This story is part of a package on homelessness during the COVID-19 pandemic. Click here to read the accompanying piece.
The hundreds of local hotel rooms designated as isolation housing, however, are not currently available to homeless people trying to get off the streets. Instead, they’re reserved for health-care workers and “individuals who either have a COVID-19 diagnosis or who are awaiting test results, but who cannot safely return home and do not need hospital care,” according to the mayor’s office.
The Chicago Housing Initiative, Illinois Public Health Association, and more than 1,300 online petition signatories have called on the Chicago Housing Authority to make some 2,000 units of vacant public housing available for the homeless. But so far “there’s complete resistance on the part of the CHA and complete inaction on the part of the mayor’s office” in response to this idea, said CHI executive director Leah Levinger.
“We are working to ensure that anyone that does get housed because they become ill does not end up homeless again after they recover,” said Dworkin of CCH. “We are working on advocating to use federal recovery resources to get people into temporary housing units rather than hotel rooms, and then linking them to permanent housing.”
“Shelters are powder kegs, it’s really a blessing this pandemic hit in the spring and not in the winter,” said Levinger. “Spacing beds six feet apart when everyone is using the same door handles and bathrooms to me seems a little bit like window dressing. It’s no fault of any guests or workers, it’s just everyone is living in a really tight space . . . I know because I live in a Catholic Worker house. We’re doing intense cleaning protocols, but it’s a shared kitchen, shared bathrooms, we’re packed in together, we share air together.” v
