There are many homeless people around the Springfield area. According to a WICS report, at one given time there are at least 271 homeless people in Springfield. [the January 2020 point-in-time census of persons living in emergency/transitional shelter and unsheltered counted 294 homeless persons in Sangamon County] It seems that at almost every major intersection there is an individual a sign asking for help. I will sometimes give cash but it is not something I can do every time. So I did some research to see what other things can be done to help those experiencing homelessness without giving money all the time. I found there are several different ways we can help. The number one thing we can do as a community is contact our legislatures and demand that they do something to help the homeless. There is no reason we should have any homeless people. I myself am not sure what the answer is but there has to be something we can all do. There are many buildings and homes just sitting empty that we should somehow be able to utilize to provide temporary housing to individuals. Most would rather not be homeless and for some reason or another have fallen upon hard times and need help temporarily. Until something is done to help the homeless get back on their feet there are several more things we can do as community members to help make their life a little easier.
- Smile, make eye contact and talk to them and get to know them and their story. Human contact is one of the most basic needs that we all need and can give. They might just want someone to talk to.
- Offer to help in anyway you can. Offer food, water, personal items and if needed, cash. We really don’t know someone else’s story and they know what they need at the moment.
- Call the Homeless Hotline if there is one available. In Springfield you can contact Ministries Emergency Shelter at 217-753-3939. There are several others too.
- If the person appears to be in distress see if you can get them an ambulance
- Educate yourself on the homeless.
[To learn about what you can do, and follow the homelessness issue in Springfield, I recommend the website of the Heartland Continuum of Care at https://heartlandcontinuum.com/]
Something I am going to do is start carrying bags with me that has personal items in it, a list of shelters in Springfield and a small gift card to a restaurant where they can get a meal.
Helping the current homeless population would only be the beginning, we also need to prevent it from continuing to happen. We need to have services in place that are available to anyone before they become homeless. Some of those services would be:
- Have affordable housing available to provide to someone that will become homeless
- Have other services available such as job training, provided daycare so parents can actively look for work
- Intervention/Prevention programs to help financially
This is a great reaction essay with a sharp focus on a single issue and an orientation toward solutions.
The coordinator of the Heartland Continuum of Care was recently asked what would be most helpful, and he was also asked what is preventing us from solving the problem, since we do know how to solve the homelessness problem, as you have outlined in your reaction essay. He said we lack resources. Specifically, to move to a housing-first model for everyone, and a permanent supportive housing model for those who need that (which is probably all homeless persons with substance addictions or mental illnesses or co-morbid conditions, which is probably about 40% of all who become homeless in a year, and probably well over half of all who are homeless at any given point-in-time). In either case, we need housing units where we can permanently place people, and we don't have enough of those. The Landlord Association is willing to work with the Heartland Continuum of Care and make many units available, but we need more, and once those units are available, we need the money to pay the rent for those places. Could churches, the city government, the current homeless shelters (Helping Hands, Contact Ministries, Inner City mission, etc.) take on new roles as "landlords" for persons in permanent supportive housing or just supportive housing? In any event, the point is that we do not have the resource: neither do we have funds to provide the rents or acquire the properties we need to house all the homeless, nor do we have the funding to pay the salaries of the persons who would provide wrap-around support and sobriety support and mental health services, or those who would coordinate the volunteers, who would be checking in with people in permanent supportive housing.
The implication is that we ought to:
Push the city government and the 20+ entities in the Heartland Continuum of Care and the local religious congregations that help support the various services for the homeless to unify in applications for city, state, and federal aid to help us get the resources to supply housing and services for permanent supportive housing.
Support the efforts of Mayor Langfelder and the City Council to allocate more money to addressing the problems of Springfield residents who lack housing.
Give money to whatever entity is collecting all the resources and coordinating the project of getting all this housing available, and to the services and shelters that currently feed and house the homeless when they run out of their SNAP benefits or monthly assistance—if they even receive those benefits (e.g., St. John's Breadline, Fifth Street Renaissance, the Salvation Army, Helping Hands, Contact Ministries, Inner City Mission, Central Illinois Food Bank, etc.).
Advocate for things that will prevent homelessness:
affordable housing,
more housing choice vouchers,
rules forcing landlords to accept clients who use housing choice vouchers,
more public housing units,
more state-or-city equivalents of the federal public housing program,
more subsidies and laws (especially zoning law modifications) that would create more affordable housing and land trusts, and distribute such housing equitably around a metropolitan area.
Promote an understanding of housing as a human right.
Promote an understanding that it probably saves money (for hospital emergency rooms, local business owners, police departments, local jails) if persons experiencing homelessness are housed in permanent housing rather than put in transitional or emergency shelters, or left unsheltered. Since the costs of police and local businesses and local hospitals are passed on to all of us in higher taxes and higher insurance premiums and higher prices in stores, we're paying for homelessness either way, and it just makes more sense to take care of this issue in the way that costs the least (providing permanent housing to everyone) while also meeting our obligations to see that everyone's human rights are protected.
As for the panhandlers, I would never give them money. If someone comes to me and asks for help, I would usually refer them to Fifth Street Renaissance for breakfast and St. John's Breadline for lunch. Men could seek housing at the Helping Hands shelter or the Warming Shelter (in winter), and women could also seek shelter at Contact Ministries. The shelters typically provide dinner. Give money or food to the shelters, so they can provide the meals to the 50-60 persons who eat dinner each night. I ask persons who work at the food banks, the homeless shelters, and the Fifth Street Renaissance about the panhandlers at the intersections with their cardboard signs, and they say they don't recognize those persons as clients. I expect that it's a difficult life to work as a panhandler and stand at intersections with a sign asking for money for food, and I expect only desperate people would seek their income in that line of work, so I understand why your sympathies and compassion might lead you to give them something. I just would rather give money to the entities that are providing direct services to persons who are really homeless while also working to solve the problem of homelessness in our community.
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