The most talked-about neighborhood in Peoria still has its Halloween decorations up.
The festive decor — a pumpkin, a garland of orange leaves and a lantern with bat cutouts — is arranged on a chair outside one of the camping tents planted at the southern shoulder of the Dirksen Memorial Highway. About a dozen more tents hug the fence overlooking the highway.
Although living in the encampment can at times be perilous, Alyiah Samara said she’s found a community there and will fight to stay.
“If they remove me from here, I will put my tent right in front of them,” said Samara, 26. “If someone comes into your home, that’s what you would do, fighting for your home.”
Samara and her neighbors are facing warnings, fines and possible jail time after Peoria became the largest city in Illinois to penalize public camping on the heels of a U.S. Supreme Court decision earlier this summer that allowed municipalities to enforce bans on people sleeping outdoors.
The ordinance, narrowly passed by the Peoria City Council on Nov. 19, follows a wave of local governments in Illinois, from Mundelein to downstate Effingham and suburbs of Peoria like East Peoria and Pekin, that have passed similar measures as the state struggles with rising homelessness and an affordable housing shortage.
The Chicago Coalition to End Homelessness counts 21 Illinois municipalities so far that have penalized public camping, a trend that worries providers who say they’re being squeezed in their efforts to shelter and house people who have nowhere else to go.
“There is no evidence that ticketing and incarceration will improve outcomes for individuals who are experiencing homelessness,” Illinois’ chief homelessness officer, Christine Haley, said. “In fact, we believe it will make it worse.”
Indeed, Peoria Mayor Rita Ali, who voted against the ordinance, fears that the ban will only exacerbate chronic street homelessness in a city where 500 people are already on waitlist for permanent housing. Peoria’s official estimate of its street homeless population is around 50 people.
In a symbolic gesture, Ali’s refusing to sign it.
“They’re going to get a criminal record from being poor, from being unhoused, and that, I’m totally against,” Ali said.
But council member John Kelly, who backed the ordinance, said he saw the city’s current approach to homelessness as “enabling” problems like addiction that can leave people without a place to live.
Kelly, who is challenging Ali alongside another backer of the ordinance in next year’s mayoral race, added that he didn’t understand how allowing someone to remain in a tent while they sought housing was a more humane approach to the issue.
“These are terrible places,” he said of the encampments. “If we call this compassion, I think we need to redefine the word.”
City Council member Tim Riggenbach originally opposed the ordinance when city staff first presented it to the council in August. But he was swayed after changes were made to the proposal that mirrored the city’s trespassing ordinance. Violators aren’t historically landing in jail, he said.
“Jail time is the last thing I want to see anybody face,” he said. “If anybody (ends) up in jail because of this ordinance, then I would say we as a community have failed with the money and the resources we have available.”
Riggenbach instead looked ahead to the housing projects the city has in the works and said he saw the encampment ordinance as a way to give residents “a way out of the situation rather than just accepting the situation.”
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Olivia Hutchison, 29, left, Tristan Newland, 26, center, and Richard Thomas Jr., 51, sit near a tent at a homeless encampment near Interstate Highway 74 in Peoria on Nov. 26, 2024. (Armando L. Sanchez/Chicago Tribune)
He said his goal was to get people into housing, beginning with placing them in shelters.
“I would like to think that even those who aren’t thrilled with the mechanism in which the city has chosen to go about that stand with us 100% in that goal,” he said.
Riggenbach’s vote put the measure over the top.
Officials divided on ordinance’s impact
Peoria’s City Hall is just a few blocks from the city’s most visible encampments along the highway. Ali said she’s sympathetic to downtown business owners and workers who have expressed safety and sanitation concerns about the encampments. Moreover, she feels it is unsanitary, unsafe and unpleasant for both the people living outside and other residents who are using public property.
She said she would have supported a version of the ordinance that didn’t include jail time and had lower fines.
But the measure that cleared the Peoria City Council specifies that those who are sleeping outside on public property will receive a warning and three penalties, beginning at $50 and escalating up to $750 for a third violation, though a judge could impose community service instead of a fee. People who are cited three times within six months may be sentenced to up to six months in jail under the measure.
The ordinance also requires that city workers refer people living on the street to shelters, but Ali said local organizations that serve homeless people don’t have beds available.
“We’re not listening,” she said.
The roughly 500 already on the waitlist for permanent housing live on the street or in a temporary shelter. The city’s housing providers and social service organizations are racing to get as many encampment residents as they can into a housing pipeline, their workers say. Many were already on the path to housing, but the ordinance’s passage has accelerated and scrambled that process.
Molly Pilgreen is the chief operating officer of Phoenix Community Development Services, Peoria’s largest affordable housing provider. She said she needs to find a way to help people secure eight IDs, 15 birth certificates and 19 mental health assessments. That documentation can make the difference between getting someone into housing and forcing them to toggle between streets and shelters that are already stretched thin or at capacity.
“It all keeps me up at night,” she said.
Pilgreen and Chief Executive Officer Christine Kahl said the organization was preparing to host a set of clinics meant for people in the encampments to get the paperwork or evaluations or even vaccinations for their pets that would allow them to meet the requirements for a housing placement. But the group has only 16 vacant housing units available, and they need work.
“They are not units that somebody could walk in and occupy,” Kahl said.
There are several plans in progress to increase the number of shelter beds and permanent housing in the city, including a 55-unit housing complex that will be run by Phoenix CDS. But that project won’t break ground until next year, Kahl said.
Pilgreen on Monday had represented Phoenix CDS at a meeting with social service providers and city officials, where they’d been asked to figure out what it would take to get those vacant units ready for occupation.
“But they want an answer today,” Kahl said. “That’s not something I could do in a day.”
In Chicago, a housing-first approach
The cities and towns to pass public-way camping bans so far are scattered around the state, but it’s unlikely Chicago would follow suit, according to advocates and the city’s chief homelessness officer, Sendy Soto.
“It is absolutely not our plan to focus on any type of incarceration,” Soto told the Tribune in July after the Supreme Court’s ruling. “We really want to ensure that our unhoused community does not find this to be a reason to be afraid of their local administration.”
The city, however, is at a critical juncture on how to address its rapidly growing homeless population, which has been exacerbated by the migrant crisis. The city has historically prioritized finding housing for its homeless, many of whom reside in tent cities across its parks and under bridges. But with low affordable housing stock, depleted federal and state funding and other challenges, the city’s number of homeless people is outpacing what the city can provide.
Since the summer, the city has cleared a number of homeless encampments from North Park to the Dan Ryan expressway as part of a larger initiative to close such sites down and relocate residents to shelters or other housing. Advocates for homeless people, however, have criticized such strategies as insufficient and potentially traumatic for encampment residents, emphasizing that the only solution for homelessness is permanent housing.
More recently, encampments in Humboldt Park and Gompers Park have sparked disputes among local residents and leaders. Last month, Ald. Jessie Fuentes, 26th, said that their ward’s controversial tent encampment in Humboldt Park would be officially cleared and shut down on Dec. 6, though local outreach workers deemed the impending closure “criminalization” in a letter to Fuentes and Soto.
“Measures such as sweeps, property confiscation, and penalties for life-sustaining activities create harm, erode trust, and move us further from solutions that address the root causes of homelessness,” the letter read.
But Fuentes’ office pushed back on the letter’s characterization of the closure and said police would only be onsite as a precautionary measure.
“We are committed to a human-centered process that prioritizes support and does not criminalize anyone,” the 26th Ward chief of staff Juanita Garcia told the Tribune earlier this week.
As advocates and city leaders debate how to best address encampments and homelessness, most agree that the work has become more urgent after the reelection of former President Donald Trump, who in the past has demonstrated hostile views toward the LGBTQ+ population, which makes up a large portion of homeless youths seeking refuge in Illinois and, more specifically, Chicago.
Haley, the state’s chief homelessness officer, said the state would keep its focus on supporting the work of the 19 social service systems that serve homeless people around Illinois. In particular, she said, the state will continue to prioritize housing that comes with social services, known as permanent supportive housing.
No answers
In Peoria on Tuesday afternoon, advocate Kshe Bernard was visiting the tent city when one of the residents emerged from a tent and asked Bernard what she and her neighbors should do. Bikes, clothes, tarps, cooking equipment and furniture were scattered across the grass overlooking the highway.
Bernard didn’t have an answer.
As the program director of outreach services of the harm-reduction organization JOLT and a co-founder of the street outreach organization LULA, she is in the encampments almost every day. She and others who work directly with Peoria’s street homeless fear that people who can’t or won’t find a spot in an emergency shelter will scatter into more remote, less safe locations to avoid the ordinance.
“If you’re forcing people to hide, how are you going to find them when they get housed?” she told the Tribune.
Dustin Armstrong had returned to the site with an armload of debris and a white bandana tied around his head. He scowled as he approached a packed tent on the far east end of the encampment.
Armstrong, 31, said he’d recently been approved for housing after four years of battling a meth addiction while homeless. He was angry about the ordinance, which he felt would only create more problems for the city, and worried for his neighbors who weren’t as close to being housed as he was.
“You (won’t have) no room in your jails, because you’ve got people out here in jail for being homeless,” he said. “I want to get a petition started, and I want to get (the ordinance) back up in front of the City Council.”
In one corner of the encampment, amid blood soaked clothes, a tent and bedding materials, Bernard distributed bagged lunches, cases of water bottles and hugs to residents. She got a first-aid kit out to look at one man’s hands, which were covered in scratches and cuts.
Wesley Ramirez, whose right arm had taken the brunt of what he, Bernard and other homeless people described as a vicious dog attack the night before, said he wasn’t sure where he was going to go after the ordinance took effect. But he was more worried for his neighbors.
“I wanted to help them out, get them where they needed to go, and help them clean up and stuff like that,” said Ramirez, 36. “I know I’ll be able to handle it.”
Chicago Tribune’s Sylvan Lebrun contributed.
