies investigating the impact of a prison sentence on employment opportunities. Indeed, the studies show that individuals with a prison record fare worse in the job market. Very interesting is this note: “However, this finding is conditioned by race and ethnicity, with whites bearing far less stigma from a prior prison sentence than blacks or Hispanics” (https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/244756.pdf).
There have also been anecdotal reports in the popular media showing how a prison record makes it harder to get good jobs and pursue a career (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/people-leaving-prison-have-a-hard-time-getting-jobs-the-pandemic-has-made-things-worse). What’s worse, unemployment can lead to increased challenges in the area of mental health—depression, stress, reliance on alcohol or drugs to reduce stress.
Fourth, there are many young people who self-identify as being LGBTQ+ individuals. In fact, about 20% of Chicago youth belong to these groups—as opposed to only 10% nationally (https://s6624.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-Fact-Sheet.pdf). The discrimination faced by these groups is still great and crippling. This includes rejection from parents and other family members.
What else do we know about homeless residents? We know that nationally about 17 percent of the homeless face the challenges of drug or alcohol addiction. However, in Chicago, the numbers are much higher: “In the city of Chicago, 39% of unsheltered and 18% sheltered individuals reported receiving services for substance addiction” (https://s6624.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-Fact-Sheet.pdf).
By far, homeless persons on record are males. In fact, about 70 percent of the homeless in the US are men (https://endhomelessness.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/DDP-Gender-brief-09272019-byline-single-pages.pdf).
In Chicago, similar numbers show more than half the unhoused are male. HUD figures tell that “60.2% (330,980) of the homeless population identifies as male, 39.5% (217,268) as female, and 0.3% (1,770) transgender…” (https://s6624.pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/2018-Fact-Sheet.pdf).
We have data showing there are almost 18,000 students in the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) who are unhoused. CPS reports that 17,894 homeless students attended CPS schools, that data coming from the 2017-2018 school year. Important to note is that “98.2% of homeless students identified by CPS were children of color.” What races do they represent? Of those, 81.2% are Black, 5.6 are Latino, and the rest are multiracial and other.
It is also important to realize that about one-third of the Chicago homeless persons attend CPS. This percentage of the unhoused residents in town should figure prominently in policies and programs for intervention.
Consider that seriously for a moment: about one-third of the Chicago unhoused population is school-aged.
One recent figure put the number of homeless students attending CPS at over 16,000.
Solutions should include age-appropriate, race-appropriate, and culturally-appropriate elements. Maybe it is a cultural component that has been lacking so far in helping get the unhoused indoors and participating as active members of our diverse population.
Culturally-competent interventions occur in Connecticut (https://cceh.org/cultural-competency/). Such interventions are part of the approach used in the State of Georgia also (https://psychologybenefits.org/2013/11/18/psychological-interventions-for-people-who-are-homeless/).
Canadian programs take into account the cultural differences—most Canadian homeless are Native Americans—as an example (https://www.homelesshub.ca/blog/do-homelessness-services-need-be-culturally-relevant).
Perhaps a culturally-appropriate approach to helping the majority of the homeless in Chicago could be designed with the positive results of other interventions in other locations. Perhaps it is time to conduct a thorough literature review to better inform stakeholders in how to create stronger solutions to the huge problem of homelessness in Chicago.